tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83656672024-03-12T22:04:32.671-04:00Black EducatorNews, analysis, resources and documents that help us advance "Education for Liberation." In addition, we provide critical analysis of racism and capitalism in all their ugly forms.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger463125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-63440099363102212662018-03-19T11:02:00.000-04:002018-03-19T11:03:34.192-04:00A Black History Gem for Today's Struggle: Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) On What We Want<br />
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<header>
<h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">What </span>We <span style="color: #38761d;">Want</span></span></h2>
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<div class="author">
<b>Stokely Carmichael</b> </div>
<div class="details">
<time>
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/issues/1966/09/22/">September 22, 1966 Issue of New York Book review</a></time></div>
<div class="details">
<time>
</time>
</div>
</header>
One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that
up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to
the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto. There
has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted
to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone
between them and angry young blacks.<br />
<br />
None of its so-called leaders could
go into a rioting community and be listened to. In a sense, I blame
ourselves—together with the mass media—for what has happened in Watts,
Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha. Each time the people in those cities
saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became angry; when they saw
four little black girls bombed to death, they were angrier; and when
nothing happened, they were steaming.<br />
<br />
We had nothing to offer that they
could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build
their frustration.<br />
<br />
For too many years, black Americans marched and
had their heads broken and got shot. They were saying to the country,
“Look, you guys are supposed to be nice guys and we are only going to do
what we are supposed to do—why do you beat us up, why don’t you give us
what we ask, why don’t you straighten yourselves out?” After years of
this, we are at almost the same point—because we demonstrated from a
position of weakness. We cannot be expected any longer to march and have
our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, you’re nice guys.
For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.<br />
<br />
An organization
which claims to speak for the needs of a community—as does the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—must speak in the tone of that
community, not as somebody else’s buffer zone. This is the significance
of black power as a slogan. For once, black people are going to use the
words they want to use—not just the words whites want to hear. And they
will do this no matter how often the press tries to stop the use of the
slogan by equating it with racism or separatism.<br />
<br />
An organization
which claims to be working for the needs of a community—as SNCC
does—must work to provide that community with a position of strength
from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black
power beyond the slogan.<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="initial">
BLACK POWER can be
clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America
to their questions about it. We should begin with the basic fact that
black Americans have two problems: they are poor and they are black. All
other problems arise from this two-sided reality: lack of education,
the so-called apathy of black men. Any program to end racism must
address itself to that double reality.</div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
Almost from its beginning,
SNCC sought to address itself to both conditions with a program aimed at
winning political power for impoverished Southern blacks. We had to
begin with politics because black Americans are a propertyless people in
a country where property is valued above all. We had to work for power,
because this country does not function by morality, love, and
nonviolence, but by power. Thus we determined to win political power,
with the idea of moving on from there into activity that would have
economic effects. With power, the masses could <i>make or participate in making</i> the decisions which govern their destinies, and thus create basic change in their day-to-day lives.<br />
<br />
But
if political power seemed to be the key to self-determination, it was
also obvious that the key had been thrown down a deep well many years
earlier. Disenfranchisement, maintained by racist terror, makes it
impossible to talk about organizing for political power in 1960. The
right to vote had to be won, and SNCC workers devoted their energies to
this from 1961 to 1965. They set up voter registration drives in the
Deep South. They created pressure for the vote by holding mock elections
in Mississippi in 1963 and by helping to establish the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. That struggle was eased, though
not won, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. SNCC workers
could then address themselves to the question: “Who can we vote for, to
have our needs met—how do we make our vote meaningful?”<br />
<br />
SNCC had
already gone to Atlantic City for recognition of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party by the Democratic convention and been rejected; it had
gone with the MFDP to Washington for recognition by Congress and been
rejected. In Arkansas, SNCC helped thirty Negroes to run for School
Board elections; all but one were defeated, and there was evidence of
fraud and intimidation sufficient to cause their defeat. In Atlanta,
Julian Bond ran for the state legislature and was elected—twice—and
unseated—twice. In several states, black farmers ran in elections for
agricultural committees which make crucial decisions concerning land
use, loans, etc. Although they won places on a number of committees,
they never gained the majorities needed to control them.<br />
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<br />
<div class="initial">
ALL
OF THE EFFORTS were attempts to win black power. Then, in Alabama, the
opportunity came to see how blacks could be organized on an independent
party basis. An unusual Alabama law provides that any group of citizens
can nominate candidates for county office and, if they win 20 per cent
of the vote, may be recognized as a county political party. The same
then applies on a state level. SNCC went to organize in several counties
such as Lowndes, where black people—who form 80 per cent of the
population and have an average annual income of $943—felt they could
accomplish nothing within the framework of the Alabama Democratic Party
because of its racism and because the qualifying fee for this year’s
elections was raised from $50 to $500 in order to prevent most Negroes
from becoming candidates. On May 3, five new county “freedom
organizations” convened and nominated candidates for the offices of
sheriff, tax assessor, members of the school boards. </div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
<div class="initial">
These men and women
are up for election in November—if they live until then. </div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
<div class="initial">
Their ballot
symbol is the black panther: a bold, beautiful animal, representing the
strength and dignity of black demands today. A man needs a black panther
on his side when he and his family must endure—as hundreds of
Alabamians have endured—loss of job, eviction, starvation, and sometimes
death, for political activity. He may also need a gun and SNCC
reaffirms the right of black men everywhere to defend themselves when
threatened or attacked. </div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
<div class="initial">
As for initiating the use of violence, we hope
that such programs as ours will make that unnecessary; but it is not for
us to tell black communities whether they can or cannot use any
particular form of action to resolve their problems. Responsibility for
the use of violence by black men, whether in self defense or initiated
by them, lies with the white community.</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZC8CHlu2bCkGODYpdmNHHLZ0xZdLALkZfy1CVLw-Avm31dv71v5FGIzZ508pqUzSgn8gjt1Sy1P9p6J6osighB3Yuac6wQZSjBRXEjy_ihvlqx9YTd5Ampsge0CU2xsObzrQ/s1600/kwame+ture.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZC8CHlu2bCkGODYpdmNHHLZ0xZdLALkZfy1CVLw-Avm31dv71v5FGIzZ508pqUzSgn8gjt1Sy1P9p6J6osighB3Yuac6wQZSjBRXEjy_ihvlqx9YTd5Ampsge0CU2xsObzrQ/s320/kwame+ture.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b>Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) in 1966</b></i></span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This is the specific
historical experience from which SNCC’s call for “black power” emerged
on the Mississippi march last July. But the concept of “black power” is
not a recent or isolated phenomenon: It has grown out of the ferment of
agitation and activity by different people and organizations in many
black communities over the years. Our last year of work in Alabama added
a new concrete possibility. In Lowndes county, for example, black power
will mean that if a Negro is elected sheriff, he can end police
brutality. If a black man is elected tax assessor, he can collect and
channel funds for the building of better roads and schools serving black
people—thus advancing the move from political power into the economic
arena. In such areas as Lowndes, where black men have a majority, they
will attempt to use it to exercise control.<br />
<br />
This is what they seek:
control.<br />
<br />
Where Negroes lack a majority, black power means proper
representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power
bases from which black people can work to change statewide or nationwide
patterns of oppression through pressure from strength—instead of
weakness.<br />
<br />
Politically, black power means what it has always meant to
SNCC: the coming-together of black people to elect representatives and <i>to force those representatives to speak to their needs</i>.
It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. A man or woman
who is black and from the slums cannot be automatically expected to
speak to the needs of black people. Most of the black politicians we see
around the country today are not what SNCC means by black power. The
power must be that of a community, and emanate from there.<br />
<br />
SNCC
today is working in both North and South on programs of voter
registration and independent political organizing. In some places, such
as Alabama, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey,
independent organizing under the black panther symbol is in progress.
The creation of a national “black panther party” must come about; it
will take time to build, and it is much too early to predict its
success. We have no infallible master plan and we make no claim to
exclusive knowledge of how to end racism; different groups will work in
their own different ways. SNCC cannot spell out the full logistics of
self-determination but it can address itself to the problem by helping
black communities define their needs, realize their strength, and go
into action along a variety of lines which they must choose for
themselves.<br />
<br />
Without knowing all the answers, it can address itself to
the basic problem of poverty; to the fact that in Lowndes County, 86
white families own 90 per cent of the land. What are black people in
that county going to do for jobs, where are they going to get money?
There must be reallocation of land, of money.<br />
<br />
<div class="initial">
ULTIMATELY,
the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people
are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this
includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south—must be
liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of
exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to
South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form
of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has
been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the
expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be
broken. As its grip loosens here and there around the world, the hopes
of black Americans become more realistic. For racism to die, a totally
different America must be born.</div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
This is what the white society
does not wish to face; this is why that society prefers to talk about
integration. But integration speaks not at all to the problem of
poverty, only to the problem of blackness. Integration today means the
man who “makes it,” leaving his black brothers behind in the ghetto as
fast as his new sports car will take him. It has no relevance to the
Harlem wino or to the cotton-picker making three dollars a day. As a
lady I know in Alabama once said, “the food that Ralph Bunche eats
doesn’t fill my stomach.”<br />
<br />
Integration, moreover, speaks to the
problem of blackness in a despicable way. As a goal, it has been based
on complete acceptance of the fact that <i>in order to have</i> a decent
house or education, blacks must move into a white neighborhood or send
their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and
white, the idea that “white” is automatically better and “black” is by
definition inferior. This is why integration is a subterfuge for the
maintenance of white supremacy. It allows the nation to focus on a
handful of Southern children who get into white schools, at great price,
and to ignore the 94 per cent who are left behind in unimproved
all-black schools.<br />
<br />
Such situations will not change until black people
have power—to control their own school boards, in this case.<br />
<br />
Then
Negroes become equal in a way that means something, and integration
ceases to be a one-way street. Then integration doesn’t mean draining
skills and energies from the ghetto into white neighborhoods; then it
can mean white people moving from Beverly Hills into Watts, white people
joining the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Then integration
becomes relevant.<br />
<br />
Last April, before the furor over black power, Christopher Jencks wrote in a <i>New Republic</i> article on white Mississippi’s manipulation of the anti-poverty program:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #990000;">The war on poverty has been predicated on the notion that there is such a thing as <i>a community</i>
which can be defined geographically and mobilized for a collective
effort to help the poor. This theory has no relationship to reality in
the Deep South. In every Mississippi county there are <i>two</i>
communities. Despite all the pious platitudes of the moderates on both
sides, these two communities habitually see their interests in terms of
conflict rather than cooperation. Only when the Negro community can
muster enough political, economic and professional strength to compete
on somewhat equal terms, will Negroes believe in the possibility of true
cooperation and whites accept its necessity. En route to integration,
the Negro community needs to develop greater independence—a chance to
run its own affairs and not cave in whenever “the man” barks…Or so it
seems to me, and to most of the knowledgeable people with whom I talked
in Mississippi. To OEO, this judgment may sound like black nationalism…</span></blockquote>
<div class="initial">
MR.
JENCKS, a white reporter, perceived the reason why America’s
anti-poverty program has been a sick farce in both North and South. In
the South, it is clearly racism which prevents the poor from running
their own programs; in the North, it more often seems to be politicking
and bureaucracy. But the results are not so different: In the North,
non-whites make up 42 per cent of all families in metropolitan “poverty
areas” and only 6 per cent of families in areas classified as not poor.
SNCC has been working with local residents in Arkansas, Alabama, and
Mississippi to achieve control by the poor of the program and its funds;
it has also been working with groups in the North, and the struggle is
no less difficult. Behind it all is a federal government which cares far
more about winning the war on the Vietnamese than the war on poverty;
which has put the poverty program in the hands of self-serving
politicians and bureaucrats rather than the poor themselves; which is
unwilling to curb the misuse of white power but quick to condemn black
power.</div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
To most whites, black power seems to mean that the Mau Mau
are coming to the suburbs at night. The Mau Mau are coming, and whites
must stop them. Articles appear about plots to “get Whitey,” creating an
atmosphere in which “law and order must be maintained.” Once again,
responsibility is shifted from the oppressor to the oppressed. Other
whites chide, “Don’t forget—you’re only 10 per cent of the population;
if you get too smart, we’ll wipe you out.” If they are liberals, they
complain, “what about me?—don’t you want my help any more?”<br />
<br />
These are
people supposedly concerned about black Americans, but today they think
first of themselves, of their feelings of rejection. Or they admonish,
“you can’t get anywhere without coalitions,” when there is in fact no
group at present with whom to form a coalition in which blacks will not
be absorbed and betrayed. Or they accuse us of “polarizing the races” by
our calls for black unity, when the true responsibility for
polarization lies with whites who will not accept their responsibility
as the majority power for making the democratic process work.<br />
<br />
White
America will not face the problem of color, the reality of it. The
well-intended say: “We’re all human, everybody is really decent, we must
forget color.” But color cannot be “forgotten” until its weight is
recognized and dealt with. White America will not acknowledge that the
ways in which this country sees itself are contradicted by being
black—and always have been. Whereas most of the people who settled this
country came here for freedom or for economic opportunity, blacks were
brought here to be slaves.<br />
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When the Lowndes County Freedom Organization
chose the black panther as its symbol, it was christened by the press
“the Black Panther Party”—but the Alabama Democratic Party, whose symbol
is a rooster, has never been called the White Cock Party. No one ever
talked about “white power” because power in this country <i>is</i>
white. All this adds up to more than merely identifying a group
phenomenon by some catchy name or adjective. The furor over that black
panther reveals the problems that white America has with color and sex;
the furor over “black power” reveals how deep racism runs and the great
fear which is attached to it.<br />
<br />
<div class="initial">
WHITES WILL NOT SEE
that I, for example, as a person oppressed because of my blackness, have
common cause with other blacks who are oppressed because of blackness.
This is not to say that there are no white people who see things as I
do, but that it is black people I must speak to first. It must be the
oppressed to whom SNCC addresses itself primarily, not to friends from
the oppressing group.</div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
From birth, black people are told a set of
lies about themselves. We are told that we are lazy—yet I drive through
the Delta area of Mississippi and watch black people picking cotton in
the hot sun for fourteen hours. We are told, “If you work hard, you’ll
succeed”—but if that were true, black people would own this country. We
are oppressed because we are black—not because we are ignorant, not
because we are lazy, not because we’re stupid (and got good rhythm), but
because we’re black.<br />
<br />
I remember that when I was a boy, I used to
go to see Tarzan movies on Saturday. White Tarzan used to beat up the
black natives. I would sit there yelling, “Kill the beasts, kill the
savages, kill ’em!” I was saying: Kill <i>me</i>. It was as if a Jewish
boy watched Nazis taking Jews off to concentration camps and cheered
them on. Today, I want the chief to beat hell out of Tarzan and send him
back to Europe. But it takes time to become free of the lies and their
shaming effect on black minds. It takes time to reject the most
important lie: that black people inherently can’t do to same things
white people can do, unless white people help them.<br />
<br />
The need for
psychological equality is the reason why SNCC today believes that blacks
must organize in the black community. Only black people can convey the
revolutionary idea that black people are able to do things themselves.
Only they can help create in the community an aroused and continuing
black consciousness that will provide the basis for political strength.
In the past, white allies have furthered white supremacy without the
whites involved realizing it—or wanting it, I think. Black people must
do things for themselves; they must get poverty money they will control
and spend themselves, they must conduct tutorial programs themselves so
that black children can identify with black people. This is one reason
Africa has such importance: The reality of black men ruling their own
natives gives blacks elsewhere a sense of possibility, of power, which
they do not now have.<br />
<br />
This does not mean we don’t welcome help, or
friends. But we want the right to decide whether anyone is, in fact,
our friend. In the past, black Americans have been almost the only
people whom everybody and his momma could jump up and call their
friends. We have been tokens, symbols, objects—as I was in high school
to many young whites, who liked having “a Negro friend.” We want to
decide who is our friend, and we will not accept someone who comes to us
and says: “If you do X, Y, and Z, then I’ll help you.” We will not be
told whom we should choose as allies. We will not be isolated from any
group or nation except by our own choice. We cannot have the oppressors
telling the oppressed how to rid themselves of the oppressor.<br />
<br />
<div class="initial">
I
HAVE SAID that most liberal whites react to “black power” with the
question, What about me?, rather than saying: Tell me what you want me
to do and I’ll see if I can do it. There are answers to the right
question. One of the most disturbing things about almost all white
supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into
their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get
rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell, us what to do in
Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to
be nonviolent; let them preach non-violence in the white community. They
come to teach me Negro history; let them go to the suburbs and open up
freedom schools for whites. Let them work to stop America’s racist
foreign policy; let them press this government to cease supporting the
economy of South Africa.</div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
There is a vital job to be done among
poor whites. We hope to see, eventually, a coalition between poor blacks
and poor whites. That is the only coalition which seems acceptable to
us, and we see such a coalition as the major internal instrument of
change in American society. SNCC has tried several times to organize
poor whites; we are trying again now, with an initial training program
in Tennessee. It is purely academic today to talk about bringing poor
blacks and whites together, but the job of creating a poor-white power
bloc must be attempted. The main responsibility for it falls upon
whites. Black and white can work together in the white community where
possible; it is not possible, however, to go into a poor Southern town
and talk about integration. Poor whites everywhere are becoming more
hostile—not less—partly because they see the nation’s attention focussed
on black poverty and nobody coming to them. Too many young middle-class
Americans, like some sort of Pepsi generation, have wanted to come
alive through the black community; they’ve wanted to be where the action
is—and the action has been in the black community.<br />
<br />
Black people
do not want to “take over” this country. They don’t want to “get
whitey”; they just want to get him off their backs, as the saying goes.
It was for example the exploitation by Jewish landlords and merchants
which first created black resentment toward Jews—not Judaism. The white
man is irrelevant to blacks, except as an oppressive force. Blacks want
to be in his place, yes, but not in order to terrorize and lynch and
starve him. They want to be in his place because that is where a decent
life can be had.<br />
<br />
But our vision is not merely of a society in
which all black men have enough to buy the good things of life. When we
urge that black money go into black pockets, we mean the communal
pocket. We want to see money go back into the community and used to
benefit it. We want to see the cooperative concept applied in business
and banking. We want to see black ghetto residents demand that an
exploiting store keeper sell them, at minimal cost, a building or a shop
that they will own and improve cooperatively; they can back their
demand with a rent strike, or a boycott, and a community so unified
behind them that no one else will move into the building or buy at the
store.<br />
<br />
The society we seek to build among black people, then, is not a
capitalist one. It is a society in which the spirit of community and
humanistic love prevail.<br />
<br />
The word love is suspect; black expectations of
what it might produce have been betrayed too often. But those were
expectations of a response from the white community, which failed us.<br />
<br />
The love we seek to encourage is within the black community, the only
American community where men call each other “brother” when they meet.
We can build a community of love only where we have the ability and
power to do so: among blacks.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3J1wDXonImSOTAfo4zjgUDcvqlG5WTeS2TVXSwoxKvlxg0eqO1SaqEELV7ZHDrLNxqaFuUARSzRMjQOjunP38w-upKDO6BRDYUywYn4cjUXE-AgjAFsfG6iVo3CebSE86Pkg/s1600/blackpower+sistas.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3J1wDXonImSOTAfo4zjgUDcvqlG5WTeS2TVXSwoxKvlxg0eqO1SaqEELV7ZHDrLNxqaFuUARSzRMjQOjunP38w-upKDO6BRDYUywYn4cjUXE-AgjAFsfG6iVo3CebSE86Pkg/s640/blackpower+sistas.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="initial">
AS FOR WHITE
AMERICA, perhaps it can stop crying out against “black supremacy,”
“black nationalism,” “racism in reverse,” and begin facing reality. The
reality is that this nation, from top to bottom, is racist; that racism
is not primarily a problem of “human relations” but of an exploitation
maintained—either actively or through silence—by the society as a whole.
Camus and Sartre have asked, can a man condemn himself? Can whites,
particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming
us, and blame their own system? Are they capable of the shame which
might become a revolutionary emotion?</div>
<div class="initial">
<br /></div>
We have found that they
usually cannot condemn themselves, and so we have done it. But the
rebuilding of this society, if at all possible, is basically the
responsibility of whites—not blacks.<br />
<br />
We won’t fight to save the present
society, in Vietnam or anywhere else. We are just going to work, in the
way <i>we</i> see fit, and on goals <i>we</i> define, not for civil rights but for all our human rights.<br />
<div class="article-refers-to quiet small">
</div>
<div class="article-refers-to quiet small">
---------------- <br />
<i><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/12/01/black-power-4/">Black Power</a></i> December 1, 1966</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-66271424113708734022018-03-05T13:15:00.001-05:002018-03-05T13:15:33.571-05:00 The Unwelcome Revival of ‘Race Science’ <h1 class="content__headline content__headline--immersive content__headline--immersive--with-main-media content__headline--immersive-article
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<span style="color: #274e13;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">
The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Its defenders claim to be standing up for uncomfortable truths, but race science is still as bogus as ever. </b></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3VVxmVme1Zuk-U3UazfwjCE-FvsWGVbIl7RKRvY7m0_NS7TZQQBcfReKhLwaiQ3aPbS2eDFYpClbFGxQrWK_Xidvtm9Lt808Pb_QgZxlF1vYsTgrzOKVuuvvw6FoGXv8xyjc/s1600/blackwhite+skulls.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1600" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3VVxmVme1Zuk-U3UazfwjCE-FvsWGVbIl7RKRvY7m0_NS7TZQQBcfReKhLwaiQ3aPbS2eDFYpClbFGxQrWK_Xidvtm9Lt808Pb_QgZxlF1vYsTgrzOKVuuvvw6FoGXv8xyjc/s640/blackwhite+skulls.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
By <span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <a class="tone-colour u-underline" data-link-name="in standfirst link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/gavin-evans" itemprop="sameAs" rel="author"><span itemprop="name">Gavin Evans</span></a></span><br />
<span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">theguardian.com</span></span><br />
<span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">March 2, 2018</span></span><br />
<br />
<span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">One of the strangest ironies of our time is that a body of thoroughly
debunked “science” is being revived by people who claim to be defending
truth against a rising tide of ignorance. The idea that certain races
are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a
small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and
pundits who portray themselves as noble dissidents, standing up for
inconvenient facts. Through a surprising mix of fringe and mainstream
media sources, these ideas are reaching a new audience, which regards
them as proof of the superiority of certain races.
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</aside>The claim that there is a link between race and intelligence
is the main tenet of what is known as “race science” or, in many cases,
“scientific racism”. Race scientists claim there are evolutionary bases
for disparities in social outcomes – such as life expectancy,
educational attainment, wealth, and incarceration rates – between racial
groups. In particular, many of them argue that black people fare worse
than white people because they tend to be less naturally intelligent.<br />
<br />
Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly
research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest
promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like
to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to
ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor
because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to
the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or
foreign aid, are doomed to fail.<br />
<br />
There are scores of recent examples of rightwingers banging the drum
for race science. In July 2016, for example, Steve Bannon, who was then
Breitbart boss and would go on to be Donald Trump’s chief strategist,
wrote an article in which he suggested that some black people who had
been shot by the police might have deserved it. “There are, after all,
in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent,”
Bannon wrote, evoking one of scientific racism’s ugliest contentions:
that black people are more genetically predisposed to violence than
others.<br />
<br />
One of the people behind the revival of race science was, not long
ago, a mainstream figure. In 2014, Nicholas Wade, a former New York
Times science correspondent, wrote what must rank as the most toxic book
on race science to appear in the last 20 years. In A Troublesome
Inheritance, he repeated three race-science shibboleths: that the notion
of “race” corresponds to profound biological differences among groups
of humans; that human brains evolved differently from race to race; and
that this is supported by different racial averages in IQ scores.<br />
<br />
Wade’s book prompted 139 of the world’s leading population geneticists and evolutionary theorists to sign <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/geneticists-decry-book-race-and-evolution">a letter</a>
in the New York Times accusing Wade of misappropriating research from
their field, and several academics offered more detailed critiques. The
University of Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne described it as “simply bad
science”. Yet some on the right have, perhaps unsurprisingly, latched
on to Wade’s ideas, rebranding him as a paragon of intellectual honesty
who had been silenced not by experts, but by political correctness.<br />
<br />
“That attack on my book was purely political,” Wade told Stefan
Molyneux, one of the most popular promoters of the alt-right’s new
scientific racism. They were speaking a month after Trump’s election on
Molyneux’s YouTube show, whose episodes have been viewed tens of
millions of times. Wade continued: “It had no scientific basis whatever
and it showed the more ridiculous side of this herd belief.”<br />
<br />
Another of Molyneux’s recent guests was the political scientist Charles Murray, who co-authored <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/">The Bell Curve.</a>
The book argued that poor people, and particularly poor black people,
were inherently less intelligent than white or Asian people. When it was
first published in 1994, it became a New York Times bestseller, but
over the next few years it was picked to pieces by academic critics.<br />
<br />
As a frequent target for protest on college campuses, Murray has
become a figurehead for conservatives who want to portray progressives
as unthinking hypocrites who have abandoned the principles of open
discourse that underwrite a liberal society. And this logic has prompted
some mainstream cultural figures to embrace Murray as an icon of
scientific debate, or at least as an emblem of their own openness to the
possibility that the truth can, at times, be uncomfortable. Last April,
Murray appeared on the podcast of the popular nonfiction author Sam
Harris. Murray used the platform to claim his liberal academic critics
“lied without any apparent shadow of guilt because, I guess, in their
own minds, they thought they were doing the Lord’s work.” (The podcast
episode was entitled “Forbidden knowledge”.)<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b></b></i></span><br />
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<i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg36NwS3t3owK5Ws-lj8DkCwI3wTd-TYZQ3aeEgISgIlGYaeJhVXTSLZHccua4JUS9h02q0nX_QWfFyL_eUXlNF2pr7OoZV4qf8cJv0l9EA_2a6mtEGzOE9ZIVXnEkIGBPw_rs/s1600/students+protesting+chas+murray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="880" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg36NwS3t3owK5Ws-lj8DkCwI3wTd-TYZQ3aeEgISgIlGYaeJhVXTSLZHccua4JUS9h02q0nX_QWfFyL_eUXlNF2pr7OoZV4qf8cJv0l9EA_2a6mtEGzOE9ZIVXnEkIGBPw_rs/s640/students+protesting+chas+murray.jpg" width="640" /></a></b></i></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b>Students in Vermont turn their backs to Charles Murray during a lecture in March last year. </b></i></span><br />
<br />
In the past, race science has shaped not only political discourse,
but also public policy. The year after The Bell Curve was published, in
the lead-up to a Republican congress slashing benefits for poorer
Americans, Murray gave expert testimony before a Senate committee on
welfare reform; more recently, congressman Paul Ryan, who helped push
the Republicans’ latest tax cuts for the wealthy, <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/03/13/paul_ryan_and_charles_murray.html">has claimed</a> Murray as an expert on poverty.<br />
<br />
Now, as race science leaches back into mainstream discourse, it has
also been mainlined into the upper echelons of the US government through
figures such as Bannon. The UK has not been spared this revival: the
London Student newspaper <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/10/ucl-to-investigate-secret-eugenics-conference-held-on-campus">recently exposed</a>
a semi-clandestine conference on intelligence and genetics held for the
last three years at UCL without the university’s knowledge. One of the
participants was the 88-year-old Ulster-based evolutionary psychologist
Richard Lynn, who has described himself as a “scientific racist”.<br />
<br />
One of the reasons scientific racism hasn’t gone away is that the
public hears more about the racism than it does about the science. This
has left an opening for people such as Murray and Wade, in conjunction
with their media boosters, to hold themselves up as humble defenders of
rational enquiry. With so much focus on their apparent bias, we’ve done
too little to discuss the science. Which raises the question: why,
exactly, are the race scientists wrong?<br />
<hr class="section-rule" />
<span class="drop-cap"><span class="drop-cap__inner">R</span></span>ace,
like intelligence, is a notoriously slippery concept. Individuals often
share more genes with members of other races than with members of their
own race. Indeed, many academics have argued that race is a social
construct – which is not to deny that there are groups of people
(“population groups”, in the scientific nomenclature) that share a high
amount of genetic inheritance. Race science therefore starts out on
treacherous scientific footing.<br />
<br />
The supposed science of race is at least as old as slavery and
colonialism, and it was considered conventional wisdom in many western
countries until 1945. Though it was rejected by a new generation of
scholars and humanists after the Holocaust, it began to bubble up again
in the 1970s, and has returned to mainstream discourse every so often
since then.<br />
<br />
In 1977, during my final year in state high school in apartheid South
Africa, a sociology lecturer from the local university addressed us and
then took questions. He was asked whether black people were as
intelligent as white people. No, he said: IQ tests show that white
people are more intelligent. He was referring to a paper published in
1969 by Arthur Jensen, an American psychologist who claimed that IQ was
80% a product of our genes rather than our environments, and that the
differences between black and white IQs were largely rooted in genetics.<br />
<br />
In apartheid South Africa, the idea that each race had its own
character, personality traits and intellectual potential was part of the
justification for the system of white rule. The subject of race and IQ
was similarly politicised in the US, where Jensen’s paper was used to
oppose welfare schemes, such as the <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ohs/about/history-of-head-start">Head Start programme</a>,
which were designed to lift children out of poverty.<br />
<br />
But the paper met
with an immediate and overwhelmingly negative reaction – “an
international firestorm,” the New York Times called it 43 years later, <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/science/arthur-r-jensen-who-set-off-debate-on-iq-dies.html">in Jensen’s obituary</a> – especially on American university campuses, where academics issued dozens of rebuttals, and students burned him in effigy.<br />
<br />
The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly
benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the
world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the
view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first
in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes">a lengthy article</a>
in the liberal American magazine The New Republic the following year.
This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true
that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say
that others are naturally less so.<br />
<br />
The background to Pinker’s essay was <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16867211">a 2005 paper</a>
entitled “Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence”, written by a trio
of anthropologists at the University of Utah. In their 2005 paper, the
anthropologists argued that high IQ scores among Ashkenazi Jews
indicated that they evolved to be smarter than anyone else (including
other groups of Jews).<br />
<br />
This evolutionary development supposedly took root between 800 and
1650 AD, when Ashkenazis, who primarily lived in Europe, were pushed by
antisemitism into money-lending, which was stigmatised among Christians.
This rapid evolution was possible, the paper argued, in part because
the practice of not marrying outside the Jewish community meant a “very
low inward gene flow”. This was also a factor behind the
disproportionate prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews of genetic diseases such
as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s, which the researchers claimed were a
byproduct of natural selection for higher intelligence; those carrying
the gene variants, or alleles, for these diseases were said to be
smarter than the rest.<br />
<br />
Pinker followed this logic in his New Republic article, and elsewhere
described the Ashkenazi paper as “thorough and well-argued”. He went on
to castigate those who doubted the scientific value of talking about
genetic differences between races, and claimed that “personality traits
are measurable, heritable within a group and slightly different, on
average, between groups”.<br />
<br />
In subsequent years, Nicholas Wade, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, the
increasingly popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and others
have all piled in on the Jewish intelligence thesis, using it as ballast
for their views that different population groups inherit different
mental capacities. Another member of this chorus is the journalist
Andrew Sullivan, who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for The Bell
Curve in 1994, featuring it prominently in The New Republic, which he
edited at the time. He returned to the fray in 2011, using his popular
blog, <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2011/11/28/the-study-of-intelligence-ctd-1/">The Dish</a>, to promote the view that population groups had different innate potentials when it came to intelligence.<br />
<br />
Sullivan noted that the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic
Jews were “striking in the data”. It was a prime example of the rhetoric
of race science, whose proponents love to claim that they are honouring
the data, not political commitments. The far right has even rebranded
race science with an alternative name that sounds like it was taken
straight from the pages of a university course catalogue: “human
biodiversity”.<br />
<br />
A common theme in the rhetoric of race science is that its opponents
are guilty of wishful thinking about the nature of human equality. “The
IQ literature reveals that which no one would want to be the case,”
Peterson told Molyneux on his YouTube show recently. Even the prominent
social scientist Jonathan Haidt has criticised liberals as “IQ deniers”,
who reject the truth of inherited IQ difference between groups because
of a misguided commitment to the idea that social outcomes depend
entirely on nurture, and are therefore mutable.<br />
<br />
Defenders of race science claim they are simply describing the facts
as they are – and the truth isn’t always comfortable. “We remain the
same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species,”
Sullivan wrote in 2013. “But poodles, in general, are smarter than
beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell.”<br />
<hr class="section-rule" />
<b><i><span class="drop-cap"><span class="drop-cap__inner">T</span></span>he
race “science” that has re-emerged into public discourse today –
whether in the form of outright racism against black people, or
supposedly friendlier claims of Ashkenazis’ superior intelligence –
usually involves at least one of three claims, each of which has no
grounding in scientific fact.</i></b><br />
<br />
The first claim is that when white Europeans’ Cro-Magnon ancestors
arrived on the continent 45,000 years ago, they faced more trying
conditions than in Africa. Greater environmental challenges led to the
evolution of higher intelligence. Faced with the icy climate of the
north, Richard Lynn wrote in 2006, “less intelligent individuals and
tribes would have died out, leaving as survivors the more intelligent”.<br />
<br />
Set aside for a moment the fact that agriculture, towns and alphabets
first emerged in Mesopotamia, a region not known for its cold spells.
There is ample scientific evidence of modern intelligence in prehistoric
sub-Saharan Africa. In the past 15 years, cave finds along the South
African Indian Ocean coastline have shown that, between 70,000 and
100,000 years ago, biologically modern humans were carefully blending
paint by mixing ochre with bone-marrow fat and charcoal, fashioning
beads for self-adornment, and making fish hooks, arrows and other
sophisticated tools, sometimes by heating them to 315C (600F). Those
studying the evidence, such as the South African archaeologist
Christopher Henshilwood, argue that these were intelligent, creative
people – just like us. <a class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/science/14paint.html">As he put it</a>: “We’re pushing back the date of symbolic thinking in modern humans – far, far back.”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYtR5VOeQiuK-iofqu_2HfRGReHDlNHaVF5TaPw3RTugL8xeq7ugE862wYuJ9pn9hkC-UT-goKXs7hvoOsEaf-TzuVBsTYVvbuTBaZoxDWQc2zNzMAhPYOyywp9JfK7UfRAI4/s1600/77000+yr+old+artpiece+from+south+africa.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="880" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYtR5VOeQiuK-iofqu_2HfRGReHDlNHaVF5TaPw3RTugL8xeq7ugE862wYuJ9pn9hkC-UT-goKXs7hvoOsEaf-TzuVBsTYVvbuTBaZoxDWQc2zNzMAhPYOyywp9JfK7UfRAI4/s640/77000+yr+old+artpiece+from+south+africa.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b>A 77,000-year-old piece of red ochre with a deliberately engraved design discovered at Blombos Cave, South Africa. </b></i></span><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b> </b></i></span><br />
A second plank of the race science case goes like this: human bodies
continued to evolve, at least until recently – with different groups
developing different skin colours, predispositions to certain diseases,
and things such as lactose tolerance. So why wouldn’t human brains
continue evolving, too?<br />
<br />
The problem here is that race scientists are not comparing like with
like. Most of these physical changes involve single gene mutations,
which can spread throughout a population in a relatively short span of
evolutionary time. By contrast, intelligence – even the rather specific
version measured by IQ – involves a network of potentially thousands of
genes, which probably takes at least 100 millennia to evolve
appreciably.<br />
<br />
Given that so many genes, operating in different parts of the brain,
contribute in some way to intelligence, it is hardly surprising that
there is scant evidence of cognitive advance, at least over the last
100,000 years. The American palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, widely
acknowledged as one of the world’s leading experts on Cro-Magnons, has
said that long before humans left Africa for Asia and Europe, they had
already reached the end of the evolutionary line in terms of brain
power. “We don’t have the right conditions for any meaningful biological
evolution of the species,” he told an interviewer in 2000.<br />
<br />
In fact, when it comes to potential differences in intelligence
between groups, one of the remarkable dimensions of the human genome is
how little genetic variation there is. DNA research conducted in 1987
suggested a common, African ancestor for all humans alive today:
“mitochondrial Eve”, who lived around 200,000 years ago. Because of this
relatively recent (in evolutionary terms) common ancestry, human beings
share a remarkably high proportion of their genes compared to other
mammals. The single subspecies of chimpanzee that lives in central
Africa, for example, has significantly more genetic variation than does
the entire human race.<br />
<br />
No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all,
and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer
review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof
Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is
reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.”
Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single
strand of DNA.<br />
<hr class="section-rule" />
<span class="drop-cap"><span class="drop-cap__inner">U</span></span>ltimately,
race science depends on a third claim: that different IQ averages
between population groups have a genetic basis. If this case falls, the
whole edifice – from Ashkenazi exceptionalism to the supposed
inevitability of black poverty – collapses with it.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>A Brief History of IQ </b></span><br />
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<br />
Before we can properly assess these claims, it is worth looking at
the history of IQ testing. The public perception of IQ tests is that
they provide a measure of unchanging intelligence, but when we look
deeper, a very different picture emerges. Alfred Binet, the modest
Frenchman who invented IQ testing in 1904, knew that intelligence was
too complex to be expressed in a single number. “Intellectual qualities …
cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured,” he insisted,
adding that giving IQ too much significance “may give place to
illusions.”<br />
<br />
But Binet’s tests were embraced by Americans who assumed IQ was
innate, and used it to inform immigration, segregationist and eugenic
policies. Early IQ tests were packed with culturally loaded questions.
(“The number of a Kaffir’s legs is: 2, 4, 6, 8?” was one of the
questions in IQ tests given to US soldiers during the first world war.)
Over time, the tests became less skewed and began to prove useful in
measuring some forms of mental aptitude. But this tells us nothing about
whether scores are mainly the product of genes or of environment.
Further information is needed.<br />
<br />
One way to test this hypothesis would be to see if you can increase
IQ by learning. If so, this would show that education levels, which are
purely environmental, affect the scores. It is now well-known that if
you practise IQ tests your score will rise, but other forms of study can
also help. In 2008, Swiss researchers recruited 70 students and had
half of them practise a memory-based computer game. All 35 of these
students saw their IQs increase, and those who practised daily, for the
full 19 weeks of the trial, showed the most improvement.<br />
<br />
Another way to establish the extent to which IQ is determined by
nature rather than nurture would be to find identical twins separated at
birth and subsequently raised in very different circumstances. But such
cases are unusual, and some of the most influential research – such as
the work of the 20th-century English psychologist Cyril Burt, who
claimed to have shown that IQ was innate – has been dubious. <span style="color: red;"><i><b>(After
Burt’s death, it was revealed that he had falsified much of his data.)</b></i></span><br />
<br />
A genuine twin study was launched by the Minneapolis-based
psychologist Thomas Bouchard in 1979, and although he was generously
backed by the overtly racist Pioneer Fund, his results make interesting
reading. He studied identical twins, who have the same genes, but who
were separated close to birth. This allowed him to consider the
different contributions that environment and biology played in their
development. His idea was that if the twins emerged with the same traits
despite being raised in different environments, the main explanation
would be genetic.<br />
<br />
The problem was that most of his identical twins were adopted into
the same kinds of middle-class families. So it was hardly surprising
that they ended up with similar IQs. In the relatively few cases where
twins were adopted into families of different social classes and
education levels, there ended up being huge disparities in IQ – in one
case a 20-point gap; in another, 29 points, or the difference between
“dullness” and “superior intelligence” in the parlance of some IQ
classifications. In other words, where the environments differed
substantially, nurture seems to have been a far more powerful influence
than nature on IQ.<br />
<br />
But what happens when you move from individuals to whole populations?
Could nature still have a role in influencing IQ averages? Perhaps the
most significant IQ researcher of the last half century is the New
Zealander Jim Flynn. IQ tests are calibrated so that the average IQ of
all test subjects at any particular time is 100. In the 1990s, Flynn
discovered that each generation of IQ tests had to be more challenging
if this average was to be maintained. Projecting back 100 years, he
found that average IQ scores measured by current standards would be
about 70.<br />
<br />
Yet people have not changed genetically since then. Instead, Flynn
noted, they have become more exposed to abstract logic, which is the
sliver of intelligence that IQ tests measure. Some populations are more
exposed to abstraction than others, which is why their average IQ scores
differ. Flynn found that the different averages between populations
were therefore entirely environmental.<br />
<br />
This finding has been reinforced by the changes in average IQ scores
observed in some populations. The most rapid has been among Kenyan
children – a rise of 26.3 points in the 14 years between 1984 and 1998,
according to one study. The reason has nothing to do with genes.
Instead, researchers found that, in the course of half a generation,
nutrition, health and parental literacy had improved.<br />
<br />
So, what about the Ashkenazis? Since the 2005 University of Utah
paper was published, DNA research by other scientists has shown that
Ashkenazi Jews are far less genetically isolated than the paper argued.
On the claims that Ashkenazi diseases were caused by rapid natural
selection, further research has shown that they were caused by a random
mutation. And there is no evidence that those carrying the gene variants
for these diseases are any more or less intelligent than the rest of
the community.<br />
<br />
But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests
conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed
Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ
tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found
Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor
who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to
disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And
yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores <em>were</em> above average.<br />
<br />
A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of
Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of
92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese
Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990.
And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by
5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.<br />
<br />
No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in
the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a
generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry
Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took
the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s
provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”<br />
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<hr class="section-rule" />
<span class="drop-cap"><span class="drop-cap__inner">T</span></span>en
years ago, our grasp of the actual science was firm enough for Craig
Venter, the American biologist who led the private effort to decode the
human genome, to respond to claims of a link between race and
intelligence by declaring: “There is no basis in scientific fact or in
the human genetic code for the notion that skin colour will be
predictive of intelligence.”<br />
<br />
Yet race science maintains its hold on the imagination of the right,
and today’s rightwing activists have learned some important lessons from
past controversies. Using YouTube in particular, they attack the
left-liberal media and academic establishment for its unwillingness to
engage with the “facts”, and then employ race science as a political
battering ram to push forward their small-state, anti-welfare,
anti-foreign-aid agenda.<br />
<br />
These political goals have become ever more explicit. When
interviewing Nicholas Wade, Stefan Molyneux argued that different social
outcomes were the result of different innate IQs among the races – as
he put it, high-IQ Ashkenazi Jews and low-IQ black people. Wade agreed,
saying that the “role played by prejudice” in shaping black people’s
social outcomes “is small and diminishing”, before condemning “wasted
foreign aid” for African countries.<br />
<br />
Similarly, when Sam Harris, in his podcast interview with Charles
Murray, pointed out the troubling fact that The Bell Curve was beloved
by white supremacists and asked what the purpose of exploring race-based
differences in intelligence was, Murray didn’t miss a beat. Its use,
Murray said, came in countering policies, such as affirmative action in
education and employment, based on the premise that “everybody is equal
above the neck … whether it’s men or women or whether it’s ethnicities”.<br />
<br />
Race science isn’t going away any time soon. Its claims can only be
countered by the slow, deliberate work of science and education. And
they need to be – not only because of their potentially horrible human
consequences, but because they are factually wrong. The problem is not,
as the right would have it, that these ideas are under threat of
censorship or stigmatisation because they are politically inconvenient.
Race science is bad science. Or rather, it is not science at all.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-36940580685681769992017-11-17T09:05:00.002-05:002017-11-17T09:05:58.748-05:00The Racist/Sexist/Sordid History Behind NYC's Statue of J. Marion Sims, the so-called Father of Gynecology<h1 class="Big">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">Monumental Error</span></span></h1>
<h2 class="sbHead italic">
<span style="color: blue;">Will New York City finally tear down a statue?</span></h2>
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<br /></div>
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By<b> <a href="https://harpers.org/author/j-c-hallman/" rel="author" title="Posts by J. C. Hallman">J. C. Hallman</a></b></div>
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<span class="init-cap">I</span>n 1899, the art critic Layton Crippen complained in the <em>New York Times</em>
that private donors and committees had been permitted to run amok,
erecting all across the city a large number of “painfully ugly
monuments.” The very worst statues had been dumped in Central Park. “The
sculptures go as far toward spoiling the Park as it is possible to
spoil it,” he wrote. Even worse, he lamented, no organization had “power
of removal” to correct the damage that was being done.<br />
<br />
Crippen criticized more than two dozen statues for their aesthetic
failures, mocking Beethoven’s frown and the epicene figure of Bertel
Thorvaldsen. Yet he took pains to single out the bronze monument to J.
Marion Sims, the so-called Father of Gynecology, for its foolish
“combination toga-overcoat.” Would visitors really be so hurt, Crippen
asked, if the Sims statue, then situated in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, was
removed?<br />
<br />
A little more than a century later — after it had been refurbished
and moved to Central Park — the Sims statue has once again prompted
angry calls for its removal. This time, the complaint is not that it is
ugly. Rather, East Harlem residents learned that their neighborhood
housed a monument to a doctor whose renown stems almost exclusively from
a series of experimental surgeries that he had performed, without the
use of anesthesia, on a number of young slave women between 1845 and
1849.<br />
<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_266391" style="width: 400px;">
<img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-266391" height="579" src="https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/027__HA1117_27-1.png" width="390" /><div class="wp-caption-text">
<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Illustrations by Lincoln Agnew</i></span></span></div>
<div class="wp-caption-text">
<br /></div>
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Sims was attempting to discover a cure for vesicovaginal fistula
(VVF), a common affliction that is caused by prolonged obstructed labor.
The timing, nature, and purpose of his experiments make for an
impossibly tangled knot of ethical dilemmas. Most prominently, they
raise the issue of medical consent. Did Sims obtain consent from his
subjects, as he later claimed — and if he did, could a slave truly
provide it? What woman would agree to be operated on, without
anesthesia, upwards of thirty times? On the other hand, given the
horrific nature of VVF, wouldn’t most women endure additional horrors in
pursuit of a cure? And without a willing patient, would delicate
surgery on a wound barely visible to the eye even be possible? What of
the fact that if Sims managed to cure the women, they would be promptly
returned to the plantations, where little awaited them but backbreaking
work, use as breeders of additional slaves, and state-sanctioned rape?<br />
<br />
All these questions came to the surface a couple of months ago, when
activists long opposed to the Sims statue linked it to the Confederate
war memorials being torn down in cities across America. They staged a
protest in front of the statue in August, and an image from the event —
four women of color in blood-soaked gowns, representing Sims’s
experimental subjects — went viral. Newspaper accounts across the
country soon followed. Would the monument to Sims be the very first in
New York City to go to the chopping block?<br />
<pre><em><sup>1</sup> Two partial exceptions to this rule are Richard Serra’s</em> Tilted Arc, <em>which was removed in 1989, and Frederick MacMonnies’s</em> Civic Virtue Triumphant over Unrighteousness, <em>which
was relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in 2012. In both cases, however,
city officials insisted that the decision was practical:</em> Tilted Arc <em>was removed because it was said to block foot traffic, and</em> Civic Virtue <em>for restoration purposes.</em></pre>
<br />
That, too, is a more complicated question than it seems. What Crippen
noted in 1899 is still true today. Even minor alterations to works of
public art in New York City are subject to an arcane system of approval,
and there is no formal mechanism in place for citizens to challenge the
decisions of earlier times. The governing assumption is that if a
memorial has realized permanent form, it represents a consensus that
should be preserved. Not a single statue in the history of New York City
has ever been permanently removed as a result of official action.<sup>1</sup><br />
<sup></sup><br />
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<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><sup> </sup><em>Illustration of Dr. J. Marion Sims with Anarcha by Robert Thom.
Courtesy of Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Pearson
Museum. </em></b></span><br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">I</span>n 1845, Marion Sims was a
thirty-two-year-old doctor with ten years of experience in the South’s
Black Belt. He served Alabama’s free black population; he contracted to
care for the slaves of local plantation owners; and his office and home
in downtown Montgomery included a small backyard facility he called the
Negro Hospital. Tending to the medical needs of current and former
slaves was an economic necessity in an area where two thirds of the
population was black. Indeed, Sims was a slaveholder himself: he had
accepted an enslaved couple as a wedding present from his in-laws, and
he came to own as many as seventeen slaves before he moved to New York
City in 1853. Letters to his wife (“Negroes and children always expect
liberal presents on Christmas”) betray a rank paternalism typical of
antebellum Southerners.<br />
<br />
Medicine had been a default vocation rather than a calling. Sims’s
mother steered him toward the cloth, his father toward the law, and the
latter complained, when his son settled on medicine, that there was no
“honor” or “science” in it. Sims attended medical schools in South
Carolina and Philadelphia, and soon settled on surgical innovation as
the best path to a lucrative practice and a permanent legacy. At the
time, this involved learning new procedures from medical journals, and
Sims made a name for himself by treating clubfoot and crossed eyes.<br />
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_266392" style="width: 640px;">
<img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-266392" height="413" src="https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/029__HA1117_29-1.png" width="630" /><div class="wp-caption-text">
<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b>Source
photographs: bust of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson © Drew
Angerer/Getty Images; statue of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney ©
Dennis MacDonald/Alamy Stock Photo; statue of a horse in the Confederate
Army © Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images</b></i></span></div>
<div class="wp-caption-text">
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</div>
More grandiosely, he announced that he had devised a better method
for dislodging foreign objects from the ear, and that he had discovered
the cure for infant lockjaw. He would later apologize for the first
claim, acknowledging that others had preceded him in syringing the ear.
But he went to his grave insisting that his cure for lockjaw was his
“first great discovery in medicine.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Zealous in his belief that most maladies were by nature mechanical, Sims
had attempted to cure a number of suffering slave babies by prying up
their skull plates with an awl. Shortly after Sims died, in 1883,
scientists identified lockjaw as a bacterial infection, also known as
tetanus.<br />
<br />
By Sims’s account — as related in <em>The Story of My Life</em>
(1885), published posthumously and excerpted in this magazine — his next
great discovery came just two months after the first. In the summer of
1845, he was asked to treat three young female slaves with holes inside
their vaginas. A few days after delivery, fistula sufferers experience a
sloughing away of dead tissue, most often leaving an opening between
the vaginal canal and the bladder. Once afflicted, women are cursed with
a perpetual leak of urine from their vaginas, frequently resulting in
severe ulceration of the vulva and upper thighs.<br />
<br />
These were the first cases of VVF that Sims had encountered. It’s not
surprising, given his later confession that he had initially “hated
investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” A little research
revealed that doctors throughout history had been stymied by the
affliction. The basic problem, surgically speaking, was that you had
little room to see the wound you were attempting to close, let alone to
stitch sutures in the secreting tissue. Sims concluded that all three of
the women were untreatable, but the last, having traveled from Macon
County, was permitted to spend the night in his Negro Hospital, the idea
being that she would leave by train the following afternoon.<br />
<br />
There the story might have ended — except that the next morning, Sims
was called to attend to an emergency. A white seamstress had dislocated
her uterus in a fall from her horse. Sims grudgingly made his way to
her home and placed her facedown with her buttocks awkwardly elevated in
what doctors called the knee-chest position. The idea was to vigorously
push her uterus back into place. Sims was first surprised when the
woman’s entire womb seemed to vanish, leaving his fingers flailing about
in an apparent void — yet somehow this worked, her pain was immediately
relieved. He was surprised again when the woman, lowering herself onto
her side, produced a blast of air from her vagina.<br />
<br />
The seamstress was mortified, but Sims rejoiced. The accident
explained what had happened — and offered great promise besides. The
position of her body and the action of his fingers against her perineum
and the rear of the vaginal wall caused an inrush of air that inflated
her vagina. Sims immediately thought of the young woman still waiting
for a train in his backyard clinic. Might not the ballooning action of
the vagina enable a doctor to clearly observe a fistula, and thereby
cure a condition that had baffled the world’s leading medical minds for
centuries?<br />
<br />
Sims rushed home, stopping on the way to purchase a large pewter
spoon that he believed would function more efficiently than his fingers.
Two medical students assisted him with the woman — her name was either
Lucy or Betsey, depending on how you read Sims’s account — and as soon
as they put her in the knee-chest position and pulled open her buttocks,
her vagina began to dilate with a puffing sound. Sims sat down behind
her, bent the spoon, and turned it around to insert it handle first. He
elevated her perineum and looked inside. He could see the fistula as
plainly as a hole in a sheet of paper. Years later, Sims described the
moment as if he had summited a mountain or landed on the surface of the
moon.<br />
<br />
“I saw everything,” he wrote, “as no man had ever seen before.”<br />
<br />
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<span class="init-cap">T</span>his was the first of many epiphanies
in a life that would come to be characterized, by Sims himself and by
others after him, as having proceeded along the lines of a fantastical
romance. For the next four years, the fairy tale goes, Sims labored to
cure those first three slaves, along with a number of other fistula
sufferers whom he sought out in neighboring communities. Progress was
incremental, levying a tax on the young physician’s soul and wallet (he
paid the cost of room and board for his enslaved subjects). Finally, in
1849, he managed to successfully close a fistula — and soon thereafter,
he grandly claimed, he cured all the slaves in his care. At least some
portion of the fame he coveted now came his way: the tool and the
position he used to cure fistulas have been known ever since as the Sims
speculum and the Sims position.<br />
<br />
What followed was a period of collapse, probably from dysentery.
Assuming he was gravely ill, and concerned that he “might die without
the world’s reaping the benefits of my labors,” Sims published “On the
Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula” in <em>The American Journal of the Medical Sciences</em>
in 1852. The paper was an immediate success. Sims claimed that his
surgery was easier to perform and produced more consistent results than
had any previous techniques. Citing health reasons (Alabama colleagues
thought him more ambitious than ill), he moved to New York City the next
year, and soon proposed establishing Woman’s Hospital. This would be
one of the first institutions in the world devoted to those conditions
“of the female pelvis” that he had once deplored.<br />
<br />
A pattern emerged. As Sims saw it, he would be presented with a
series of women suffering from mysterious maladies — and, devising his
own cures or improving on the cures of others, he would conquer each
illness in turn. In addition to being crowned the Father of Gynecology,
Sims attached his name to dozens of tools and procedures. His fame
became international when he spent the Civil War years abroad, spreading
the gospel of his work and tending to the medical needs of empresses
and countesses. For the rest of his life, he remained a
continent-hopping cosmopolite, attending conferences and practicing
medicine in New York City, London, Paris, Geneva, and Vienna.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>he effort to erect a monument to Sims began less than a month after his death in 1883. A Baltimore physician wrote a letter to <em>the Medical Record,</em> the day’s leading organ for surgeons and doctors, to suggest that a statue be commissioned and erected in Central Park.<br />
<br />
The editor agreed. The magazine announced that it would raise the
necessary funds from doctors — and from the many women who owed their
health and happiness to Sims’s “amelioration of their numerous and
distressing ailments.” Prominent surgeons offered pledges and praise,
and suggested that a Sims Memorial Fund Committee, made up “partly of
gentleman and partly of ladies,” be formed to take charge of the effort.<br />
<br />
It was perhaps inevitable that Sims would wind up in bronze. The
rhetorical mold had first been cast in 1857, by a woman named Caroline
Thompson, who gave a speech to the New York state legislature after
being treated by Sims. Boasting a fatality rate near zero, Woman’s
Hospital was attempting to expand and become a state institution, and
Thompson told legislators that a vote in favor would “build for [them] a
monument in the hearts of women more durable than granite.”<br />
<br />
The fund drive for the Central Park monument began in 1884. The <em>Medical Record</em>
published the name of each donor and the amount of each donation, most
often $1, as they came in from across the country. When sufficient funds
were raised, the committee hired Ferdinand von Miller II, a German
sculptor who lived in an Italian castle. He eagerly set to work, and the
Sims memorial arrived in the United States in April 1892. At once the
committee approached the Department of Public Parks about the statue,
kicking off a cursory period of municipal assessment. Consistent with
the practice at the time, no public comment was invited.<br />
<br />
A Central Park placement was initially denied. Instead, the statue
was unveiled in Bryant Park in October 1894. A “goodly number of ladies”
attended the ceremony, it was reported, but in the end not a single
woman served on the Sims Memorial Fund Committee, and only a tiny
portion of the monument’s donations had come from the surgeon’s former
patients — a tip-off, perhaps, that the hearts of women were less
receptive to Sims’s legacy than they were supposed to be.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">C</span>riticism of Sims began early and never
quite went away. His assistant in Alabama, Nathan Bozeman — who would
himself become a gynecologist of international renown — alleged that
Sims’s fistula cure had been successful only half the time. Others noted
that every aspect of the cure, including both the Sims speculum and the
Sims position, had been anticipated by other practitioners.<br />
<br />
No matter. In the wake of Sims’s death and for many decades
afterward, the voices questioning his legacy were drowned out by a
chorus of hagiographers, whose fact-free defense of their idol amounts
to a study in mass delusion. In addition to the New York monument, there
were statues in South Carolina and Alabama, a Sims-branded medical
school and foundation (defunct and extant, respectively), and comically
laudatory profiles (“Savior of Women”) in dozens of publications. He was
included on short lists of civilizational greats alongside George
Washington, and likened to the divine figures in Homer and Virgil. He
was dubbed the Architect of the Vagina. The apotheosis peaked in 1950
with a radio-theater adaptation of the only book-length biography of
Sims, with the Oscar-winning actor Ray Milland playing the title role in
<em>Sir Galahad in Manhattan.</em><br />
<br />
In recent decades, however, this began to change. A series of
scholarly books — all of them brilliant but problematic — steadily
chiseled away at the Sims edifice. In the late 1960s, a young scholar
named G. J. Barker-Benfield produced a dissertation on how the
“physiological minority” of Wasp males had come to dominate
nineteenth-century America, later published as <em>The Horrors of the Half-Known Life</em>
(1976). Smart and copious, the book included several chapters on Sims,
viewing him with refreshing skepticism. “Woman’s Hospital,”
Barker-Benfield wrote, “was founded very largely as a demonstration
ground for Sims’s surgical skill. He needed food and fame.” Yet
Barker-Benfield flubbed numerous details of the story, conflating, for
example, the displaced uterus of the seamstress with the damaged vagina
of the first enslaved patient. And only the profoundly Freudian
predilection of so much midcentury American scholarship can explain the
author’s claim that Sims harbored a “hatred for women’s sexual organs” —
one that he overcame by “his use of the knife.”<br />
<br />
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Twenty years later, in <em>From Midwives to Medicine,</em> Deborah
Kuhn McGregor recounted the history of Woman’s Hospital as an emblem of
the male establishment’s hostile takeover of obstetrics, a jurisdiction
traditionally overseen by women. This exhaustive volume is often on the
mark: “Although J. Marion Sims is pivotal in the history of gynecology,
he did not create it by himself.” But McGregor, too, commits casual
errors: she mistakenly describes the VVF wound as a “tear” (a peeve of
clinical specialists), and creates confusion with equivocal language and
even imprecise grammar. Worse, a story that is fraught with horror and
drama is reduced to stale summary by the truth-destroying academic
conviction that to be dull is to be serious.<br />
<br />
Both Barker-Benfield and McGregor failed to penetrate the membrane
that separates the world of academic squabbles from that of the people
who walk past the Sims statue every day. They did inspire a new
generation of scholarship, but a tendency to fight fire with fire
resulted in an inferno of questionable claims. Sims was soon described
by one detractor as “Father Butcher,” a sadistic proto-Mengele. Even
before the debate’s most indignant voices chimed in, Sims’s biography
had become a kind of post-truth zone. His defenders engaged in flagrant
invention, creating a saintly caricature that outstripped even Sims’s
own efforts to inflate his reputation; his detractors introduced
inaccuracies and exaggerations that morphed into outright falsehoods as
they ricocheted from source to source.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">F</span>orty years after its dedication, the
Sims statue, along with a statue of Washington Irving, was removed from
Bryant Park. The year was 1932, and the nation was about to observe the
bicentennial of George Washington’s birth. To commemorate the occasion,
Sears, Roebuck and Company erected in the park a temporary replica of
Federal Hall, from which Washington delivered his first inaugural. The
statues, which were in the way of this patriotic simulacrum, were
dragged away.<br />
<br />
Robert Moses was named the commissioner of parks a short time later.
He disliked statues in general, and almost immediately proposed a
dramatic overhaul of Bryant Park that did not include the reinstallation
of the Sims and Irving monuments. This was fortuitous, as the statues
had been misplaced — five tons of granite and metal had somehow gone
missing. The good luck turned into headache, however, when the Art
Commission (which was later renamed the Public Design Commission, and
today has final say over all public-art decisions in New York City)
rejected his proposal. The statues had to come back.<br />
<br />
Reports differ on what came next. Some say the statues turned up by accident in a Parks Department storage yard. Moses told the <em>New York Times</em>
a different story: a protracted effort led searchers to a storage area
beneath the Williamsburg Bridge, where they found the monuments wrapped
in tarpaulins. Moses reiterated his belief that the “city could get
along very well” without them. Still, to keep Sims from mucking up his
plans, he consented to a request from the New York Academy of Medicine
that the monument be installed across from its Fifth Avenue location, in
a niche on the outer wall of Central Park.<br />
<br />
Again, the public was afforded no opportunity to comment. The statue
was rededicated on October 20, 1934. The speakers echoed those who had
first lobbied for a Sims monument, hailing his supposed innovations
without ever really addressing what such a memorial was for. In 1884,
another celebrated surgeon, Samuel Gross, had argued in his letter of
support for a Sims statue that monuments are not intended for the dead.
Rather, they should act as a stimulus for the living to “imitate the
example” of the figure memorialized. But what sort of inspiration would
the Sims statue provide? After all, the man in the strange bronze
overcoat was, as the <em>Medical Record</em> noted, distinguished mostly for his readiness to employ “the one needful thing, the knife.”<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">S</span>ims would have yet another memorial
before the roof fell in. In the late 1950s, the pharmaceutical giant
Parke-Davis commissioned the artist Robert Thom to produce a series of
forty-five oil paintings illustrating the history of medicine. One
painting depicted Sims’s fistula experiments: clutching his trademark
speculum, the doctor stands in his ramshackle clinic before two acolytes
and the three worried slave women who would serve as his initial
subjects.<br />
<br />
Parke-Davis was sold in 1970 to another pharmaceutical giant,
Warner-Lambert, which appears to have had no qualms about the painting:
the company granted permission for the image to be used on the cover of
McGregor’s <em>From Midwives to Medicine.</em> In 2000, however, Warner-Lambert was purchased by Pfizer — and Pfizer <em>did</em> have qualms. Harriet Washington’s <em>Medical Apartheid,</em>
the next scholarly book to take aim at Sims, begins with an account of
her attempt to secure the rights to the image. She, too, hoped to use
Thom’s painting on the jacket of her book. Pfizer asked to review the
manuscript before making a decision, and she refused to comply. Later,
she submitted a request to use a smaller version of the image in the
book’s interior and never got an answer.<sup>2</sup><br />
<pre><em><sup>2</sup> In 2007, Pfizer donated all forty-five paintings
to the University of Michigan. The painting of Sims is currently in
storage. A less prominent painting of Sims was commissioned by the
University of Alabama in 1982. It was removed from public view in 2005
after a visiting lecturer from Harvard complained about it.</em></pre>
<pre><em> </em></pre>
<em>Medical Apartheid</em> is a vast and sweeping work, which ranges
from gynecology to eugenics, radiation, and bioterrorism. It is notable
for having won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle award in general
non-fiction, among several other honors. Yet even though only a small
portion of <em>Medical Apartheid</em> is devoted to Sims, a number of
errors crop up: for example, the author describes the bronze statue of
Sims as a “marble colossus,” misstates the original location of Woman’s
Hospital, claims that only one of Sims’s slave subjects was ever cured,
and wrongly suggests that Sims once etherized wives to enable
intercourse.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, <em>Medical Apartheid</em> finally penetrated the
scholar-public divide, and efforts got under way to have the statue
removed. They began with a woman, fired up by Washington, handing out
flyers in East Harlem. Viola Plummer, now chief of staff to New York
State Assemblyman Charles Barron, had been working with several
colleagues on health care disparities, and who knows how they first came
to focus on the Sims statue? It was back during the Bush
Administration, Plummer recalled, when there was torture and
waterboarding going on, and maybe the details of Sims’s experiments, as
recounted in <em>Medical Apartheid,</em> resonated with all that. Or
maybe it was because a statue was a tangible thing, so perhaps you could
actually do something about it.<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b> A bronze likeness of Dr. James Marion Sims stands at the entrance of
Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street in Manhattan. Two women
protesters painted their clothes as part of their demonstration in August 2017.</b></i></span><br />
<div style="background-color: white; border: medium none; color: black; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">
<br /></div>
Plummer’s pamphlets caught the eye of a group called East Harlem
Preservation, which put her petition online. Eventually, it attracted
enough media attention that the New York City Parks Department sent
someone to explain to the members of Community Board 11, also involved
by that point, that the city had a policy of not removing art for
content. Removing a statue, any statue, would amount to expunging
history.<br />
<br />
Albeit on a lark rather than a mission, the department had been
thinking about its statuary for a while. In 1996, Commissioner Henry
Stern — a colorful character who bestowed code names on Parks staffers,
his own being Starquest — launched an effort to erect signs to
contextualize each of the statues, busts, and monuments under Parks
supervision, of which there were more than 800. A statue should be more
than a grave site, Stern’s thinking went. It should tell a story.<br />
<br />
One of the people carrying out this mission was the new art and
antiquities director, Jonathan Kuhn (code name: Archive), who continues
on in the same position today. In 1996, the Sims statue was for Kuhn
little more than a punch line — he proudly told the <em>New York Times</em>
that the city’s statues included a “fifteenth-century martyr, a sled
dog, and two gynecologists.” The signage effort coincided with the
digital revolution, so only a few summaries were ever installed in
Central Park as physical signs. The Sims summary was one of the many
that appeared only online.<br />
<br />
The original version of this summary, which has since been finessed
and corrected, was notable for vagueness and factual errors. First, it
repeated the common but inaccurate claim that Sims innovated the use of
silver wire as an antibacterial suture material. The text also asserted
that the statue had been funded by donations from “thousands of Sims’s
medical peers and many of his own patients,” and as late as 2016, the
Parks website specified 12,000 individual donors. The actual numbers are
much more modest: 789 male doctors, forty-one women, and twenty-eight
medical societies. In any case, nobody at the department paid much
attention to the Sims summary. It was one headache among many, and why
quibble with a memorial to a man whose “groundbreaking surgical
methods,” as the original summary read, “earned him worldwide
notoriety”?<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">I</span>n 2007, at roughly the same time that
Viola Plummer was handing out letters in East Harlem, Mary Bassett, then
the deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and
Mental Hygiene, also read <em>Medical Apartheid.</em> Bassett was
uniquely positioned to appreciate what is undeniably the most
scruples-testing aspect of the Sims legacy. A physician herself, she had
spent nearly two decades in Zimbabwe, where the epidemiological
nightmare of VVF rages on today. Largely eradicated in the West because
of the prevalence of caesarean section, the condition still blankets the
African continent, with estimates of as many as 100,000 new sufferers
annually. There has been a recent rise in clinics dedicated to the
disorder, whose victims often wind up divorced, ostracized, depressed,
and suicidal. These clinics all descend from a single source: the Addis
Ababa Fistula Hospital, in Ethiopia, which was founded in 1974 by the
Hamlins, an Australian couple, both gynecologists, who planned their
facility by carefully studying Sims’s <em>The Story of My Life.</em><sup>3</sup><br />
<pre><em><sup>3</sup> A brick from the original Woman’s Hospital was
transported to Ethiopia and used in the construction of the Hamlin
fistula clinic.</em></pre>
<pre><em> </em></pre>
The advent of African fistula clinics aside, Bassett believed that
Sims’s surgical subjects must have perceived his initial experiments as a
form of torture. Rather than handing out flyers, Bassett invited
Harriet Washington to give a talk at a health department gathering. It
was Washington’s lecture on Sims and the broader history of medical
experimentation that got staffers brainstorming about what could be done
about the statue. They came up with the idea of a contextualizing
plaque to be added to the statue itself, which would tell the story of
Sims’s initial procedures.<br />
<br />
Kuhn dismissed the idea of a plaque. Instead, he suggested, they
should propose additions to the existing online summary. That’s
basically what happened. In 2008, the department added nine lines to the
text — which, true to form, introduced more historical errors. For one
thing, the revised summary claimed that Sims had been on hand to tend to
President Garfield’s gunshot wound: false. More meaningfully, the new
text noted that during the period of Sims’s fistula experiments, he had
“declined or could not use anesthesia.”<br />
<br />
This skirts one of the most contentious aspects of the Sims debate.
During the mid-1840s, when he experimented on the enslaved women, ether
had just been introduced as a surgical anesthetic; it was not approved
for safe use until 1849. As for chloroform, it would make its debut in
1847 and become widely known for killing patients in the hands of
inexperienced physicians. Sims’s detractors have argued that he reserved
anesthesia for his white patients. This isn’t true, and for his part,
Sims claimed that the pain of fistula surgery did not merit the risk of
anesthesia in any patient.<sup>4</sup><br />
<pre><em><sup>4</sup> Even after anesthesia came into common use, Sims
varied from his stance only in VVF cases where the damage extended to
the urethra or the neck of the uterus. It is critical to note, however,
that Sims did sometimes display a shockingly callous disregard for the
suffering experienced by his slave subjects. To further complicate
matters, Sims’s detractors have also accused him of believing that
African women had a special genetic endowment that made them resistant
to pain. In fact, it was his biographer, Seale Harris, who made this
claim a hundred years later in</em> Woman’s Surgeon: The Life Story of J. Marion Sims <em>(1950).</em></pre>
<br />
Beyond the error-speckled lines added to the online text, nothing
happened. Adrian Benepe, who succeeded Henry Stern, was more concerned
with health initiatives, such as smoking in public parks. For that
matter, Benepe later recalled, it wasn’t like there had ever been a
grand public chorus rising up to complain about the Sims statue. And
when you’re the commissioner, that’s what you do: you deal with things
that take up a lot of media and public attention. The Sims controversy?
It wasn’t even in the same ballpark as what PETA did to Mayor Bill de
Blasio over the Central Park horses in 2014.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">S</span>ince the 1990s, one of the most
prominent figures in the Sims controversy has been L. Lewis Wall. Wall’s
résumé makes you feel like you’ve wasted your life. He holds two
doctorates, is a professor of medicine, social anthropology, and
bioethics, and founded the Worldwide Fistula Fund, which has launched
clinical programs to combat the scourge in Niger, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
Wall has performed hundreds of fistula surgeries in Africa, and has seen
firsthand the struggles of aid efforts — including local corruption and
political exploitation. Just as onerous, in his view, was “fistula
tourism”: non-African doctors making blitzkrieg trips to Africa to rack
up “good cases.” Wall responded with two articles, “A Bill of Rights for
Patients with Obstetric Fistula” and “A Code of Ethics for the Fistula
Surgeon.”<br />
<br />
The latter manifesto stands in stark contrast to Sims’s lifelong
hostility toward medical ethics. He always hated rules, and a petulant
inability to follow even those he had agreed to has been viewed by his
champions as an element of his puckish persona. Yet Sims did sometimes
pay for his rule-flouting tendencies. In 1870 — thirteen years before
assisting with the Sims Memorial Fund Committee — the New York Academy
of Medicine put him on trial for ethics violations.<br />
<br />
Sims had written
publicly about the condition of the theater star Charlotte Cushman, whom
he had once seen in private practice. In doing so, he violated his
patient’s confidence and ignored an ethical prohibition against doctors
seeking publicity — hardly a first for Sims, who had a ringmaster’s
flair for self-promotion and had once socialized with P. T. Barnum.<sup>5</sup>
Sims was found guilty. He was given a formal reprimand, which would
subsequently be characterized by his detractors as a draconian penalty
and by his supporters as a slap on the wrist.<br />
<pre><em><sup>5</sup> There is no evidence yet to suggest that pomposity
and narcissism are hereditary conditions. Let’s recall, however, that
our current president’s tasteless retreat at Mar-a-Lago was designed by
the grandson of J. Marion Sims.</em></pre>
<pre><em> </em></pre>
Judging from this, one might suspect that Wall would have pitched his
tent in the camp of Sims’s critics. Instead, as the debate turned
rabid, Wall kicked back against Sims’s detractors. No, he argued, Sims
did not <em>deliberately</em> addict his experimental subjects to opium.
As to anesthesia, Wall calmly noted, the exterior of human genitals is
indeed sensitive, but that the inner lining of the vagina is not nearly
as innervated as one might expect.<br />
<br />
Wall is not above reproach. For example, he decided on the basis of
the little information available that Sims’s experiments were “performed
explicitly for therapeutic purposes.” This conclusion overlooks the
social and economic realities of the South, and the less than altruistic
reasons that a plantation owner might send a woman suffering from a
fistula in search of a cure: the sexual exploitation of slaves, and the
financial benefits to be reaped from breeding additional human chattel.
In any event, in the zero-sum game of journalism, Wall found himself
positioned as Sims’s highest-profile defender, even though he had been
the first to suggest that there should be a monument to Anarcha, Betsey,
and Lucy.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">I</span>t is worth noting that while Sims is
remembered primarily for his VVF surgeries, these account for only a
small fraction of his lengthy practice. Indeed, after he moved to New
York City, he left the bulk of fistula procedures to Thomas Addis Emmet,
who became his assistant in 1856 and further perfected the process,
curing many patients that his superior regarded as lost causes.<br />
<br />
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Over the
next two decades, Sims would dabble with a range of horrific
procedures, including clitoridectomy (performed at least once, in 1862)
and so-called female castration. Indeed, Sims later became a fervent
champion of “normal ovariotomy,” in which one or both healthy ovaries
were removed as specious cures for dysmenorrhea, diarrhea, and epilepsy.
He performed the operation a dozen times himself, killing several women
and mutilating others.<br />
<br />
Earlier in his career, however, Sims turned his attention to
procreation. He hoped to make advances that would ensure the
perpetuation of honorable families and powerful dynasties. His
investigations into sterility would result in his prescribing
intercourse at particular times of the day, and then swabbing his
patients’ vaginas (to count sperm under a microscope) at such
increasingly rapid postcoital intervals that critics wondered exactly
what kind of bargain had been struck between husband and physician.<br />
<br />
Sims signed on to a simple anatomical tenet of the day: if the neck
of a woman’s uterus did not offer a clear pathway, then the egress of
menstrual matter from the womb, and the ingress of sperm into it, could
be impaired. In his view, this could lead to sterility and painful
menses. His solution (and he was not the first to suggest it) was to
surgically open the passage with one of a variety of multibladed
dilating tools, some of which were activated with a spring mechanism
once inserted into the patient’s womb: the blades popped open and made
multiple incisions as the device was drawn out again.<br />
<br />
In 1878, he published a kind of summa, “On the Surgical Treatment of
Stenosis of the Cervix Uteri,” reflecting at length on a procedure that
Sims estimated he had performed as many as a thousand times. Like his
early publications, this one seemed designed to ensure that nobody could
snatch away credit that was properly his. In this case, Sims wished to
cement his claim to a particular incision made to the cervical canal.
“The antero-posterior incision belongs to Sims,” he declared, “and not
to Emmet, or any one else.”<br />
<br />
The paper was presented to the American Gynecological Society that
same year, and while Sims was not present, other doctors spoke up to
praise or critique his claims. The most interesting response came from
Fordyce Barker, President Grant’s personal physician, who had championed
Sims from the moment of his arrival in New York City, launching the
young doctor’s career (and canonization) with a public description of
his “brilliant” fistula operation.<br />
<br />
Twenty-five years later, Barker rose to offer a less enchanted view.
He began by noting that it was unclear whether a womb with a narrow neck
was even pathological. In recent years, many unnecessary operations had
been performed, often with injurious results. Worse, the procedure had
been adopted by untrained physicians or downright charlatans. In any
event, how could it be that Sims had performed these operations five
times as often as many other capable surgeons?<br />
<br />
His skills were
undeniable, Barker concluded, but it was for precisely this reason that
his arguments should be scrutinized, for it had been the tendency of the
profession to accept the dicta of such men unquestioned.<br />
<br />
Four years later, Barker accepted the chairmanship of the Sims Memorial Fund Committee. He died before the statue was dedicated.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">I</span>n March 2014, the Sims debate reignited with another <em>New York Times</em>
article, which described the limbo into which the controversy had
fallen after 2011. Now the Parks Department and Community Board 11,
which had been fighting the Sims case for seven years, agreed to meet
and settle things once and for all.<br />
<br />
The city, still resistant to removing the statue, sought out experts
to make its case. They enlisted Robert Baker, a professor of philosophy
at Union College and the author of <em>Before Bioethics</em> (2013).
Baker acknowledged Sims to be precisely the kind of doctor that had
necessitated the bioethics revolution: bioethics holds that
science-minded physicians shouldn’t be trusted to monitor their own
ethical behavior. Yet in <em>Before Bioethics,</em> Baker takes Sims at
more than his word. For example, Baker claims that Sims freed his slaves
before he moved to New York City in 1853. This is patently untrue: he
leased his slaves before he left Alabama, and during his difficult first
year in the city, they likely formed an important part of his income.
Baker even argues that <em>The Story of My Life</em> should be forgiven
for its use of the word “nigger” because Sims only uses it when quoting
other people. Actually, that’s not true — but even if it were, who
cares?<br />
<br />
It was Baker who provided the department with a three-page
“deposition” on the controversy.<br />
<br />
This document reads like a disheveled
Wikipedia entry. Baker’s claim about Sims’s own slaves is there, along
with an inaccurate assertion that Sims repeatedly sought consent for
surgery from his enslaved patients. The document also notes that Sims
offered credit to his slave subjects and that they came to serve as his
assistants. These assertions are true, yet all they do is add another
twist to the complicated knot of consent. Slaves cannot provide consent
for surgery — they do not have true agency. Similarly, should a slave be
applauded for performing labor that she is in any event compelled to
perform? Regardless, Baker concluded that additional information about
the three slaves on or near the Sims monument would be an appropriate
way to “follow Sims’s example [and honor] the courage of these African
American women.”<br />
<br />
Parks also contacted the art historian (and former vice president of
the New York City Art Commission) Michele Bogart, whose position
couldn’t have been clearer: she was vehemently opposed to the removal of
the Sims statue. Bogart didn’t know a lot about Sims. In her view,
however, the details didn’t matter: you simply didn’t remove art for
content. Bogart didn’t buy the claims that modern sensibilities had been
injured. Get over it, she thought. It boiled down to expertise. What
Bogart believed — and she was undeniably an expert — was that the Sims
statue had stood in New York City for more than 120 years, and that even
false history was of historic interest if it managed to persevere.<br />
<br />
The meeting was held in June 2014. Baker’s deposition was read aloud
to members of the Parks subcommittee, and Bogart briefly addressed the
importance of using city monuments as educational tools. A deputy
commissioner apologized for the years it had taken to produce a
response, then reiterated that the statue would not be removed. However,
the department was ready to consider a freestanding sign, and the
committee voted unanimously that Parks, in a timely manner, should
return when a complete plan had been formed. In other words, it was back
to bureaucratic limbo, where the argument over the Sims statue — which
had long since become a symbol of how the fraudulent past becomes
official history — had resided for nearly a decade.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">I</span>n May 1857, Sims was approached in
private practice by a forty-five-year-old woman possessed of
irritability of the bladder and uterine displacement. She was a curious
case, married at twenty but still a virgin. Sims attempted an
examination, only to find that the slightest touch to her vagina caused
her to shriek, spasm, and cry. A second examination, under the influence
of ether, revealed minor uterine retroversion — but her vagina was
perfectly normal. Medical books threw no light on the matter. The only
rational treatment, Sims concluded, would be to cut into the muscles and
the nerves of the vulval opening. Alas, the woman’s “position in
society” made her an unsuitable candidate for such an experimental
procedure.<br />
<br />
Fifteen months later, Sims was sent a similar case from Detroit, a
young virgin with the same dread of having her vagina touched. This
time, he decided, the risk was justified: her husband had threatened
divorce. Cutting into the hymen offered the young woman no relief, but
incisions into the mucous membrane and the sphincter muscle were
slightly more effective. By that point, her mother concluded that Sims
was experimenting on her daughter — which, of course, he was — and
yanked her from his care.<br />
<br />
A few weeks later, another case fell into his hands, followed by two
more. By now, Sims had a name for the condition: vaginismus. He had also
devised a cure, aimed primarily at permitting coitus between husband
and wife: amputate the hymen in full, then make several deep,
two-inch-long incisions into the vaginal tissue and the perineum. As
with his cervical stenosis surgery, this would be followed by the
insertion of glass or metal dilating plugs as the wounds healed. Several
years later, in <em>Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery</em> (1866)<em> —</em>
sometimes characterized as modern gynecology’s inaugural text — he
claimed to have encountered thirty-nine instances of vaginismus and
achieved a perfect cure in every case.<br />
<br />
Sims’s claims were challenged even before he finished making them.
English doctors rejected the notion that the condition had never before
been described, and London’s <em>Medical Times and Gazette</em> noted
that British surgeons would no sooner resort to excision for a mild case
of vaginismus than they would cut off a patient’s eyelid because he had
a twitch. French doctors agreed. They had been researching the
condition since at least 1834. They regarded the “Sims operation” as too
bloody and dangerous, and one French doctor dismissed it as too
mechanical, “<em>too American.</em>”<br />
<br />
American doctors eventually rejected the procedure as well, using it
for only the most severe cases. They also came to dispute Sims’s claim
to thirty-nine perfect cures. Years later, one Woman’s Hospital surgeon
insisted that he was aware of only a single cure, and vividly recalled
two patients who had been left in far worse shape after the procedure.
Another doctor remembered cases in which failed Sims operations —
performed by surgeons other than Sims — were followed by so many futile
attempts at treatments that the women’s vaginas looked as though they
had been splashed with nitric acid. A year before the Sims statue was
erected, A.J.C. Skene — the <em>other</em> gynecologist in New York
City’s statuary pantheon — claimed that he had never seen a case of
vaginismus for which the Sims operation “would have been of any value.”<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjot3_TR3NM6KhvUP1T6lX86Gz9Lw7jVsAqJF2yo-Nt2HvxXRLbCrWBR9kSx1EhBeB9Lo0jQCnC6QB1LRHFjKK6RyQ_tcPLcxVf83CCh87oZf01ppRB5HBoUxP8pKICXLz71wo/s1600/959192236.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="751" data-original-width="570" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjot3_TR3NM6KhvUP1T6lX86Gz9Lw7jVsAqJF2yo-Nt2HvxXRLbCrWBR9kSx1EhBeB9Lo0jQCnC6QB1LRHFjKK6RyQ_tcPLcxVf83CCh87oZf01ppRB5HBoUxP8pKICXLz71wo/s640/959192236.jpg" width="484" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b>J Marion Sims with his medals of "Honor".</b></i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The debate over the Sims monument has tended to focus on his VVF
experiments — but that’s only the beginning of the story. After Sims
exploited a vulnerable population to achieve a minor victory that he
successfully parlayed into international fame, he claimed credit for a
series of bogus breakthroughs and performed thousands of surgeries,
often at the behest of distressed husbands, which left many women
mutilated or dead. This does not make Sims a Gilded Age Mengele. Mengele
killed his Jewish subjects by degrees, extracting data along the way,
while Sims was always attempting to ameliorate <em>something.</em> Good
intentions, however, don’t erase the enormous pain and injury that he
inflicted, nor the sense of violation — one felt by women today every
time they pass the statue on the sidewalk.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>he anti-Sims movement has never had
the fervor of a student uprising. And for more than a decade, it lacked
even the figurehead of a vigilante arrested for defacing the statue in a
pique of righteous inspiration. That shouldn’t matter. Not all scholars
of public art agree that statues should remain in place forever.
Experts of a different kidney, such as Erika Doss, a professor of
American studies at the University of Notre Dame, are perfectly
comfortable with monuments being “defaced, despoiled, removed, resisted,
dismantled, destroyed and/or forgotten” when they represent “beliefs no
longer considered viable.” These acts of symbolic vandalism embody
Emerson’s insistence that good men must not obey laws too well.<br />
<br />
Like history itself, activism seems to move very slowly at times,
then abruptly accelerates. In June 2016, the long-awaited language for
what had evolved into a freestanding-sign-plus-plaque solution was
presented to Community Board 11. The expectation was that the board
would provide yet another rubber stamp for yet another round of evasive
action. Instead, a subcommittee balked — and after another presentation,
two weeks later, the full board voted to remove the statue. Then the
Confederate flag came down over the South Carolina statehouse, and
Confederate statues vanished in New Orleans, Baltimore, Orlando, St.
Louis — and in the wake of Charlottesville came a growing sense that the
nation could no longer tolerate commemorations of its most shameful
moments. And finally, on August 19, protesters congregated around the
Sims statue and demanded that the city remove it.<br />
<br />
In the media storm that followed, Mayor de Blasio instituted a
ninety-day period of reevaluation for the city’s sprawling statuary.
After years of telling activists that there was no way to remove
statues, the city invented one. Still, it wasn’t enough for one
protester, who at last seized the initiative and spray-painted <span style="font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;">racist</span> across the statue’s back and gave it red, villainous eyes.<br />
<br />
Surely this Emersonian good man — <em>if</em> it was a man — had been
prodded into action by the activists, one of whom condemned
“imperialist slaveholders, murderers, and torturers like J. Marion
Sims.” But truth be told, that’s not quite right, either. For all his
crimes, Sims was not a torturer or a murderer. Which means that his
detractors are on the right side of history, but for the wrong, or
incomplete, reasons. And maybe that doesn’t matter. For ten years, the
Parks Department and the city itself resisted removing the statue not
because they cared about Sims but because they feared a precedent that
would bring a cascade of other statues down as well.<br />
<br />
That’s exactly what
<em>should</em> happen, in New York and elsewhere. In an age defined by
changing values and an evolving notion of what constitutes a fact, the
Sims statue stands as a monument to truth’s susceptibility to lies and
political indifference. Removing it represents an awareness that history
is fluid, but bronze is not.<br />
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-71465469806211896822017-11-04T08:55:00.000-04:002017-11-04T08:55:20.493-04:00The Two-Headed Dragon that Must Be Slain: Capitalism & White Supremacy<h4 style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Capitalism and White Supremacy: The Two-Headed Dragon that Must Be Slain</span></span></span></h4>
<br /> <a href="http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/images/capws.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img align="left" border="0" height="400" src="https://www.hamptoninstitution.org/images/capws.JPG" style="visibility: visible;" width="600" /></a><br />
<br />
<b>Matthew Dolezal</b> <i>I Social Economics I Analysis I November 2nd, 2017</i><br /><br />
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Four decades of neoliberal Reaganomics has decimated the American poor and
working class. Median wages have remained stagnant since the late 1970s,
despite a consistent increase in productivity. The top 1 percent owns
40 percent of the country's wealth, and top CEOs make more than <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-has-grown-90-times-faster-than-typical-worker-pay-since-1978/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">300 times </a>that
of the average worker (which is a 1,000 percent increase since 1978).
There are 46 million Americans officially living in poverty, but, due to
the <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/18/why-is-the-federal-poverty-line-so-low/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">arbitrary nature </a>of
the poverty line, another 100 million are "near poor" (i.e. cannot
afford basic necessities). And keep in mind - this is happening in the
richest country in the world. These third-world levels of economic
inequality make the US look a lot like an oligarchy. The <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/19/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-99-percent-new-income-going-to/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">vast majority </a>of new income goes to the top 1 percent, and <i>one family</i><b><i> </i></b><b><i>-</i></b> <b><i> </i></b>the <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Waltons </a>of the Walmart empire - has more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the population.<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Wealth concentration and poverty under neoliberalism aren't abstract concepts; they have tangible consequenses. For example, <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/why-half-america-doesn-t-even-live-paycheck-paycheck-n780276" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">half </a>of all Americans don't even live paycheck to paycheck, student loan debt is <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/18/its-not-the-avocado-toast-federal-reserve-finds-student-debt-reducing-millennial-home-ownership/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">diminishing </a>the prospects of home ownership, climate change is beginning to <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-will-hurt-poor-and-help-wealthy-630155" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">devastate</a>poor communities while helping the rich, and <a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">45,000 </a>people
die every year due to a lack of health insurance. In Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s final speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
in 1967, he <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/the-uncompromising-anti-capitalism-of-martin-luther-king-jr_b_4629609.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said </a>:</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>"One
day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people
in America?' When you ask that question, you begin to question the
capitalistic economy."</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
But this is a democracy, right? Who would vote for such a grim existence? Well, according to an academic study from <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cambridge </a>,
there is literally no correlation between public opinion and government
policy. Turns out the plutocrats are running the show (thanks, in part,
to <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/05/james-bopp-citizens-united/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Citizens United </a>).<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Generic,
theoretical capitalism is inseparable from our current paradigm of
advanced, hyper-consumerist, job-shipping, union-busting, soul-crushing
neoliberalism. Prominent capitalists have fought desperately to achieve
this sadistic system, which is the culmination of an evolutionary
history of laissez-faire. One day, long ago, Adam Smith planted roses,
and all that remain are the thorns. To quote <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/the-uncompromising-anti-capitalism-of-martin-luther-king-jr_b_4629609.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">King </a>again, "today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness."<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCoWGZcKvo21p1NrfIBPSSRkB8dOBZNJff0eVTkb1-7y0fjh0j9TwxyJlh9yqv0CnJDmkTntCNWFtOk3iGMvRNeUU-stzvYsq0eN2wWTAF20hgQOnKJNnPQFOEkthGB53xLBE/s1600/3_poverty_ap_img3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="327" data-original-width="615" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCoWGZcKvo21p1NrfIBPSSRkB8dOBZNJff0eVTkb1-7y0fjh0j9TwxyJlh9yqv0CnJDmkTntCNWFtOk3iGMvRNeUU-stzvYsq0eN2wWTAF20hgQOnKJNnPQFOEkthGB53xLBE/s640/3_poverty_ap_img3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
But
capitalism is not an equal-opportunity destroyer. These social
tragedies demonstrably and empirically affect folks of color at vastly
disproportional rates. For instance, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-after-ferguson-race-deserves-more-attention-not-less.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">average </a>net worth of black households is $6,314, compared to $110,500 for the average white household. Blacks are more than <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">twice </a>as likely as whites to be poor, and a white male with a criminal record is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915472/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">more likely </a>to get a job than an equally qualified person of color with a clean record. Median black household <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">income </a>is
approximately $43,300, while median white household income is around
$71,300. This discrepancy is roughly 40 percent greater today than it
was in 1967. And these economic disparities are just the beginning. For
instance, in the area of mass incarceration, more than 40 percent of US
inmates are black men, while that demographic only makes up 6.5 percent
of the general population. In the area of police violence, black teens
age 15-19 are <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i>21 times</i> </a>more
likely to be shot and killed by the police than white teens of the same
age group. These statistics could continue for pages.<br />
<br />
Profound systemic
racism poisons every aspect of American society. These horrors are
manifestations of the racial caste system that has always existed in the
US, which is discussed at length by Michelle Alexander in her
groundbreaking <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">book</a> <i>The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
We
often forget that merely five decades ago, our country maintained a
government-sactioned apartheid system. This included the intentional
creation of black <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-sanitize-how-our-government-created-the-ghettos" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ghettos </a>through redlining and other discriminatory policies. Political inertia, mixed with the <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">racist </a>War
on Drugs, has preserved the vestiges of white supremacy. The reality on
the ground looks a lot like the same ol' Jim Crow; that guy we swore we
kicked out in 1964.<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
But racism isn't just institutional; it is often overt. The recent emergence of Trump made this <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/president-donald-trump-racist-examples_us_584f2ccae4b0bd9c3dfe5566" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">crystal-clear </a>. Not only did the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500352353/kkk-paper-endorses-trump-campaign-calls-outlet-repulsive" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ku Klux Klan </a>and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20170427/100-days-trumps-america" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">white nationalists </a>endorse him, but even for his voters, "<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/fear-of-diversity-made-people-more-likely-to-vote-trump/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> fear of diversity </a>" was a significant motivating factor. <br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5OCBvaQEDjHPt6W5f_nXNXuXAloti3o0CPpfvN3zNAqX74F3LVXYXrfakfA0FadVBGX4EufTe9bY_BwtUBdBb2R1cnt21IQyvwQrOtteP-SLrO4_sfKhGMLhLCuNEXKfWsVM/s1600/Poverty-and-women.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="498" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5OCBvaQEDjHPt6W5f_nXNXuXAloti3o0CPpfvN3zNAqX74F3LVXYXrfakfA0FadVBGX4EufTe9bY_BwtUBdBb2R1cnt21IQyvwQrOtteP-SLrO4_sfKhGMLhLCuNEXKfWsVM/s640/Poverty-and-women.jpg" width="636" /></a></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
The
evils of racism are clearly apparent to any non-psychopath, but racial
ideologies also serve to pit poor and working-class white folks against
people of color and minorities, distracting them from their true
nemesis; the ruling class. This is a classic example of "divide and
conquer," and has benefited the elites immensely. Anti-racism activist
and author Tim Wise <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0k7Do5JWq0&t=5589s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">elucidates </a>this phenomenon in a concise Marxian manner:</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>"The history of America is the history of rich white men telling not rich white people that their enemies are black and brown."</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Let's
put an end to this madness. Let's build a movement to confront and
destroy this dual evil of economic and racial injustice.. Might I
suggest…<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Socialists have a rich tradition of fighting racism, from the Communist Party of <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123771194" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Alabama </a>, to Cuba's critical <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/11/the_secret_history_of_how_cuba" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">support </a>of black South Africans during Apartheid, to early 20th century socialist politician <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/debs-socialism-race-du-bois-socialist-party-black-liberation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Eugene Debs </a>, to revolutionary Marxist <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/06/red-rosa/308500/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rosa Luxemburg </a>, to the original <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/black-panther-party-revolution-fred-hampton/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Black Panthers Party </a>.
Socialists not only see racism as contrary to worker solidarity, but as
a destructive and dehumanizing hierarchy, just like the class system
itself. And indeed, capitalism and racism have a symbiotic relationship.
Two modern organizations that are battling this double-headed beast
are <a href="http://www.dsausa.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Democratic Socialists of America </a>(DSA) and <a href="https://www.redneckrevolt.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Redneck Revolt</a> .<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Founded
in 1982, DSA is the largest socialist organization in the US, with a
total dues-paying membership of 25,000 (a four-fold increase since
November of 2016). Members have been active in opposing the agenda of
the Trump regime, as well as carrying the torch of the Bernie Sanders
political revolution. DSA has been on the front lines fighting for a $15
minimum wage, universal healthcare, LGBTQ equality, climate justice,
reproductive rights, and many other progressive causes. However, one
thing that separates DSA from other left-leading organizations such as <a href="https://ourrevolution.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Our Revolution</a>is their vehement anti-capitalism.<br />
<br />
DSA <a href="http://www.dsausa.org/where_we_stand#dc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">document </a><i>Where We Stand: Building the Next Left </i>explains:</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>"We
are socialists because we reject an international economic order
sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender
discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in
defense of the status quo.</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>We
are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international
social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to
achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy
environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and
non-oppressive relationships."</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
On the topic of anti-racist activism, DSA <a href="http://www.dsausa.org/our_structure" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Honorary Chair </a>and prominent intellectual Cornel West <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/14/barack-obama-us-racism-police-brutality-failed-victims" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">writes </a>:</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>"A
long and deep legacy of white supremacy has always arrested the
development of US democracy… When the system is declining, it can bring
despair. That's why Black Lives Matter </i><i> </i> <i>-</i> <i> </i> <i>and all other young people of all colors who are mobilizing</i> <i> </i> <i>-</i> <i> </i> <i>is
a beautiful thing. We are having a moral and spiritual awakening. It
gives us democratic hope... It's time to move from being spectators, to
being actors."</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Members of Redneck Revolt are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/11/redneck-revolt-guns-anti-racism-fascism-far-left" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">not liberals </a>.
They are pro-gun, pro-labor, anti-fascist, and anti-racist. The
movement is rapidly expanding, with more than 30 chapters around the US.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKTnz0ZNBaxo3dCVKo76jVcZD_rQrD4QVD5-htPFxhlM_EnF4ISEB2qwv0lml3MG_HSq6DIc2elRKSG5AJ2SV89mGAbzjlF5zUMYlFLHMXU4H0zwbyKmPcqsNFi3EJz04wcDg/s1600/c1543a_1e3fe71b6b154ab8b59733bf97eb407d%257Emv2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="416" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKTnz0ZNBaxo3dCVKo76jVcZD_rQrD4QVD5-htPFxhlM_EnF4ISEB2qwv0lml3MG_HSq6DIc2elRKSG5AJ2SV89mGAbzjlF5zUMYlFLHMXU4H0zwbyKmPcqsNFi3EJz04wcDg/s640/c1543a_1e3fe71b6b154ab8b59733bf97eb407d%257Emv2.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Developing around 2009 as an outgrowth of the John Brown Gun Club, this
diverse group now focuses on recruiting rural, southern and Appalachian
working-class folks to join the fight against white supremacy and
capitalism, while protecting and supporting people of color and other
marginalized communities. After all, many of these poor southern white
folks have been voting against their own interests for decades after
falling for the xenophobic rhetoric of prominent politicians. Dave
Strano, a founding member of the organization, explains:</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>"The
history of the white working class has been a history of being an
exploited people. However, we've been an exploited people that further
exploits other exploited people. While we've been living in tenements
and slums for centuries, we've also been used by the rich to attack our
neighbors, coworkers, and friends of different colors, religions and
nationalities."</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Member Max Neely summarized their strategy by saying simply:</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
<i>"We use gun culture as a way to relate to people. No liberal elitism. Our basic message is: guns are fine, but racism is not."</i><br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
Now, I know just mentioning the term "white privilege" can make people <a href="http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249/116" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">uncomfortable </a>,
but this sociological reality must be acknowledged and dismantled as an
inherent aspect of entrenched white supremacy. White privilege is the
flip-side of the oppression and marginalization faced by people of
color. Simply being given an unconditional pass to avoid oppression,
discrimination, profiling, and other forms of profound inequality is in
itself a major manifestation of white privilege.<br />
<br />
But an understanding of
intersectionality as it relates to privilege is also crucial, just as
it is in understanding oppression and exploitation. If one has
privileges based on other sociological aspects of their identity, this
privilege may extend beyond merely avoiding the injustices uniquely
faced by non-whites. In addition to race, these realms include class,
sexual orientation, religion, gender identity, etc.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCI-sv16DYgOYhzdHjSSucM-euIhIUFLo2Dh6IM_1y-07mbtsdw5ZnMXC42Y8VNyuRS_pfxZgNxuh5elE7QdTTiK07yD0L_D-Pu_LV3gie3eKXGZYE023aaBxFphbexj2HzKM/s1600/arrest_bankers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="742" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCI-sv16DYgOYhzdHjSSucM-euIhIUFLo2Dh6IM_1y-07mbtsdw5ZnMXC42Y8VNyuRS_pfxZgNxuh5elE7QdTTiK07yD0L_D-Pu_LV3gie3eKXGZYE023aaBxFphbexj2HzKM/s640/arrest_bankers.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
The more dominant
groups one belongs to, the more privileges that are usually afforded to
that individual. Based on a rudimentary analysis of modern American
society, the most privileged demographic would be wealthy, white,
heterosexual, cisgendered, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_privilege" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Christian </a>men.<br />
<br />
Indeed, if you pay even peripheral attention to current events and
history, you'll quickly realize that these are, more often than not, the
people who own and control our society and have since its inception.
One such man was "founding father" and forth president of the United
States, James Madison, who was passionate about <a href="https://chomsky.info/commongood02/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">protecting</a> "the minority of the opulent against the majority." Oh, and he also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_who_owned_slaves" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">owned </a>over a hundred slaves. There are still dudes like this, but now they're banksters and <a href="https://www.sanders.senate.gov/koch-brothers" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Koch </a>-fiends.
Let's break this trend. To those of us with various forms of privilege,
let's use it to fight for a better future for everyone.<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-top: 0px;">
The
genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas was our nation's
original sin.<br />
<br />
White supremacy and capitalism were then built upon this
rotten foundation. These parasitic abominations emerged simultaneously
in American society; let's dismantle them simultaneously as well.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-72899787282224526562017-10-30T11:07:00.001-04:002017-10-30T11:08:05.284-04:00The Russian Revolution, Africa and the Diaspora<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />
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<h1 class="entry-title" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Russian Revolution, Africa and the Diaspora </span></span></span></span></h1>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAqbEgutjO6YUgIkLoqsRwT-wzz1_zo5Trcc0o-VPN3U4AKJCkU2wSKHA2catWNpxfPqveKwjj7_Tcgcu7vsJdHZH4qU8xG7w3tuUApRgfDUzsWs2NDKIMVHSAIxIqzgpE650/s1600/dubois+in+moscow+1959.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="514" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAqbEgutjO6YUgIkLoqsRwT-wzz1_zo5Trcc0o-VPN3U4AKJCkU2wSKHA2catWNpxfPqveKwjj7_Tcgcu7vsJdHZH4qU8xG7w3tuUApRgfDUzsWs2NDKIMVHSAIxIqzgpE650/s640/dubois+in+moscow+1959.png" width="548" /></a></div>
<i><span style="color: #274e13;"><b>W.
E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois viewing the May Day parade in
Moscow’s Red Square, May 1, 195</b></span>9. </i></div>
<br />
<span class="byline"><span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="http://www.aaihs.org/author/h-adi/" title="Hakim Adi"><b>By Hakim Adi</b></a></span></span>
<span class="posted-on"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/" rel="bookmark" title="5:30 am"> <time class="entry-date published" datetime="2017-10-30T05:30:02+00:00"> </time></a></span><br />
<br />
<span class="posted-on"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2017-10-30T05:30:02+00:00">October 30, 2017</time></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
From the time of the Great October Revolution in 1917, Africans and
those of African heritage around the world gravitated towards the
revolutionary events in Russia and <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/conclusion-roundtable-on-pan-africanism-and-communism-by-hakim-adi/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Communism</a>,
seeing in them a path to their own liberation. Perhaps not surprisingly
then, many of the main black political figures of the twentieth
century, in Africa and elsewhere, have been Communists, or at least
inspired and influenced by the international communist movement. These
include such diverse figures as André Aliker, Aimé Césaire, <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/thinking-black-against-the-carceral-state-angela-davis-and-prisoner-defense-campaigns/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Angela Davis</a>, Assata Shakur, <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/w-e-b-du-bois-the-black-flame-and-the-struggle-ahead/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">W.E.B Du Bois</a>, Elma Francois, <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/hubert-harrison-black-griot-of-the-harlem-renaissance/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hubert Harrison</a>, <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/claudia-jones-feminist-vision-of-emancipation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Claudia Jones</a>, Alex la Guma, <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/somebody-has-to-pay-audley-moore-mother-of-the-reparations-movement/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Audley Moore</a>, Josie Mpama, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/paul-robeson-black-dockworkers-and-labor-left-pan-africanism/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Paul Robeson</a>, Jacques Romain, Thomas Sankara, Ousmane Sembène and Lamine Senghor.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
African Americans and those in the African diaspora were impressed by
the prospect that the Revolution might spread globally and signal the
end of the capital-centered system and all that went with it including
racist oppression. The Jamaican poet and writer <a href="http://www.publicbooks.org/devil-wears-pravda/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Claude McKay</a>
therefore referred to the October Revolution as “the greatest event in
the history of humanity,” and Bolshevism as “the greatest and most
scientific idea in the world today.”<sup class="footnote"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fn-23703-1" id="fnref-23703-1">1</a></sup> </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Another Jamaican, Wilfred Domingo wondered, “will Bolshevism accomplish
the full freedom of Africa, colonies in which Negroes are the majority,
and promote human tolerance and happiness in the United States?”<sup class="footnote"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fn-23703-2" id="fnref-23703-2">2</a></sup>
There was thus an early admiration for the Revolution from the
perspective that it heralded the possibility of an alternative to the
capital-centered system which would be to the advantage of those who
were oppressed in the United States and the Caribbean, as well as in
Africa. These were the perspectives of those early twentieth century
organizations, which were inspired by the October Revolution such as the
African Blood Brotherhood in the United States, which subsequently
included many leading black communists such as Otto Huiswoud, Cyril
Biggs, Harry Haywood and <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/black-women-communists-and-pan-africanism-an-interview-with-minkah-makalani/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Grace Campbell</a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i> </i></b></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgogDT9bATTYDZAot7iSeuvk6GPJORvZGmV9mzje94wBydWk2vUdNVh4dzEiHrSWH4qPGrfcuDFNrGxpcWjBVXlIEuSUObgkk1v5qX7ak93pWxLAvHhOR0Qi_eZlGjTEgKW9v8/s1600/21redcentury-wilson-master768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgogDT9bATTYDZAot7iSeuvk6GPJORvZGmV9mzje94wBydWk2vUdNVh4dzEiHrSWH4qPGrfcuDFNrGxpcWjBVXlIEuSUObgkk1v5qX7ak93pWxLAvHhOR0Qi_eZlGjTEgKW9v8/s640/21redcentury-wilson-master768.jpg" width="640" /></a><span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i> </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i>Singer and actor Paul Robeson during his tour in Moscow in August 1958. </i></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
Once the new Soviet Union was more firmly established in the 1920s,
several prominent figures traveled to see at first hand the construction
of socialism and remarked on the absence of racism and national
oppression. Indeed, this was a common theme in the eye-witness accounts
of visitors such as <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/comrades-in-the-struggle-for-black-freedom-gerald-horne-and-web-du-bois/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">W.E.B. Du Bois</a>,
Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. As early as 1926, on his return from
the Soviet Union, the prominent African American scholar-activist Du
Bois <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/docs/history/dadoo-19.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">publicly acknowledged</a>,
“I stand in astonishment at the revelation of Russia that has come to
me…If I what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears is
Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.” Even the famous Pan-Africanist George
Padmore, a former communist from Trinidad who had parted company with
the communist movement, wrote a major book in 1945, <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-russia-transformed-her-colonial-empire-a-challenge-to-the-imperialist-powers/oclc/3440348&referer=brief_results" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i>How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire</i></a>,
over a decade after his expulsion. Padmore still felt compelled to
publish what was, in effect, a celebration of the revolutionary
transformation of 1917 and the elimination of national oppression which
in the author’s view was a consequence of it.<br />
<br />
<br />
The significance of the October Revolution was not just in the event
itself, but the fact that it gave rise to the construction of a new
political and economic system in the Soviet Union and to a new
international communist movement organized from 1919 in the Third
(Communist) International, or Comintern. The aim of the Comintern was to
create the conditions for revolutionary transformation outside the
Soviet Union and from its inception it took a very keen interest in
Africa and other colonies, as well as in what came to be called the ‘<a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-communist-international/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Negro Question</a>’–the
question of how Africans and those of African heritage could liberate
themselves and put an end to all forms of racist oppression. In fact,
there was no other international organization that took such a stand,
that was openly opposed to both <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/author-interview-lindsey-r-swindall-on-southern-civil-rights-and-anticolonialism/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">colonialism</a> and <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/colorism-as-racism-garvey-du-bois-and-the-other-color-line/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">racism</a> and attempted to organize all people of African descent for their own liberation.<br />
<br />
The fact that the Comintern grappled with the ‘Negro Question,’
included in its ranks Communists of all nationalities and took a strong
stand in opposition to colonialism and racism endeared it to many in
Africa and beyond, even when there was some dissatisfaction with the
communist parties in Britain, France, the United States and South
Africa. To some, these parties appeared to be dragging their feet over
the important Negro Question. There was a widespread view that the
Comintern was more revolutionary, the custodian of the legacy of the
October Revolution and therefore more concerned about such matters than
some of its constituent parties. This certainly seemed to be the case
when the Comintern demanded that the Communist Party in South Africa
should be a party of the masses of the people of that country, led by
Africans, and that it should first champion the rule of the majority in
what was considered a colony of a special type, even if many of the
leaders of that party had a contrary view.<br />
<br />
The decisions of the
Comintern were similarly firm and controversial in relation to the
orientation to be adopted for the African American struggle for
self-determination in the so-called ‘Black Belt’ in the United States.
Whatever may be said of the Comintern’s policy, it undoubtedly raised
the profile, significance and centrality of that struggle and, as recent
historical accounts have shown, laid many of the foundations for the
later struggles for civil rights and Black Power. What is more, the
Comintern’s position had an impact outside of the United States,
influencing communist parties in <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/fears-of-black-political-activism-in-cuba-and-beyond-1912-2017/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cuba</a> and other <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/afro-latin-america-and-the-black-pacific-an-interview-with-sherwin-k-bryant/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Latin American countries</a>.
Eventually, Black Communists took a lead in demanding the creation of a
specialized organization–the International Trade Union Committee of
Negro Workers (ITUCNW).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
The importance of the ITUCNW, its organ <i>Negro Worker</i>, as
well as other publications, was that the revolutionary politics and
impact of the October Revolution and of the Comintern were spread
throughout the world– particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, as well
as in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s. As part of the work of the
ITUCNW workers and others were recruited from the British colonies in
West Africa, as well as from <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-art-of-life-a-new-book-on-black-lives-in-apartheid-south-africa/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">South Africa</a>
and in time, students were sent from many parts of Africa to the Soviet
Union. Others traveled to see the consequences of the October
Revolution from the Caribbean and from the United States. In the period
between the wars, hundreds made this journey including leading
anti-colonial figures such as Isaac Wallace-Johnson from Sierra Leone,
Jomo Kenyatta, future prime minister of Kenya, and Albert Nzula, the
first black general secretary of the South African Communist Party
(SACP).</div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i> </i></b></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPWnDx1DSTSaMnp0jr6nohHqzRdNA-ZkbpiKM608MYN6KLvXOaciUvvwsKq1WsX7poYHsp5h0Uc8s8p3IYzhGvXUfANFQMvm95JW5tySHxXNE5bW2jrldyRJGyBQUdOZPfyQg/s1600/reellife.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="239" data-original-width="529" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPWnDx1DSTSaMnp0jr6nohHqzRdNA-ZkbpiKM608MYN6KLvXOaciUvvwsKq1WsX7poYHsp5h0Uc8s8p3IYzhGvXUfANFQMvm95JW5tySHxXNE5bW2jrldyRJGyBQUdOZPfyQg/s640/reellife.jpg" width="640" /></a><span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i> </i></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i>Black Communists in the Soviet Union in the 1930s</i></b></span></div>
<br />
Perhaps the most important legacy of the October Revolution was the
theory that emerged from it and the experience of building a new social
system while surrounded by a capital-centered world. What was
demonstrated was that another world was possible and that those who were
the producers of value could be their own liberators and could
construct this new world themselves. This alternative and the prospect
of liberation continued to inspire individuals and organizations in
Africa and the diaspora throughout the inter-war period and particularly
during the Second World War thereafter–when the Soviet Union led the
defeat of fascism and created the possibility of national liberation and
the restoration of sovereignty in those countries that languished under
colonial rule.<br />
<br />
<br />
For some, this theory was embodied in the personality and work of V.I
Lenin, who continued to inspire many. In 1970, during a visit to
Kazakhstan, Amilcar Cabral–the famous leader of the national liberation
struggle in what was then Portuguese Guinea–is <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/docs/history/dadoo-19.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reported to have said</a>,
“How is it that we, a people deprived of everything, living in dire
straits, manage to wage our struggle and win successes? Our answer is:
this is because Lenin existed, because he fulfilled his duty as a man, a
revolutionary and a patriot. Lenin was and continues to be, the
greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples.” Cabral was
far from alone in voicing his admiration from Lenin’s work and
contribution. Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader from Burkina
Faso, not only expressed his admiration for Lenin’s writing, which he
claimed to have read in its entirety, but was rather more specific in
his praise of the ‘great revolution of October 1917 [that] transformed
the world, brought victory to the proletariat, shook the foundations of
capitalism and made possible the Paris Commune’s dreams of justice.”<sup class="footnote"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fn-23703-3" id="fnref-23703-3">3</a></sup> In 1984, he concluded, “the revolution of 1917 teaches us many things.”<sup class="footnote"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fn-23703-4" id="fnref-23703-4">4</a></sup><br />
<br />
The world has changed considerably since 1917. The Soviet Union and
the construction of socialism in some other countries have been
terminated. Communism – the doctrine of the conditions for the
liberation of the wealth producers has not and cannot be terminated,
although clearly there is a need for a modern Communism providing
solutions for modern problems. The October Revolution demonstrated that
another world is possible, that this alternative is not a utopia, and
that we can all be the agents of change and the makers of history.<br />
<a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#_ednref4" name="_edn4"></a><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#_ednref5" name="_edn5"></a><br />
<div class="footnotes" id="footnotes-23703">
<ol>
<li id="fn-23703-1"> Hakim Adi, <i>Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939</i> (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013), 12. <span class="footnotereverse"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fnref-23703-1">↩</a></span></li>
<li id="fn-23703-2"> Ibid., 13. <span class="footnotereverse"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fnref-23703-2">↩</a></span></li>
<li id="fn-23703-3"> <i>Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987</i> (London: Pathfinder, 2015), 165. <span class="footnotereverse"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fnref-23703-3">↩</a></span></li>
<li id="fn-23703-4"> Ibid., 135. <span class="footnotereverse"><a href="http://www.aaihs.org/the-russian-revolution-africa-and-the-diaspora/#fnref-23703-4">↩</a></span></li>
</ol>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-77270578445237755282017-10-16T09:26:00.003-04:002017-10-16T09:26:26.604-04:00Racism, Climate Change, Pollution: Disaster Capitalism@Work<br />
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<span style="color: #274e13;">The Brutal Racial Politics of Climate Change and Pollution</span></h1>
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Trump administration policies are systematically making natural disasters more harmful for the poor and people of color.</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="sep">By </span><b><span class="author vcard"><a href="http://fpif.org/authors/basav-sen/" rel="author" title="Basav Sen">Basav Sen</a></span><time class="updated" datetime="2017-09-21" pubdate=""></time></b></div>
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<time class="updated" datetime="2017-09-21" pubdate="">September 21, 2017</time></div>
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<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/21/brutal-racial-politics-climate-change-and-pollution" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Visit Common Dreams">Common Dreams</a><br />
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As I watched coverage of Harvey’s flood damage in Houston, Irma’s
wreckage in the Caribbean, the devastating record monsoons in South
Asia, and the fresh nightmares of Hurricane Maria, I thought back to
another place: Charlottesville, where racists openly rallied to their
cause—and were later defended by the president.<br />
<br />
To explain why, let me point back to one of the least known—yet most
outrageous—of the Trump administration’s early policy proposals: the <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09032017/epa-environmental-justice-mustafa-ali-flint-water-crisis-dakota-access-pipeline-trump-scott-pruitt" target="_blank" title="proposed elimination">proposed elimination</a> of the Environmental Justice program at the EPA. While the division <a href="https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice" target="_blank" title="still exists">still exists</a> for now, it has no more grants available for the current fiscal year, and its future is in limbo.<br />
<br />
Environmental justice is the principle that people of color and poor
people have historically faced greater harm from environmental damage,
so special efforts should be made to prioritize their access to clean
air and water. The environmental justice program gave small grants to
communities struggling with these disparate pollution impacts. Its
budget was <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09032017/epa-environmental-justice-mustafa-ali-flint-water-crisis-dakota-access-pipeline-trump-scott-pruitt" target="_blank" title="small">small</a>—just $6.7 million out of the prior year’s EPA budget of $8 billion, or less than one-tenth of 1 percent.<br />
<br />
Clearly, the proposed cut wasn’t about saving money. Instead, it
points to a more sinister agenda—especially when paired with other
planks of the administration’s environmental platform.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Disproportionate Harm</b></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHZWt42l8Uiqhg70yoBWe_4d77I21-qzoX4jXjJVxvNzQ5LNKg78myhwqJyqmNvCAzDerJrpyr0g2C_3eph97Do86gKXEhgHbX3eA_E8qJE2aEUM1I_bOvVFJrcGUrcu4P3sg/s1600/afp-sb2ht.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="750" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHZWt42l8Uiqhg70yoBWe_4d77I21-qzoX4jXjJVxvNzQ5LNKg78myhwqJyqmNvCAzDerJrpyr0g2C_3eph97Do86gKXEhgHbX3eA_E8qJE2aEUM1I_bOvVFJrcGUrcu4P3sg/s640/afp-sb2ht.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b></span></span>Take Trump’s proposal to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/climate/trump-climate-change.html" target="_blank" title="deregulate">deregulate</a> power plant emissions.<br />
<br />
Air pollution is bad for everyone with lungs, but it disproportionately harms people of color and poor people, who are much <a href="http://www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CoalBlooded.pdf" target="_blank" title="likelier">likelier</a> to live near coal-burning power plants. People living within three miles of coal-fired power plants have a per capita income <a href="http://www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CoalBlooded.pdf" target="_blank" title="15 percent lower">15 percent lower</a> than the national average, and African Americans die of asthma at a <a href="http://www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CoalBlooded.pdf" target="_blank" title="172 percent higher">172 percent higher</a> rate than white people. Deregulating toxic polluters is only going to worsen such egregious disparities.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile in Alaska, Native villages are literally <a href="https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/human-shishmaref.shtml" target="_blank" title="sinking into the sea">sinking into the sea</a> and facing the loss of their traditional lifestyle as polar ice melts. Yet the federal government proposes <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19052017/leaked-donald-trump-budget-EPA-climate-clean-energy-environment" target="_blank" title="eliminating">eliminating</a> the
already meager assistance they receive, and won’t even name the problem
they’re confronting. Absurdly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) now refers to Arctic climate change impacts as “<a href="https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/human-shishmaref.shtml" target="_blank" title="Arctic Change">Arctic Change</a>.”<br />
Similar inequalities show up in the places hardest hit during this catastrophic hurricane season.<br />
<br />
Refineries and other petrochemical facilities in Houston have been shut down in the wake of Tropical Storm Harvey. However, <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082017/hurricane-harvey-rain-damage-climate-change-oil-industry-congress-budget-flood-insurance-science" target="_blank" title="storm damage">storm damage</a> at the
Exxon refinery in Baytown has led to leaks of toxic chemicals, while
the Chevron Phillips refinery in Pasadena reported to regulators that it
may release <a href="http://www.houstonpress.com/news/houston-ship-channel-communities-deal-with-weird-smell-during-harvey-9741373" target="_blank" title="known carcinogens like benzene">known carcinogens like benzene</a>.<br />
<br />
Who <a href="https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice" target="_blank" title="lives near these facilities">lives near these facilities</a>?
Of the two Census blocks immediately adjoining Exxon’s Baytown
refinery, one is 87 percent non-white and 76 percent low-income, the
other 59 percent non-white and 59 percent low-income.<br />
<br />
Outside the Chevron Phillips facility, the same pattern plays out:
Residents there are 83 percent non-white and 74 percent low-income.<br />
<br />
Living near these facilities—and in the storm zone, generally—is
dangerous. But for some people, even trying to get away was dangerous.
In a horrifying move, the Border Patrol continued to operate <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/08/25/border-patrol-checkpoints-in-texas-will-stay-open-as-hurricane-evacuation-is-underway/" target="_blank" title="checkpoints">checkpoints</a> on
highways being used by people evacuating from the hurricane-affected
zone, so undocumented immigrants had to choose between risking their
lives or getting deported.<br />
<br />
While Texas was still reeling, the Caribbean, and then Florida, was struck by Hurricane <a href="http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/news/AL112017_key_messages.png?030" target="_blank" title="Irma">Irma</a>. The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, a sovereign state that’s over 90 percent black, says that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/us/hurricane-irma-caribbean.html" target="_blank" title="95 percent">95 percent</a> of the structures on the island of Barbuda have been destroyed.<br />
<br />
Americans sometimes forget that the Caribbean includes the U.S.
territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Though
“colonies” would be a more truthful word, since these largely nonwhite
islands have <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/hurricane-ravaged-puerto-rico-and-the-virgin-islands-are-part-of-the-us-too/" target="_blank" title="no voting representation">no voting representation</a> in Congress.)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41218002" target="_blank" title="More than half">More than half</a> the residents of Puerto Rico lost power, and a top utility official has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/hurricane-irma-most-powerful-atlantic-caribbean-islands" target="_blank" title="warned">warned</a> that
many of them will remain without power for weeks to months. The delay
is partly attributable to the poor state of the island’s infrastructure,
which hasn’t been maintained over a <a href="http://cepr.net/publications/reports/life-after-debt-in-puerto-rico-how-many-more-lost-decades" target="_blank" title="decade-long recession">decade-long recession</a>—one worsened by Washington-imposed austerity policies that prioritize payments to lenders over the well being of Puerto Ricans.<br />
<br />
People in the U.S. Virgin Islands, meanwhile—over <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk" target="_blank" title="three-quarters of whom are black">three-quarters of whom are black</a>—are <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/weather/hurricane/article172841811.html" target="_blank" title="struggling">struggling</a> with major storm damage and power outages, with minimal federal assistance and <a href="http://www.theroot.com/why-u-s-virgin-islanders-say-they-feel-like-america-s-1805878543" target="_blank" title="little coverage">little coverage</a> from
the U.S. media. While federal authorities aren’t providing meaningful
assistance to USVI residents, they’ve nonetheless mustered the capacity
to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/12/us-british-virgin-islands-hurricane-irma-refused-entry" target="_blank" title="block">block</a> desperate evacuees from other harder-hit islands in the region from reaching the islands.<br />
<br />
And before Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders had a chance to recover, they’ve been hit by <a href="https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-us-virgin-islands-caribbean-impacts" target="_blank" title="Maria">Maria</a>,
a second major hurricane, that’s knocked out power for the entire
island of Puerto Rico and caused severe structural damage to buildings.
The mayor of San Juan expects it will take 4 to 6 months to restore
electricity.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: magenta;"><img alt="cleardot.gif" class="caption-processed" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEju4ePGX64s969Gi8P0waNwcCRRNlixR__5VdMDm3HrB6m73MWoEIFocDygcuDouzmkjG0wmi5png5TergH7qEnU5MeGdCCe8G8tdHlI0o4j3nBQJjHrwo8wzfOWnplB1rSbFbtrZiPlZEXmOmfeC6auj73iQ1ptw=s0-d-e1-ft" /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: magenta;"><b>An Unmistakable Pattern</b></span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7gFPH1VFCo7vN9kax8VOLhy6WB_yuHI_nUucvlaJtQPEHfQHsc-1SYLeRXshjFxw3p9xHQbrBszdkE-xgUoA_gJQRJpKb-DcZXNeYAc3bmEQICE68nqk5bKxN2te2ffeyl3w/s1600/harvey%2527s+victims+texas2017.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="955" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7gFPH1VFCo7vN9kax8VOLhy6WB_yuHI_nUucvlaJtQPEHfQHsc-1SYLeRXshjFxw3p9xHQbrBszdkE-xgUoA_gJQRJpKb-DcZXNeYAc3bmEQICE68nqk5bKxN2te2ffeyl3w/s640/harvey%2527s+victims+texas2017.png" width="640" /></a><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: magenta;"></span></span><span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i>Neighborhoods in Port Arthur, Texas, flooded quickly as the remnants of
Hurricane Harvey dumped 26 inches of rain on the city in late August.</i></b></span><br />
<br />
There’s a pattern here.<br />
<br />
The proposed elimination of environmental justice funding, assistance for Native Alaskans, and the <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16032017/donald-trump-budget-proposal-climate-change-global-warming-epa" target="_blank" title="U.S. contribution">U.S. contribution</a> to
the Green Climate Fund (which assists poor countries with adapting to
the effects of climate change and transitioning to clean energy) all
appear calculated to pander to the most racist, nationalist elements of
Trump’s base, who don’t want any assistance going to those they consider
“undeserving.”<br />
<br />
Yet who could be more deserving?<br />
<br />
Black Americans are living with (and dying from) asthma caused by
particulate pollution from profit-generating power plants. Native
Alaskans are losing their homes and traditional lifestyles due to
melting ice caused by climate change. Undocumented people had to risk
deportation while fleeing a life-threatening disaster.<br />
<br />
Globally, Bangladeshis, Indians, and Nepalis are suffering from <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/floods-kill-1200-india-nepal-bangladesh-170826230610924.html" target="_blank" title="catastrophic floods">catastrophic floods</a> that are exacerbated by other people’s greenhouse gas emissions—not least our own, since the U.S. is <a href="https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain-world%E2%80%99s-top-10-emitters" target="_blank" title="the largest historical">the largest historical</a> emitter
of the carbon now warming the planet. And people in Antigua, Barbuda,
the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico just got battered by a powerful
hurricane <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/hurricane-irma-most-powerful-atlantic-caribbean-islands" target="_blank" title="intensified">intensified</a> by a warming ocean.<br />
<br />
All of these lives are systematically devalued by the powers that be
precisely because of entrenched white supremacy—of the implicit kind
(evidenced by the decades of foot-dragging by rich countries on the
issue of climate change), as well as the brazen kind on display in
Charlottesville.<br />
<br />
We cannot truly confront the root causes and horrific impacts of climate change without challenging and undoing white supremacy.<br />
<br />
-------------------- <span style="color: #783f04;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04;">
</span><div class="author-bio">
<span style="color: #783f04;">Basav Sen directs the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. He’s the author of the recent report “<a href="https://www.ips-dc.org/report-how-states-can-boost-renewables-with-benefits-for-all/" target="_blank" title="How States Can Boost Renewables, With Benefits for All">How States Can Boost Renewables, With Benefits for All</a>.”</span></div>
</section>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-2385521613150212172017-10-01T07:38:00.000-04:002017-10-01T07:39:55.164-04:00<h1>
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Writing While Socialist</span></span></h1>
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<b><a href="http://bostonreview.net/author/vijay-prashad">Vijay Prashad</a>, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/author/mark-nowak">Mark Nowak</a></b><br />
<b>http://bostonreview.net </b></div>
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<i><b>Editor's Note:</b> Over the past year, the
scholar and activist Vijay Prashad taught a series of nonfiction writing
workshops to students, activists, workers, and journalists across
India. The workshops sought to develop an ethics and practice of
socialist writing to foreground what Prashad calls “the small voices of
history.” Here he talks to the poet Mark Nowak, founder of the <a href="http://www.workerwriters.org/">Worker Writers School</a> in
New York City, about the political valence of socialist writing in a
time of rampant populism, racism, and xenophobia. This is the
second in a series of dialogues between Prashad and Nowak. Their first
conversation, <a href="http://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/socialist-writing-publishing-books-reading/">The Essentials in Socialist Writing</a>, was published in </i>Jacobin<i>.</i><br />
<hr />
<br />
<b>Mark Nowak:</b> You have facilitated a new series of
workshops around India since we last spoke. How has this project evolved
over time? What new ideas, techniques, or insights did you bring to the
second round?<br />
<br />
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<b>Vijay Prashad: </b>With each workshop the broad outlines
of socialist writing become clear to me. I am now able to better
distinguish between capitalist writing—which typically emerges from the
liberal, mainstream media and is intended to produce commodities—and
socialist writing—which is intended to produce a confident community of
struggle. The time in our workshop is spent digging deep to understand <i>how</i> to create these communities.<br />
<br />
As socialist writers, we take our lead from the people struggling to improve their worlds.<br />
<br />
This leads us to the question of style. It is a myth that style is a
bourgeois concern. There is an assumption that socialists are interested
in content, not style—in getting the point across in as transparent a
manner as possible and not worrying about <i>how</i> a story is framed
or what kind of mood it evokes. But the socialist writer is not merely a
conduit from the picket line to the reader. The writer must shape the
story. It is to encourage discussions of socialist style that I do these
workshops in the first place.<br />
<br />
Let us consider the Indian state of West Bengal, where the right is
currently engaged in a concerted attack on the left. Every day there are
new incidents of violence visited upon the working class and peasantry,
particularly those amongst them who are communists. Recently the police
attacked a demonstration by tea plantation workers, and some of the
workers were injured. A writer reporting on the protest has a choice:
should one write in the mode of grief, representing the workers as
victims, or should one write in the mode of anticipation, conveying the
intensity of struggle?<br />
<div align="center" class="caption">
<img alt="" src="https://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/Tea%20planation%20workers.jpg" /><br />
<i><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>Tea plantation workers on strike in northern West Bengal, 2017.</b></span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Image courtesy the Communist Part of India (Marxist).</span></i></div>
The women protesting in the photograph above should not be taken for
victims of a ruthless state. They are not mere spectators to history,
they are the ones pushing history forward. The mainstream media does not
take them seriously. It avoids telling their stories. It does not
question the conditions of their lives and work. It does not ask how
they have built up the courage to take to the streets against the more
organized and powerful state. As socialist writers, we take our lead
from the people struggling to improve their worlds. If we can narrate
their struggles with honesty, then we can perhaps bolster their
confidence. It is this confidence, and not commodities, that we seek to
produce.<br />
It is a myth that style is a bourgeois concern.<br />
<br />
<b>MN: </b>I like what you say about the tea plantation
workers in West Bengal. This is a discussion we have often had at the
Worker Writers School in New York, led by long-time collaborators from <a href="http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/index.php/en/">Domestic Workers United</a>.
The students, who work as nannies, street venders, cab drivers, and
retail workers, have seen journalists come in, listen to their stories,
learn about their struggle for a domestic workers’ bill of rights, and
then disappear. They ask, “Where did my story go?” How do you think
workers can maintain some control over their own stories?<br />
<br />
<b>VP: </b>Stories travel. That is always a risk. I like
Eduardo Galeano’s great line that people are not made of atoms, they are
made of stories.<br />
<br />
Imagine a journalist at a protest, watching people march and chant
but unable to comprehend them as anything but quaint or anachronistic.
This is a journalist who sees the <i>event</i>—the meeting or the protest—but cannot see the <i>process</i>,
cannot see the history of struggle. What use is this journalist’s story
to the workers? Will there be anything but condescension in the prose?
The workers won’t recognize themselves in the story. There are the
liberal writers who approach workers with sympathy. They see them as
victims, as people to be pitied for the terrible conditions of their
life and work. Such writers want their readers to recognize the
existence of injustice, but again only as an event—something to look at
and bemoan. The intention behind such writing is to provoke the <i>readers</i>
to act on behalf of the workers. In this setup, the workers are to be
pitied, they are not seen as drivers of human history. Others have to
act for them. No wonder there is little in their texts that workers can
recognize. These victims are alien to them.<br />
<br />
One of the ways in which workers are written out of the news and out
of history books is that their lives are not seen as producing history.
The mundane nature of working-class and peasant life is seen as
reproductive, not generative—merely reproducing the world but not making
new worlds. But history is produced by the sentiments of the workers
and by their struggles. Attention to their everyday lives allows us to
better understand extraordinary developments, which build off millions
of small gestures made by ordinary people.<br />
Socialist writing is intended to produce a confident community of struggle.<br />
<br />
I recommend that people visit the <i><a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/">People’s Archive of Rural India</a></i>,
a website that documents the lives of rural Indians, driven by the
ferociously energetic and brilliant journalist P. Sainath. Nilanjana
Nandy’s <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/the-temporary-chairwomen-of-banswara/">story</a> about women who fought to sit on chairs in Rajasthan and Parth M.N.’s <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/wells-of-despair/">story</a>
about borewells in Maharashtra are good examples of socialist writing.
Sitting on a chair is not only about sitting on a chair. It is about the
increased confidence of women in rural India. Where this confidence
goes is the next chapter in the story.<br />
<div class="rtecenter caption">
<img alt="" height="443" src="https://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/Babli%20Devi%2C%20Kharveda%20Village%20%28left%29%20and%20Sangeeta%20Bunnkar%2C%20Kharveda%20village%20%28right%29.png" width="640" /><br />
<i><span style="color: #274e13;"><b>Left: Babli Devi, Kharveda village; Right: Sangeeta Bunkar, Kharveda
village.</b></span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Image courtesy the People's Archive of Rural India.</span></i></div>
These small voices of history are the pebbles thrown into a pond that
set in motion the cascading waves of history. Such stories are not
taken seriously by mainstream writers, but a socialist writer must make
them central. They are, after all, signs of confidence that lead from
everyday life to extraordinary events. They are what workers, as
readers, can recognize as real stories of their lives and struggles.<br />
<br />
<b>MN:</b> So the liberal writer hopes to engage the reader
to act on behalf of the struggling, downtrodden subject while the
socialist writer hopes to document their subjects engaged in acts,
minute and major, of resistance? How would you relate this in one of
your workshops? Could you walk readers through one of your recent
workshops to help us understand how you practice this in your pedagogy?<br />
<br />
<b>VP:</b> There is a major political distinction between
the liberal writer and the socialist writer. The socialist writer, to my
mind, must believe that change is possible. This does not mean that
such change is inevitable, merely that it is possible. Cynicism and
pessimism are not the mood of the socialist. This means that when
injustice is uncovered, the writer assumes that justice is possible.
Perhaps the antidote to cynicism is to retain faith in the capacity of
human beings to overcome the present. For this it is important to treat
the people that one interviews not merely as repositories of
information, but also as reservoirs of hope and anticipation.<br />
<br />
Workers are not mere spectators to history, they are the ones pushing it forward.<br />
What kind of hopefulness do people exude not only in their words, but also in their practice? PARI published a <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/karimuls-medical-motorcycle-diaries/">story</a>
about a man, Karimul Haque, who works in the hills of West Bengal. His
mother died because there was no ambulance available to her when she
needed one. Subsequently this man has turned his motorcycle into a kind
of ambulance.<br />
<br />
He now ferries people across the hills to local hospitals.
In another <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/dhol-on-wheels/">story</a>,
Srilal Sahani, who lives just down these same hills and is in terrible
debt, spends his mornings selling fish in the local market. In the
afternoons, he rides his bicycle up and down the main street, beating on
a small drum and singing songs. Both men are gesturing to life beyond
the misery of the present. They have taken history into their own hands
by attempting to improve the lives of the people around them. These may
seem like small gestures, but they are significant to those whose lives
have been impacted. Karimul Haque is saying to his neighbors that they
need not to wait for an NGO to come to their aid, that they can make
their own history.<br />
<br />
Srilal Sahani won't allow debt to define him. In both
these stories hope is not a theoretical concept, it is real and
palpable. A writer who abandons hope is abandoning the stories of these
people. These may be stories of survival and not of political
transformation. But stories of survival are the first drafts of
revolutionary action. In our time, we must write stories that are both
about incubated revolutionary sentiment—such as those of Karimul Haque
and Srilal Sahani—and stories of protest.<br />
<br />
In a recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/review/viet-thanh-nguyen-writers-workshops.html">piece</a>,
Viet Thanh Nguyen points out that writing workshops are often hostile
to politics. Aside from the art of writing, he notes, these workshops
“did not have anything to say about the matters that concerned me:
politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology.” This was not a problem
in our workshops across India, where we took art and politics as
equally important and indeed intertwined.<br />
<br />
One example is our emphasis on “smashing language.” We drew up lists
of hollow or dead words: development, freedom, growth, and
sustainability. Having made this list, we then “smashed” the words,
broke them up in order to awaken the meaning within them. The example I
give my students is from the first few months after the Russian
Revolution. The Bolshevik leader Krupskaya recounts the “altered
language” she heard from women workers and peasants in a meeting. The
speakers, she recounted, “spoke boldly and frankly about
everything.” Their language had changed. Communist futurist writers,
such as Mayakovsky, drew from what they saw in these meetings. They had
to “smash” their language to bring it back to life. The assumption was
that the old Russian language was saturated with feudal implications. It
could not be inherited without first being “smashed.” So in the
workshop we do what Mayakovsky did to language, we plunder and pulverize
it, playing games with the words.<br />
<br />
You can well imagine what people do with words like development and
freedom—how they play around with them until the words become
meaningless and perhaps even imbued with new meaning. The emergence of
new words shows how hope is embedded in our own fierce desire for a
better world. It reaffirms the belief that we are not trapped as long as
we are able to conjure, if only in language, an alternative world. In <i>Homage to Catalonia</i>,
George Orwell reflects on the changes he witnesses in Barcelona. He
writes: “There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I
did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of
affairs worth fighting for.” It is this attitude that our workshops
hope to cultivate.<br />
<br />
Change is possible. We are not trapped as long as we can conjure, if only in language, an alternative world.<br />
<br />
<b>MN:</b> You mention Eduardo Galeano above. He is perhaps
my favorite writer. In the past you have also talked about James
Baldwin. Galeano and Baldwin are two writers who try to construct a
bridge between socialist writing and literature, who borrow from both
traditions to sketch extraordinary exposés of struggle and resistance.
Are there other writers that clarify your conception of socialist
writing?<br />
<br />
<b>VP:</b> Baldwin is so important. Make language “clean as
a bone,” he advised. I take that advice fully. There are many writers I
admire for what they do with the stories around us. I have already
mentioned the journalist P. Sainath, with whom I co-taught a workshop.
He is really one of the finest socialist writers today. I would also
like to encourage people to read the work of Brinda Karat, one of the
leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). She spends a great
deal of time traveling around India, interacting with workers and
peasants who suffer and struggle. What I find most interesting in her
writing is that she conveys the hardships that people face as well as
the determination to overcome their conditions in equal part. In a
recent <a href="http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/on-a-train-they-were-stabbed-skull-cap-thrown-beard-pulled-1716569">column</a>,
she documented the assault and murder of a young Muslim boy, Junaid
Khan, on a train in northern India. The story begins with a portrait of
Junaid’s mother, Sayara, mourning her son, then documents the murder and
the underlying Hindutva politics that caused it, and concludes with a
call to arms against the suffocation of public space. Karat's writing
evokes pathos and rage, but also complicity. It reminds us that nobody
helped Junaid, and that our collective silence is what killed the boy.<br />
<br />
Ryszard Kapuściński's ability to write about politics is almost
magical. There are stories that he fabricated some of his experiences in
Africa, and that is unforgivable. But there is an object lesson in the
way he was able to bring his readers from Poland into worlds that they
knew little about, to teach them about power and culture and to
encourage them to puncture their parochial visions and take in the
world. We forget that he was writing in Polish and was telling the
stories of Iran and Ethiopia to people in Warsaw and Szczecin.<br />
<br />
There are
many heirs to Kapuściński: such as the Colombian writer Santiago Gamboa
and the Lebanese writer Sahar Mandour. They are novelists and
journalists of the left, writing in Spanish and Arabic respectively, and
telling stories of intimate worlds that have the capacity to explode
into something dynamic and deliberate. You cannot have socialist writing
today that does not engage with private, domestic worlds alongside the
world of the streets. The latter is not enough.<br />
<br />
<b>MN</b>: Speaking of hope, in recent years we have seen
the rise of so many new social movements and so many energized, young
activists participating in Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the
Bernie Sanders campaign, #NoDAPL, protests against the “Muslim Ban,” and
other anti-Trump protests. What writing advice would you give to people
becoming politically active, some of the first time, in this moment?
There seems to be an imbalance between the speed needed by today's
technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and live-streaming, and the
necessity of pausing and thinking about how to tell the story. How do
we, as emerging writers in social movements, achieve any balance between
the two completely different paces of our writing practice?<br />
Stories of survival are the first drafts of revolutionary action.<br />
<br />
<b>VP</b>: The difference between Twitter and long-form
writing is in the length of the text, not in the thinking that goes to
produce it. One could produce a thoughtless long-form essay as easily as
a thoughtless tweet. To me the length or the speed of production is not
the issue.<br />
<br />
What is at stake is the understanding behind what one is
writing. If one does not have a good way to explain these protests, one
will struggle to report them either in a tweet or in a book. A socialist
writer who wants to track these movements needs to take a step back and
look at the historical dynamic of these struggles, where they come from
and where they could potentially go, what stands in opposition to
them, the closeness or distance of these movements from the people, and
the question of whether the demands being articulated can speak to the
lived anxieties of people. These elements—if answered with care and
close study—will help the writer understand how to write about
something, whether in 140 characters or in 500 pages.<br />
<br />
Both those on the inside and those on the outside of movements would
be well-served not only by accounts of what is happening, but also by
accounts that provide the broader context. Our movements are born out of
older movements, older uprisings that produce our confidence, and our
movements in turn birth new and, we hope, broader revolts against the
present order. That is the kind of historical sweep that socialist
writers need to create. Their job is not simply to define the terms of
an event, thereby rendering it mythical and impossible to replicate. The
reader must not think, “I wish I was there.” The reader should
think, “I was not there, but I’ll be there tomorrow.” The story has not
ended, it is ongoing. Engels wrote that history moves “often in leaps
and bounds and in a zigzag line.” It does not necessarily move in a
progressive direction, and can just as often fall backwards. A story
needs to represent that: the journey from and the journey towards.<br />
<br />
Arthur Rimbaud called a good poet a “thief of fire.” That is a lovely
phrase. There is despair for humanity right now, but there is also
optimism. That’s what our socialist writers must strive for—to be
thieves of fire.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-87871234239070458882017-09-22T14:12:00.003-04:002017-09-22T14:12:57.919-04:00Police TerrorUSA, Inc. Is More Than Police Murders<header><h1 class="hide-on-small-only flow-text">
<span style="color: red;">
Police Murders Are the Tip of the Iceberg</span></h1>
<figure class="article-image">
<img height="293" src="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1506008046GordonSt_Louis_riot_police_Stockley_protest666.jpg" width="640" /><figcaption class="article-image-caption">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b>St. Louis police confront protesters in the wake of Jason Stockley's acquittal, September 15</b></i></span> </figcaption>
</figure>
</header><b><a class="author-link" href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/author/colingordon">Colin Gordon</a> </b>▪ September 21, 2017<br />
dissentmagazine.org<br />
<br />
The protests that have roiled St. Louis since the acquittal
last week of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley in the 2011
murder of Anthony Lamar Smith are—in one respect—animated by the
palpable injustice of the case. The trial judge gave little weight to
Stockley’s declaration, during his pursuit of Smith, that he was “<a href="https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2017/08/02/st-louis-cop-jason-stockley-fired-kill-shot-from-six-inches-away-prosecutors-say" rel="noopener" target="_blank">going to kill this motherfucker</a>.” He accepted without hesitation or reservation Stockley’s <a href="https://www.slu.edu/law/law-journal/online/2017-18/the-stockley-verdict.php" rel="noopener" target="_blank">claim to be acting in self-defense</a>. He whistled past <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/15/this_judge_s_excuses_for_acquitting_jason_stockley_of_murder_are_pathetic.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">strong circumstantial evidence </a>that
Stockley planted a weapon in Smith’s car after the shooting. He made
little of chilling detail that Stockley, in addition to his service
weapon, was brandishing a personal AK-47 in defiance of departmental
regulations. And he punctuated his ruling with the <a href="http://www.stlamerican.com/news/editorials/judge-wilson-is-guilty-as-hell-of-explicit-bias/article_342b276e-9a55-11e7-8b60-9f4a68fe8bcb.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">gratuitous aside</a>, on the question of whether Smith was armed, “that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.”<br />
<br />
More
broadly, the protests mark a persistent outrage at police conduct (and
misconduct) in which the deaths of Smith in 2011, and of Michael Brown
in 2014, are but the most visible episodes. And they mark a persistent
burden of unequal citizenship in Greater St. Louis, in which African
Americans are more likely to be the targets of local government than its
beneficiaries. Policing, in this sense, is not just a public service
aimed at securing safety and order. It is, <a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-060415-093825" rel="noopener" target="_blank">as Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver underscore</a>,
a highly discretionary exercise of “coercion, containment, repression,
surveillance, regulation, predation, discipline, and violence” that
represents for many—and certainly for the most marginal—the single most
important point of contact between citizen and state.<br />
<br />
“The meting out of punishment in the American criminal justice system,” add <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0002716213502929" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Tracey Meares and Ben Justice</a>,
“. . . . provide Americans with a powerful and coherent set of messages
and experiences that define who is a citizen, and who is a problem.”<br />
<br />
These
patterns have a long history, and are hardly unique to St. Louis. But
they are magnified in this politically fragmented and deeply segregated
metropolitan area. As of 2017, St. Louis County alone counts 89
municipalities, 81 municipal courts, and 61 police departments. Local
testimony—from the <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027012205;view=1up;seq=9" rel="noopener" target="_blank">1970 hearings of the United States Commission on Civil Rights</a> through the <a href="http://03a5010.netsolhost.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ArchCity-Defenders-Municipal-Courts-Whitepaper.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">work of Arch City Defenders</a>
and others in the wake of Michael Brown’s death—document exposure to
serial traffic stops and low level harassment from one municipal
fragment to the next, and a tangle of local warrant and fines that often
trapped those charged with even minor offenses on a “municipal shuffle”
from one court docket to the next. And this “byzantine maze of
overlapping jurisdictions,” <a href="http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/in-st-louis-the-politics-of-police-reform-are-tougher/article_33eea176-97ef-11e7-91ea-db9d61847031.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">as reporters Ryan J. Reilly and Rebecca Rivas put it</a>,
has made it harder to accomplish any meaningful change in policing or
the courts; “whatever you do in St. Louis City,” one reformer observes,
“you have to replicate 90 times throughout the county.”<br />
<br />
Traffic
stops are one potent illustration of the disproportionate contact
between black citizens of Greater St. Louis and their local police.
Since 2000, the State of Missouri has required local police departments
to <a href="https://ago.mo.gov/home/vehicle-stops-report" rel="noopener" target="_blank">report traffic stops</a>
(and their outcome) by race. The figure below plots this disparity
index for the nine-county St. Louis region, for blacks and whites, from
2000 to 2016. At a disparity index of “1,” the share of traffic stops
matches that racial group’s share of the population. Each dot on the
graph is a police jurisdiction; the bars show the range from the 25<sup>th</sup> to the 75<sup>th</sup>
percentile, with the midpoint line designating the median value for
that year across all jurisdictions. The “whiskers” extend to a point 1.5
times the interquartile range (the difference between the 25<sup>th</sup> and 75<sup>th</sup> percentiles); all values greater than that are excluded as outliers.<br />
<span style="padding: 2px;"></span><br />
<b>Traffic Stops by Race, St. Louis Region, 2000-2016</b><br />
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/Colin-Gordon-St_Louis_traffic_stops-chart-1000x673.png" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img alt="Traffic Stops by Race, St. Louis Region, 2000-2016 [graphic]" height="430" src="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/Colin-Gordon-St_Louis_traffic_stops-chart-1000x673.png" width="640" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><i>Source: Missouri Attorney General, </i><a href="https://ago.mo.gov/home/vehicle-stops-report" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><i>Vehicle Stops Report, 2000-2016</i></a>.</span><br />
<span style="padding: 2px;"></span><br />
For whites, the 100-odd police
jurisdictions in the St. Louis region are clustered at or below 1 in
every year surveyed. For blacks, the median disparity index is closer to
2, and the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile is over 3 for all but four of the
years surveyed. A quarter of these police jurisdictions, in other
words, stopped black motorists at a rate more than three times their
share of the population.<br />
<br />
These disparities were even starker when a
traffic stop led to a search or an arrest. In 2013 (the year before
Michael Brown was shot), <a href="https://iowa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/cgordon_uiowa_edu/Documents/current%2520projects/blog%2520posts%2520and%2520drafts/Dissent/at%2520https:/www.ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/public-safety/2013agencyreports.pdf?sfvrsn=2" rel="noopener" target="_blank">the police departments of Ferguson, Olivette, Overland, and Kirkwood</a>
searched the vehicles of black motorists at twice the rate of those of
whites, and arrested black motorists at almost three times the rate. In
Bel-Ridge (just south of Ferguson) that year, more than three-quarters
of all traffic stops involved black motorists; of the 775 black
motorists stopped, eleven were subject to searches and thirty-two were
arrested. Traffic stops of motorists who were <i>not</i> black did not yield a single search or arrest.<br />
<br />
This data further corroborates the conclusions of the Obama Justice Department’s <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ferguson-justice-department-consent-degree-standoff">investigation of the Ferguson Police Department</a>,
published in 2015. In its report, the Department noted “the persistent
exercise of discretion to the detriment of African Americans; the
apparent consideration of race in assessing threat; and the historical
opposition to having African Americans live in Ferguson, which lingers
among some today” in describing local practices more interested in
enforcing segregation than in ensuring public safety. The police “see
some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly
African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected
than as potential offenders,” the report concluded caustically.<br />
<br />
Such
sharply uneven experiences diminish and devalue civic life in other
ways. A criminal record can short-circuit other avenues of meaningful
citizenship—including <a href="http://prospect.org/article/mass-incarceration-and-achievement-gap" rel="noopener" target="_blank">education</a> and <a href="https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc232i.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">employment opportunities</a>, access to <a href="http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/docs/publications/100557417156c76d544e9c0.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">housing,</a> and the <a href="http://users.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/Manza_Uggen_POP_04.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">right to vote</a>.
Both the rate and the manner of interactions with the police, of which
traffic stops offer but one jarring example, undermine the faith of
African-American citizens in the ability of their government to make
fair and objective decisions.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizecPJZBkSJ76QneCf3W35sssPsSXCI3_g1cDvMVmYkCriAb6Txt7arqqzkJEzftE5rpU2C4b0Og3xV1B7GuW3j1hZaHai5CoMhzS3DZ0b0FMi4dpu7qPXnNjzq8lMvEbgh9g/s1600/march-in-st-louis-to-stop-police-brutality.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="880" height="544" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizecPJZBkSJ76QneCf3W35sssPsSXCI3_g1cDvMVmYkCriAb6Txt7arqqzkJEzftE5rpU2C4b0Og3xV1B7GuW3j1hZaHai5CoMhzS3DZ0b0FMi4dpu7qPXnNjzq8lMvEbgh9g/s640/march-in-st-louis-to-stop-police-brutality.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Such policing practices “<a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo18008991.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">arrest citizenship</a>”
not just because they are unevenly targeted, but because the conduct of
the police, and the charges themselves, violate basic norms of social
and legal equity. “African Americans’ views of [Ferguson Police
Department],” as the Department of Justice observed, “are shaped not
just by what FPD officers do, but by how they do it.”<br />
The problem
here is twofold: first, local policing in Greater St. Louis has always
leaned heavily on enforcement of the municipal code—a constitutional fog
of petty offenses and citations.<br />
<br />
Michael Brown was stopped under the
auspices of <a href="https://library.municode.com/mo/ferguson/codes/code_of_ordinances/239430?nodeId=PTIICOOR_CH44TRMOVE_ARTVIIPE_S44-344MAWAALRO" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Ferguson Municipal Code Sec. 44-344</a> “Manner of walking along roadway,” an exhortation to use the sidewalk that was, before its repeal in 2016, employed <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/04/95-percent-of-people-arrested-for-jaywalking-in-ferguson-were-black/?utm_term=.589600b5bbed" rel="noopener" target="_blank">almost exclusively</a>
as a pretext for stopping black pedestrians. More broadly, much of the
harassment that passes for policing rest on “contempt of cop” charges
such as Failure to Comply, Disorderly Conduct, Interference with
Officer, or Resisting Arrest—all of which are wielded overwhelmingly
against black pedestrians and motorists. The result, as the Department
of Justice tallied, are systematic violations of the First Amendment,
and of the “probable cause” and “excessive force” provisions of the
Fourth Amendment.<br />
<br />
Second, this pattern of unequal protection under
the law is accompanied by only the thinnest veneer of procedural
justice. Police interactions with African Americans in St. Louis and St.
Louis County have historically been marked by indifference and neglect
of those seeking the protection of the courts (including early arrivals
in areas of racial transition), and disrespect, disdain, and excessive
force for those who are the targets of the law. In their <a href="http://03a5010.netsolhost.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ArchCity-Defenders-Municipal-Courts-Whitepaper.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">scathing 2015 assessment</a>
of the County’s municipal courts, Arch City Defenders underscored this
point: “For most individuals, the only substantive interaction they have
with the Missouri justice system or with their municipal government is
through the municipal courts, and the impressions instilled by those
courts reflect on the entire municipality.”<br />
<br />
In short, police
across the region have snuffed out any semblance of equal protection and
equal citizenship for half the population of the City of St. Louis and
nearly a quarter of the population of St. Louis County. This regime of
policing, at once systemic and chaotic, is just one iteration of the
refusal of equal citizenship playing out hour by hour across the
country—in stark racial inequalities on every metric from <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/03/24/racial-disparities-in-school-suspensions/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">school suspensions</a> to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/race-and-the-death-penalty/373081/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">executions</a>, in pervasive entanglement with the police and courts in particular for <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/05/23/465997013/opinion-how-policing-black-boys-leads-to-the-conditioning-of-black-men" rel="noopener" target="_blank">young black men</a>, and an in era of <a href="http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">mass incarceration</a>
without historical precedent or current analog. These are the
conditions that shield state actors no matter how egregious their
conduct, and that extend to others the state’s constant attention but
not its protection. These are the conditions that made it possible for
Jason Stockley to murder Anthony Lamar Smith and walk away free.<br />
<br />
<hr />
<strong>Colin Gordon</strong><span> </span>is a professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of<span> </span><a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14445.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><em>Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City</em></a><span> </span>(2008) and a<span> </span><a href="http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">companion website</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-481820906070128812017-08-20T10:45:00.000-04:002017-08-20T10:45:04.109-04:00A 2016 discussion from the Original Founders of the Black Panther PartyHere's a raw video of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party that actually started in May 1966 in Harlem, NY and then spread thruout the USA.<br />
<br />
<iframe height="480" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxpTQjR2UwX3aEJwOFllQm02Q0E/preview" width="640"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-57842057870927266452017-08-10T08:39:00.000-04:002017-08-10T08:39:13.695-04:00Respectability Politics and their Failure to Keep Black Americans Safe<h1>
<span style="color: blue;">
Respectability Will Not Save Us</span></h1>
<h2>
<span style="color: #783f04;"><i>
On the History of Respectability Politics and their Failure to Keep Black Americans Safe</i></span></h2>
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<h3>
By <a href="http://lithub.com/author/carol-anderson/">Carol Anderson</a></h3>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and
Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author
of <i>Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955,</i> which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards, and <i>Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960,</i> also published by Cambridge. Her most recent publication, <i>White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide</i>, won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been named one of the best books of 2016 by the <i>New York Times</i>, the <i>Washington Post, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,</i> and the <i>Globe and Mail</i> and is also a <i>New York Times</i> Bestseller and a <i>New York Times Editor’s</i> Pick. </span><br />
<br />
<small><i>NOTE: The following article contains graphic images of lynching.</i></small><br />
</div>
It was well after the Civil Rights Movement. Decades, even. Yet, the
bodies of black people continued to pile up—the victims of police and
vigilante violence. Their names read like a memorial to the fallen:
Amadou Diallo, Tarika Wilson, Sean Bell, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant,
Kathryn Johnston, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Stanley-Jones,
Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Timothy Russell, Malissa Williams, Freddie
Gray, Tanisha Anderson, Kendrec McDade, Michelle Cusseaux, Jonathan
Ferrell, Laquan McDonald, Danette Daniels, Cedrick Chatman, Jamar Clark,
Tamir Rice, and far too many more. As children, fathers, wives, even a
92-year-old grandmother were gunned down or choked to death,
#BlackLivesMatter activists asserted “<a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/25/respectability_will_not_save_us_black_lives_matter_is_right_to_reject_the_dignity_and_decorum_mandate_handed_down_to_us_from_slavery/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">respectability will not save us</a>.”<br />
<br />
The politics of respectability, deployed during the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, was supposed to have put an end to this.
This denigration of black lives. This legal and cultural propensity to
define African Americans as un-citizens and, therefore, unworthy of
rights. If the language of post-racial America is to be believed, the
Civil Rights Movement had finally made audible how hollow the nation’s
civic pronouncements were whenever the United States<br />
Declared:<br />
<br />
<div style="padding-left: 60px;">
<i>We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal</i>;</div>
<br />
Sang:<br />
<div style="padding-left: 60px;">
<i>O’er the land of the free</i>;</div>
<br />
and Pledged:<br />
<div style="padding-left: 60px;">
<i>with liberty and justice for all</i>.<br />
</div>
African Americans had long been well aware of the U.S.’s “<a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14679.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">mocking paradoxes</a>.”
In the 1930s, Langston Hughes poetically chronicled the chasm between
the myth of the nation and its brutal reality. In a searing indictment
of democracy, he <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-america-be-america-again" rel="noopener" target="_blank">declared</a>,
“There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of
the free.’. . . America has never been America to me.” While
disfranchisement—which shut down the ballot box to nearly 95 percent of
blacks in the South—and unequal schools that mocked the very concept of
separate but equal greatly conscribed the lives of African Americans, it
was blacks’ vulnerability to legal and extralegal domestic terrorism
that defined how tenuous their very existence actually was.<br />
<br />
Indeed, one year before Hughes published his searing poem, Claude
Neal, a black man accused of rape and murder, was dragged from his jail
cell in Alabama, transported to Florida, hoisted onto a platform,
castrated, branded, and tortured while a throng of onlookers clamored
wildly for the dismembered fingers and body parts tossed to them by his
executioners.<br />
<br />
Shortly thereafter law enforcement in Alabama and Florida, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), <a href="http://lsupress.org/books/detail/anatomy-of-a-lynching-updated/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">concluded that no crime had been committed</a>.<br />
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<span class="caption"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0Bi5VmnR991qxmPXNGFmflH2QqV5wNdFENxUjZkEjv1a33RybilrMh9MOYUjnt5g_yg96C3fw485unrOm8nh6jB5ogezKz9Mb8pEqlx52Q_hyphenhyphenANN50JKIEmpGLtqWWiVu6yM/s1600/claude-neal-lynching.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="360" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0Bi5VmnR991qxmPXNGFmflH2QqV5wNdFENxUjZkEjv1a33RybilrMh9MOYUjnt5g_yg96C3fw485unrOm8nh6jB5ogezKz9Mb8pEqlx52Q_hyphenhyphenANN50JKIEmpGLtqWWiVu6yM/s640/claude-neal-lynching.jpg" width="460" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption"> Photograph of body of Claude Neal hanging from a tree near the Jackson
County Courthouse, later sold as a postcard. From NAACP, The Lynching of
Claude Neal, courtesy of National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.</span> </b></i></span><br />
<br />
Similarly, only a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into
World War II, a mob stormed the Sikeston, Missouri jail and dragged Cleo
Wright, a black man accused of attempted rape, out of his cell.
Although Wright was already bleeding profusely from multiple gunshot
wounds incurred during his arrest, the mob wanted to inflict a death
that the African American community would never forget. They tied his
bullet-riddled body to the bumper of a car, drove into the black
neighborhood, doused him with five gallons of gasoline, set him afire,
and watched as the man, who was miraculously still alive at that point,
burned to death while the smell of his roasting flesh wafted through the
church windows that Sunday morning.<br />
<br />
The grand jury, after hearing the evidence, <a href="https://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=1032#.WYnFhlqGPBI" rel="noopener" target="_blank">soon concluded that no-one in the mob had committed a crime</a>.<br />
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<span class="caption"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiYteVSDz88s9Jh2f4p8vvpY5mDVo4nEn0YhpJ7PHs-BI-e082iLZILQb8EL9QAaixtQM5AouhyphenhyphenBa6B2HjdNcobCo-rolDvzHEGBrXTUqmIrBK6a2Yd_hPbDP_zGXboW5WGGA/s1600/lynching-cleo-wright.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="337" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiYteVSDz88s9Jh2f4p8vvpY5mDVo4nEn0YhpJ7PHs-BI-e082iLZILQb8EL9QAaixtQM5AouhyphenhyphenBa6B2HjdNcobCo-rolDvzHEGBrXTUqmIrBK6a2Yd_hPbDP_zGXboW5WGGA/s640/lynching-cleo-wright.jpg" width="448" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption">Photograph of the body of Cleo Wright in Sikeston, Mo, 1942. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.</span> </b></i></span></div>
<br />
In fact, the 1940s witnessed a spate of killings—a 14-year-old
African American boy in Florida, who sent a white girl a Christmas card,
paid dearly for that transgression by being thrown in the river, his
hands bound as his father was forced to watch the child drown; a
veteran, his wife, who was pregnant, brother-in-law, and her sister,
were hit with a fusillade of over 60 bullets that splattered their
bodies into the red dirt of Monroe, Georgia; a soldier, glad to be home
from fighting the Nazis, was blowtorched and dismembered in Louisiana; a
slew of World War II veterans who dared approach the ballot box in
Georgia and Alabama were gunned down for believing they were American
citizens who had the right to vote; and then there were the three
lynchings in Mississippi that happened within one week. All these
murders led to the same conclusion: either no crime had been committed
or that it was impossible for law enforcement to identify those who had
killed black men, women, and children in broad daylight. U.S.
Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell (D-IL) surveyed the racism gripping the
United States in the 1940s and asked pointedly, “<a href="http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Keeping-the-Faith/Second-World-War/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Is this democracy?</a>”<br />
<br />
The equally sinister companion to lynching was Southern Justice,
which used the criminal justice system to ignore the rules of evidence
and flaunt jurisprudence to “legally” execute African Americans—such as
the 1951 case in which the State of Mississippi <a href="http://www.radiodiaries.org/willie-mcgee-and-the-traveling-electric-chair/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">sent Willie McGee to the electric chair</a> for raping a white woman long after it had become crystal clear that the crime never happened. But, in the end, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/arts/television/06radio.html?_r=0" rel="noopener" target="_blank">his innocence simply didn’t matter</a>.
That same year, Florida sheriff Willis McCall, angry that the U.S.
Supreme Court ordered a new trial for two black men accused of rape,
drove them into the woods, stopped the car, pulled out his sidearm, then
gunned down the handcuffed prisoners. One man, although shot three
times, survived and told a tale that exposed the lies in the sheriff’s
story of an escape attempt foiled only by his trusty weapon.
Nonetheless, despite cold-blooded murder and attempted murder, McCall
kept his job for twenty-one additional years until he finally lost a
re-election bid (but was found “not guilty) <a href="http://www.sptimes.com/News/112899/Floridian/A_Southern_sheriff_s_.shtml" rel="noopener" target="_blank">after bludgeoning yet another black man to death</a>.<br />
<br />
The ease with which American society could explain away the slaughter
of black people crystallized for African Americans with the 1955
kidnapping, torture, and murder of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in Money,
Mississippi. When his killers, who subsequently proudly confessed in <i>Life</i> magazine, were found “not guilty” by a jury of their peers, <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/178832/death-of-innocence-by-mamie-till-mobley-and-christopher-benson/9780812970470/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">that was the breaking point</a>.<br />
<br />
Strategists in the Civil Rights Movement were determined to make
democracy real by rendering visible African Americans’ humanity. They
adopted the “politics of respectability” as a key tactic to
short-circuit society’s penchant to justify the unjustifiable. Their
rationale was simple: stereotypes— “<a href="http://newsreel.org/video/ethnic-notions" rel="noopener" target="_blank">ethnic notions</a>,”
in the words of filmmaker Marlon Riggs—had consistently transformed
African Americans in the eyes of white people from human beings into
“beasts” and “coons,” who were violent, ugly, savage, and feral. The
stripping of blacks’ humanity, they argued, had provided a
psychological, legal, and linguistic excuse for the extrajudicial
violence they faced. Drawing on a tradition that went back to the turn
of the century, blacks in the movement <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/43088" rel="noopener" target="_blank">worked hard to curate an image as God-fearing, hardworking, law-abiding, and family loving Americans</a>.
The point was to skillfully use the new medium of television so that
the brutality that rained down on black people—especially respectable
ones—would shock the conscience of the white public and lawmakers. As
the Paley Center for Media <a href="https://www.paleycenter.org/the-civil-rights-movement-and-television" rel="noopener" target="_blank">noted</a>:<br />
<div style="padding-left: 60px;">
<i>By 1960, 90 percent of American homes had
television. Television became a catalyst for change on a massive scale.
People in the northern states could see what was happening in Selma,
Birmingham, and Memphis and vice versa. In addition, television helped
Southern blacks unify, for while local Southern media rarely covered
news involving racial issues, they now had access to national newscasts
that were witnessing and documenting this revolution.</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEfsBSWoY3HXtoYpI58Dwhtvy0frtR2FBelzEIjcGAvcNNGXw548Lnt6UyxtAbNE-8qZxpkSl0U_PZM9AZuLqWNplwRgR0D34uWAU2otoTuuxMu_ZhwSM-hj22B2_bXJmq7EQ/s1600/5877f8465b3d2.image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="760" data-original-width="1059" height="458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEfsBSWoY3HXtoYpI58Dwhtvy0frtR2FBelzEIjcGAvcNNGXw548Lnt6UyxtAbNE-8qZxpkSl0U_PZM9AZuLqWNplwRgR0D34uWAU2otoTuuxMu_ZhwSM-hj22B2_bXJmq7EQ/s640/5877f8465b3d2.image.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
That is to say, the politics of respectability made visible that the
only possible reason why Selma, Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark would snatch
schoolteacher <b>Mrs. Amelia Boynton </b>by the collar when she tried to
register to vote was because she was black. Similarly, racism was the
only way to explain the bomb that destroyed the home of former city
councilman and Nashville civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby. There
could be no reason but sheer racial hatred that blew up a church in
Birmingham on Sunday morning and sent four little black girls to their
graves.<br />
<br />
The politics of respectability was envisioned as the leverage
to compel white Americans to see the violence and destruction done to
human beings in the name of democracy. Scholar Gary Dorrien, therefore,
concluded that the politics of respectability was essential; “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-dorrien/respectability-politics-b_b_8334534.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">there would have been no civil rights movement without it</a>.”<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span class="pullquote">“Strategists in the Civil Rights Movement were
determined to make democracy real by rendering visible African
Americans’ humanity.”</span></b></span></span></span><br />
<span class="pullquote"> </span>
<br />
The politics of respectability were in obvious play when African
Americans in Alabama decided to draw a line in the sand over the arrest
of middle-class secretary and wife Rosa Parks after she defied the Jim
Crow laws on the buses in Montgomery. E.D. Nixon, president of Alabama’s
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
state branch, “knew instinctively that Rosa Parks was without peer as a
potential symbol for Montgomery Negroes—humble enough to be claimed by
the common folk, and yet dignified enough in manner, speech, and dress
to command the respect of the leading classes.” She was not the first to
personally challenge the degrading system that assaulted African
Americans’ soul and dignity on public transportation. But the others did
not have <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/lifting-as-we-climb/3/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">the respectability quotient of Mrs. Parks</a>.
The black leadership had already refused to take up the case for
Claudette Colvin, a pregnant, unwed, 15-year-old who also defied the law
but whose stereotypical profile made her, in the mid-1950s, <a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Parting-the-Waters/Taylor-Branch/9780671687427" rel="noopener" target="_blank">problematic as the symbol of black resistance</a>.<br />
<br />
While scholars often focus on this self-policing action in the black
community, especially the demand that poorer blacks adhere to a code of
decorum, those critiques, while valid in certain aspects, <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807845431/uplifting-the-race/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">ignore the obvious</a>.
Respectable or not, some of the strictures, such as the importance of
education and sobriety, were essential for the very well-being of the
black community. To put it another way, those values were not inherently
wrong, misguided, or class-based, and they helped to sustain and
protect African Americans and their families.<br />
<br />
For all that it does, though, respectability offers little to no
protection against anti-black violence. Indeed, in the late 1890s,
rights activist Alexander Crummell declared “‘Blind men! For they fail
to see that neither property, nor money, nor station, nor office’ were
capable of saving the race” from the terror of lynching and the
stripping of constitutional rights that <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25090431?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" rel="noopener" target="_blank">defined the rise of Jim Crow</a>.<br />
<br />
Respectability politics were always too flawed to be fully viable.<br />
<br />
<i><b>First, </b></i>the standard for respectability requires blacks to have a level
of probity and purity that is close to sainthood status. Any intimation
of impropriety—an arrest, a child born out-of-wedlock, on welfare, or
even carrying a cigarette—creates an Achilles’ torso that makes the
black body vulnerable to deadly force.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Second,</b></i> the politics of respectability defines the whole by the
singular, where the violent or sexually rapacious actions of one black
person becomes the societal Rosetta Stone to decode and explain all
African Americans. In short, the vaunted individualism that conservative
ideology defines as quintessential Americanism dissipates in the face
of blackness.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Third,</b></i> the politics of respectability links rights to behavioral
performances and not to the fact that blacks are human. Fourth, with so
much focus on behavior, very little attention is paid to the important
role institutional, systemic racism plays in fostering continuing
inequality.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Finally,</b></i> the politics of respectability assumes that blacks were
responsible, because of their purported criminal actions, for being
lynched and disfranchised. And, as Ida B. Wells discovered when her
friends, successful businessmen, were lynched in Memphis, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/charles-barkley-and-the-plague-of-unintelligent-blacks/382022/?single_page=true" rel="noopener" target="_blank">accusations of rape were just a pretext</a>:<br />
<br />
<i> “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to
get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep
the race down and the nigger terrorized.”</i><br />
<br />
Nonetheless, during the civil rights era, African Americans had,
essentially, made a deal with the larger society. They would do
everything that they were supposed to, indeed, what the overwhelming
majority had been doing all along, and, in turn the United States would
finally keep its end of the bargain—freedom, democracy, and equal
opportunity with liberty and justice for all. The U.S.’s betrayal of
that bargain, however, has poured thousands out into the streets in
protests and <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/12/vast-majority-of-blacks-view-the-criminal-justice-system-as-unfair/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">led the overwhelming majority of African Americans to question the very legitimacy of the legal system</a>.<br />
<br />
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One of the key moments <i>en route</i> to today’s political
insurgency was the killing of Amadou Diallo. On February 4, 1999, the
NYPD spotted a black man standing in his apartment building’s vestibule.
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/05/nyregion/officers-in-bronx-fire-41-shots-and-an-unarmed-man-is-%20killed.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Forty-one bullets later</a>,
Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was dead. The moment the
four police officers realized that they had killed a man whose only
weapon was a wallet, the NYPD set out to “dirty up” Diallo, “to find
dirt that could be used to justify the shooting.” They searched his
apartment looking for anything to “taint his character.”<br />
<br />
They took his
roommate down to the precinct and interrogated him, demanding to know
“who were Diallo’s enemies?” Questioning that only makes sense if the
slain man had been gunned down in a drive-by shooting. They smeared him
with innuendo, asking why Diallo, who had simply left his apartment
after a long day at work to get something to eat, “had been acting in a
manner suspicious enough to attract the attention of the officers.”
These attempts were not new.<br />
<br />
The <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/08/nyregion/diallo-lawyers-level-new-charge.html">noted</a>
that “in the past when police officers have shot people,” the NYPD then
“revealed the criminal records, if any, of the shooting victims.”
Diallo, however, did not have one. The police explained, nonetheless,
that they were looking for a black serial rapist that night and saw him.
Yet, as even one of the officers, Sean Carroll, had to “admit. . .<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2000/feb/15/news/mn-64450" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Diallo really didn’t closely resemble the description of the man they were pursuing</a>.” But still, they shot, with two of the officers emptying their clips, reloading, and firing again.<br />
<br />
When they could not destroy Diallo’s respectability to explain away
41 bullets, they went after a much easier target: the black community in
the Bronx and the eyewitness. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/03/opinion/four-officers-one-likely-strategy.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The officers’ defense attorneys argued that it was irrelevant if Diallo was armed or not</a>.
The only thing that mattered was that the police had a reasonable
belief, given the crime-filled neighborhood, that the West African
immigrant had a weapon and would use it. The logic and consequences of
that legal argument are harrowing. It defines the entire black
population in the Bronx (simply because of their blackness and location)
as dangerous—and thus eligible to be shot by the police. Although, that
supposition is preposterous—no-one, for example, argues that white
males, <a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/06/19/mass-shooters-have-a-gender-and-a-race/#sthash.BWKRhQVq.dpuf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">who account for 79 percent of all mass shootings in schools</a>,
should be automatically considered a threat and gunned down before they
step foot in any educational facility—it was a defense strategy
grounded in New York law.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL5oRIv6QrVW7mh8vM2skEfOodEYgseiZ2bTByqzJRgKdglmCrilPXPo66FNNOjw5xR1hMPlwd7mr1-Op9WxWhVS6DNHmeoX7oVdmaYBC0aqFopTcOQpjlHWljUumQGhuFzpk/s1600/11-02-13-Subway-vigilante-Bernie-Goetz_full_600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL5oRIv6QrVW7mh8vM2skEfOodEYgseiZ2bTByqzJRgKdglmCrilPXPo66FNNOjw5xR1hMPlwd7mr1-Op9WxWhVS6DNHmeoX7oVdmaYBC0aqFopTcOQpjlHWljUumQGhuFzpk/s640/11-02-13-Subway-vigilante-Bernie-Goetz_full_600.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
More than a decade before Diallo’s killing,
<b>Bernard Goetz</b>, a white man who said he felt threatened by blacks on the
subway and, therefore, had to shoot them, walked away from all charges
when the New York Court of Appeals ruled that any “reasonable man” would
have done the same. The <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/29/opinion/a-reasonable-man-named-goetz.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">winced</a>, “there is little to applaud in a ruling that would justify murderous conduct by all who think they are afraid.”<br />
<br />
<span class="pullquote">“The logic and consequences of that legal
argument are harrowing. It defines the entire black population in the
Bronx (simply because of their blackness and location) as dangerous—and
thus eligible to be shot by the police.”</span><br />
<span class="pullquote"> </span>
<br />
Schrrie Elliott was the one who had so much to fear. Coming home to
the Bronx that evening, she had witnessed the four officers jump out of
their car, weapons drawn. She saw Diallo on the small porch. She heard
“‘Gun!’” And then a barrage of gunfire. Diallo’s bullet riddled body
jerking with every strike. More gunfire. Then silence. Elliott ran for
blocks, trying to get home to safety.<br />
<br />
She kept silent for weeks about
what she had witnessed but the nightmares would not stop. An unarmed
man. Four cops. A hail of bullets. Blood. She eventually told a
reporter; she had every reason to not trust the police with her story.<br />
<br />
When word came down that there was a witness, the officers’ attorneys
and the press went straight into ethnic notions mode. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/14/nyregion/cross-examination-for-diallo-witness.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The defense called her an “adverse” witness, who “hated the police.”</a>
But that was to be expected, the lawyers continued, she had a long
criminal history; she was arrested multiple times for drugs and actually
served time in prison. She not only was hostile and a criminal, she was
also a sexually promiscuous, bad mother who began having children at 15
years of age and could not manage to create a home where any of them
could live with her. But, then again, that was to be expected; the home
of this convicted felon was in “the projects” —public housing. She
“lacked credibility” the attorneys charged. The only thing that could be
believed from Schrrie Elliott, the defense lawyers continued, was that
the police were afraid for their lives when one officer yelled “Gun!”<br />
<br />
The jury in upstate New York—the trial had been moved out of New York City—agreed and “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/02/26/jury-acquits-4-ny-officers/8281dd45-c74f-4aa3-b74a-80c9ba6397f4/?utm_term=.8a10554b4655" rel="noopener" target="_blank">found the officers’ actions reasonable under the circumstances</a>.”
In the context of a crime-filled neighborhood, police on the hunt for a
black rapist, and a black man standing on his porch, forty-one bullets
were quite reasonable. One defense attorney crowed, “The point is the
police officers have to be able to do their job and do it the right
way.” The other defense attorney was outraged that the prosecutor would
even bring charges against the officers for shooting down an unarmed
man. This whole trial, he asserted, was nothing but a capitulation to
“mob justice” where Diallo’s death sparked weeks of protests and marches
in New York City.<br />
<br />
The head of the NAACP, Kweisi Mfume, saw the killing, the trial, and
the acquittal quite differently: “This case is in many ways another
example of racial profiling at its worst. It’s hard to believe this kind
of force would have been used if Diallo was a white man standing in his
vestibule not causing any kind of disturbance . . . The fact that the
accused officers were even acquitted on the charge of reckless
endangerment is equally as unbelievable.” In other words, despite a man,
who embodied respectability, despite the fact that he was unarmed and
still mowed down by nineteen of the forty-one bullets fired at him, the
justice system roared back, there was no crime here.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPeVfu8IqKOILqM1wud5Hp0UU_1MuwCO_c0DGOJsnBGpdAfq8MJI7YKpiOiFh8fUGlR_4e1DDPPX_M7wG6-n31aTXJsvZjXO7boflrcTpkgJ1FmcbYkyL-95QIcudDZ6vV_HE/s1600/120402042955-nr-trayvon-martin-timeline-00014727-story-top.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPeVfu8IqKOILqM1wud5Hp0UU_1MuwCO_c0DGOJsnBGpdAfq8MJI7YKpiOiFh8fUGlR_4e1DDPPX_M7wG6-n31aTXJsvZjXO7boflrcTpkgJ1FmcbYkyL-95QIcudDZ6vV_HE/s640/120402042955-nr-trayvon-martin-timeline-00014727-story-top.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
That same cadence played its haunting refrain in Sanford, Florida on
February 26, 2012. <b>Trayvon Martin</b>, an unarmed teenager, lay on the
ground with a bullet in his heart. The Skittles and Arizona iced-tea he
had just purchased from a nearby 7-11 were next to him. His killer,
George Zimmerman, stood there <a href="http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/03/trayvon-martin-shooting-death-initial-police-reports.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">with the murder weapon tucked in his waistband</a>.<br />
<br />
Minutes before the fatal encounter, he had spotted Martin walking in
the gated community and called 911. It was raining and the teen had his
jacket hood up to cover his head. Zimmerman, however, saw:
black-male-in-a-gated community-hood-up and deduced that Martin was a
“real suspicious guy.” “This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s
on drugs or something,” Zimmerman told the dispatcher. “It’s raining,
and he’s just walking around looking about.” “Now he’s coming towards
me. He’s got his hand in his waistband. And he’s a black male . . .
Something’s wrong with him. Yup, he’s coming to check me out. He’s got
something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is . . . These
assholes, they always get away.”<br />
<br />
Zimmerman was determined that this one would not escape. He got out
of his SUV with his loaded 9mm and began to follow Martin, who was on
the phone with teenage friend, Rachel Jeantel. When the 911 operator
asked Zimmerman if he was now following Martin, she informed the
neighborhood vigilante, “Okay, we don’t need you to do that.” Zimmerman
ignored her and continued to stalk the unarmed teenager through the
neighborhood. Moments later, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/what-happened-trayvon-martin-explained/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Trayvon Martin was dead</a>, and Zimmerman claimed self-defense.<br />
<br />
After a cursory initial investigation, the chief of police <a href="https://www.clickorlando.com/news/zimmerman/ex-sanford-police-chief-tells-local-6-why-he-didnt-arrest-george-zimmerman-" rel="noopener" target="_blank">insisted</a>
that “there wasn’t enough evidence to refute Zimmerman’s self-defense
claim.” The black community’s retort was unequivocal: That “doesn’t even
make sense,” said Ben Crump, the Martin family’s attorney. “Trayvon
Martin, a kid, has a bag of Skittles. (Zimmerman) had a 9 mm gun.
Trayvon Martin didn’t approach George Zimmerman, George Zimmerman
approached Trayvon Martin. So how can he now assert self defense?” <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/14/justice/florida-teen-shooting/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">But the police chief was adamant</a>, “The evidence and testimony we have so far does not establish that Mr. Zimmerman did not act in self defense.”<br />
<br />
On one hand, Lee was right. But only because <a href="http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/29/report-police-initially-wanted-to-make-arrest-in-trayvon-martin-case/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">the police did not conduct a real investigation</a>,
including swabbing for gun powder residue, knocking on all of the
neighbors’ doors to see if anyone knew who Martin was and why he would
be there, or even sending a homicide detective to the scene. Indeed, the
police held up Zimmerman’s supposedly “squeaky clean” record to explain
why there had been no arrest that night—or for weeks thereafter. His
relative whiteness gave him an aura of respectability and the benefit of
the doubt that the unarmed black child simply did not have. And,
Zimmerman’s halo of racial innocence protected him despite the killing,
the previous arrest for battery on a law enforcement officer, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/19/trayvon-martin-death-parents-fbi" rel="noopener" target="_blank">calling 911 nearly 50 times</a> in the first two months of that year.<br />
<br />
That disparity became heightened after intense African American
outrage led to Zimmerman’s arrest and trial. The backlash was intense.
Martin morphed from <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/93962276/Trayvon-Martin-Autopsy" rel="noopener" target="_blank">a 5’8”, 158 lbs. 17-year-old</a> into a brutal, <a href="http://the-maverick-conservative.blogspot.com/2012/04/trayvon-martins-height-and-weight.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">6’2”, 170 lbs.</a>, <a href="http://thegrio.com/2012/03/28/the-thug-ification-of-trayvon-martin-smear-campaign-distracts-from-the-case/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">pot smoking, hoodie-wearing, jewelry stealing, gold-toothed, aggressive thug</a>
that had attacked a man, who was older, less athletic, and vulnerable.
The only equalizer was a 9mm. Or as one commenter on Breitbart.com
remarked, Trayvon Martin was just “another black punk who got what he
deserved.”<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfVdrXpVdMNiUmXCYxZ_2Fjd1hO2M7KR8ZZBmQvdxPRFvw1rn2m5YLYk-QRBCUexijGF-58XqNIDlvuzqS1FI1WDt304k3LIWkq6rDQyiIs7oQFOLSTdZsm9yXNtmj4R3zqpk/s1600/rachel-jeantel1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="1000" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfVdrXpVdMNiUmXCYxZ_2Fjd1hO2M7KR8ZZBmQvdxPRFvw1rn2m5YLYk-QRBCUexijGF-58XqNIDlvuzqS1FI1WDt304k3LIWkq6rDQyiIs7oQFOLSTdZsm9yXNtmj4R3zqpk/s640/rachel-jeantel1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
His friend, <b>Rachel Jeantel</b>, with whom he was on the phone during the
stalking, was discredited in much the same fashion as Schrrie Elliott.
She devolved in the media and the defense’s case from a multi-lingual
high school student traumatized by hearing the blow-by-blow of Trayvon
Martin’s death, into an illiterate, ignorant, inarticulate stereotype, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/rachel-jeantel-on-trial" rel="noopener" target="_blank">who became the butt of jokes, black shame, and derision</a>.
“Let’s be honest,” one columnist wrote “Jeantel’s very presence on the
witness stand (broadcast live on national and international television)
conjures up all kinds of age-old race, class, and gender-based
stereotypes about black women. The large, full-figured, dark-skinned
black girl. Not a great communicator. Not very articulate. Head hung
low. Appearing to roll her eyes and head as she verbally sparred back
and forth with defense attorney Don West. And, stunningly, she tweeted
about needing a ‘drink.’”<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span class="pullquote">“The traumatized teen became the scapegoat for
the way that her inability to model respectability had failed the black
community and, with it, any real chance at justice for Trayvon Martin’s
death.”</span></b></span></span></span><br />
<span class="pullquote"> </span>
<br />
Indeed, Jeantel was stripped of her respectability and “outed” when
Zimmerman’s attorney handed her the transcript of her recent testimony
and asked Jeantel (taunted her, even), to read it back to the jury. <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trayvon-martin-friend-rachel-jeantel-turns-life-article-1.1866446" rel="noopener" target="_blank">She could not</a>. While the nineteen-year-old bore the full brunt and humiliation of that exposure, Miami’s Norland Senior High School—<a href="http://lithub.com/Downloads/,%20http:/www.usnews.com/education/besthighschools/%20florida/districts/miamidadecountypublicschools" rel="noopener" target="_blank">where only 28 percent of the students read at grade level</a>,
the largest share of curricular funding was allocated to vocational
education, and nearly one-quarter of all students do not
matriculate—remained unscathed.<br />
<br />
West was not done with Jeantel. When she seemed confused during questioning, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/for-rachel-jeantel-travyon-martins-friend-the-journey-continues/2014/06/04/0135d5a2-ec11-11e3-93d2-edd4be1f5d9e_story.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">he would chide her</a>,
“Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?” It
soon became clear, in fact, that many in the court patently refused to
understand <i>her</i> English. For example, after saying she heard
“get off me” over the phone that fateful evening, she was asked, “Could
you tell who was saying that?” The response was telling. The official
transcript read, “‘I couldn’t know Trayvon,’” and then “‘I couldn’t hear
Trayvon.’” Yet, as Stanford University linguistics professor John
Rickford <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/december/vernacular-trial-testimony-120214.html">pointed out</a>,
“neither of these makes semantic sense in context.” He noted that “When
another linguist and I listened to the TV broadcast of the recording
played in court we heard, instead, ‘I could, an’ it was Trayvon.’ . . .
she definitely did not say what the transcript reports her to have
said.” He <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161" rel="noopener" target="_blank">observed</a>,
“On talk shows and social media sites, people castigated her ‘slurred
speech,’ bad grammar and Ebonics usage, or complained that, ‘Nobody can
understand what she’s saying.’”<br />
<br />
The traumatized teen became the scapegoat for the way that her
inability to model respectability had failed the black community and,
with it, any real chance at justice for Trayvon Martin’s death. Many
African Americans were angry with Jeantel for not being able to
code-switch, moving seamlessly from Ebonics with her friends to
standardized English on the stand. One person, who self-identified as
black, lashed out: “She has to be the most, ignorant, ghetto,
uneducated, lazy, fat, gross, arrogant, stupid, confrontation Black
bitch I’ve ever seen in my fucking life. Yes, I said it . . . and I’m
Black.” Or, as Rickford conceded, “People speaking non-standard English
are even seen as being of poor character.”<br />
<br />
<b><span style="background-color: yellow;">In short, black respectability and not George Zimmerman, the man who
had killed an unarmed teenager, was on trial. Social media and
commentators transformed Jeantel, who was fluent in English, Spanish,
and Haitian Creole, into “a junkie,” an “animal,” and “the missing link
between monkeys and humans.” One commentator remarked: “You could swap
her out for a three-toed sloth and get the same witness value and
response.”</span></b><br />
<br />
Jeantel, in two days of testimony, lost the protection that any
teenager would have had, who had been traumatized by the death of a
friend whom she had known since second grade. She lost the innocence of
youth as questions about her size and complexion led to unflattering
queries about her actual age, eating habits, credibility, and her
intelligence. Zimmerman, on the other hand, walked away unscathed,
especially because <a href="http://gawker.com/5915713/george-zimmermans-lawyer-admits-his-client-lied-about-his-finances" rel="noopener" target="_blank">his lies</a>,
his wannabe cop fantasy, and propensity for violence never fully called
into question his initial statement that he was the victim of an
attack.<br />
<br />
On November 22, 2014, Officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner were
dispatched to a park in Cleveland, Ohio where they had reports of
someone with a gun. The police rushed to the scene and, within moments
of their arrival, opened fire. They called it in: “‘Shots fired, male
down,’ one of the officers in the car called across his radio. ‘Black
male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him. Send E.M.S. this
way, and a roadblock.’”<br />
<br />
Laying there bleeding to death, with neither of the police officers performing any first aid, was not a 20-year-old man but <a href="http://nyti.ms/1AVZBhs" rel="noopener" target="_blank">a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice</a>.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8aHSixQ_b-SM8k4_v8g1eSfeydJ9mpujPpzBZxR35AqJrUa57SxpWAvWwjP981plNA85gDdI9kydZJUxcRW-TIsYrGjLNZkw_2UljJtqF7Bzhk3tjmQNAXz2k8wh7RJcTiV4/s1600/140117-tamir-rice-1847_75878790a4527a9d3f3d341b45f2ca9d.nbcnews-fp-1200-800.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8aHSixQ_b-SM8k4_v8g1eSfeydJ9mpujPpzBZxR35AqJrUa57SxpWAvWwjP981plNA85gDdI9kydZJUxcRW-TIsYrGjLNZkw_2UljJtqF7Bzhk3tjmQNAXz2k8wh7RJcTiV4/s640/140117-tamir-rice-1847_75878790a4527a9d3f3d341b45f2ca9d.nbcnews-fp-1200-800.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx" rel="noopener" target="_blank">As a recent study of police officers indicated</a>,
“Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a
less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age
peers.” Worse yet, the researchers’ “findings demonstrate that the
Black/ape association,” which is a dehumanization process, “predicted
actual racial disparities in police violence toward children.”<br />
<br />
Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback gave a compelling account of
why Rice had to die. The basic tenets of their story were that Rice was
not alone, there were other people at the table in the pavilion with
him. When Loehmann and Garmback pulled up, Rice grabbed the gun and
tucked the weapon in his waistband. The police then issued three
separate warnings to him “to put his hands up but he refused.” Instead
of complying, <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/12/2/1348833/-Tamir-Rice-The-story-behind-the-execution-character-assassination-coverup-of-a-senseless-murder" rel="noopener" target="_blank">the police asserted</a>, Rice reached for his weapon and pulled it out from his waistband. Then and only then did Loehmann open fire.<br />
<br />
The story held up until the video, which the officers did not know
existed, told a very different story. There was no-one near the child
when the police arrived. The supposed threat to bystanders that Garmback
and Loehmann had conjured up evaporated in the grainy, but damning
footage: They pulled up within just a few feet of the pavilion, Tamir
Rice stood, and within two seconds he was shot. For the original story
to match up with the video, Garmback would have had to drive directly in
front of the pavilion, Loehmann get out of the police car, Rice reach
for the gun, the officers yell, “put your hands up!” three times, the
child refuse to comply each time, and then Loehmann fire two shots – all
within two seconds. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/24/tamir-rice-boy-shot-cleveland-police_n_6211064.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The improbability of that now played out on television screens around the nation</a>.<br />
<br />
But, the fact that the police had just lied about the shooting death
of a 12-year-old boy and obstructed justice did not become the story.
Nor did the U.S. Department of Justice <a href="http://www.mintpressnews.com/cleveland-public-safety-department-official-resigns-citing-tamir-rice-killing-says-no-longer-proud-work-city/200629/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">report</a>
that “identified the Cleveland Police Department as thoroughly corrupt,
and marked by the routine use of excessive force.” Neither did the
shoddy vetting process in hiring Loehmann, whose record in a much
smaller, suburban police force was abysmal. Deputy Chief Jim Polak of
the Independence Police noted that during “firearms qualification
training he [Loehmann] was ‘distracted’ and ‘weepy.’” “He could not
follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor
recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal.” Polak <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/12/cleveland_police_officer_who_s.html#incart_m-rpt-1" rel="noopener" target="_blank">concluded</a>: “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct the deficiencies.”<br />
<br />
What should have been an intense investigation into the systemic
flaws in the criminal justice system in Cleveland became, instead, an
opportunity for the police, the prosecutor’s office, and elements of the
media to shred whatever innocence and respectability that a 12-year-old
playing in the park had. The Northeast Ohio Media Group ran the
headline: <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/tamir_rices_father_has_history.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">TAMIR RICE’S FATHER HAS A HISTORY OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE</a>,
to provide “a frame of reference . . . why he [a child] had a toy gun.”
After delving into the unsavory background of the father, the next
story <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/lawyer_representing_tamir_rice.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">revealed</a>
that Rice’s mother was a convicted felon and drug trafficker.<br />
<br />
The
implications were clear: they were not going to get the status of
grieving parents, their pain would not be acknowledged as legitimate,
and they would be stripped of even the right to mourn their dead child.<br />
<br />
They were unworthy.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The prosecutor made that clear when he suggested
that the reason the parents insisted upon an indictment and a trial had
nothing to do with justice for their murdered son but was, instead, for
financial reasons. District Attorney Timothy McGinty <a href="http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33374-prosecutor-smears-tamir-rices-mother" rel="noopener" target="_blank">remarked</a>
during a community meeting, “They waited until they didn’t like the
reports they received” from law enforcement specialists labeling the
killing “justified” and “reasonable.” “They’re very interesting people. .
. let me just leave it at that . . . and they have their own economic
motives.”<br />
<br />
<span class="pullquote">“The implications were clear: they were not
going to get the status of grieving parents, their pain would not be
acknowledged as legitimate, and they would be stripped of even the right
to mourn their dead child. They were unworthy.”</span><br />
<span class="pullquote"> </span>
<br />
The ease with which a 12-year-old (Tamir Rice), an immigrant (Amadou
Diallo), a high school student (Trayvon Martin), as well as a
92-year-old grandmother (Kathryn Johnston), a 7-year-old sleeping on the
couch (Aiyana Stanley-Jones), a father (Eric Garner), a young mother
(Tarika Wilson), and a fiancé (Sean Bell) could be “dirtied up” and
their respectability and humanity stripped from them has sparked an
insurgency in the black community. The seemingly endless string of
deaths was hard enough; but the subsequent smearing of character, of
lies, of repeated “not guilty” verdicts even when the killings were
caught on film made a mockery of the very concept of justice for the
vast majority of African Americans.<br />
<br />
When traditional formats for securing justice appeared unresponsive,
#BlackLivesMatter took to the streets and airwaves chanting
“respectability will not save us.” Scholars and pundits from Brittney
Cooper to Ta-Nehisi Coates echoed that refrain. The “thug-ification” of
blacks killed by the police and vigilantes sparked an uproar on social
media as African Americans asked, “<a href="http://iftheygunnedmedown.tumblr.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">if they gunned me down, which photo will they use?</a>”<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
<span class="caption"></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-76860083796063433182017-08-07T13:55:00.002-04:002017-08-07T13:55:46.895-04:00James Baldwin On Angela Davis- November 1970Sister Angela Dives<div class="imgon2">
</div>
<h1 class="txttitle">
<span style="color: red;">An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis</span></h1>
<div class="txtauthor">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b> James Baldwin. </b></i></span> <br />
<br />
By<i><b> James Baldwin</b></i></div>
<div class="date">
November 19, 1970<br />
<i>(reprinted in the 7 August 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books)</i> </div>
<br />
Dear Sister:<br />
<br />
<div class="indent">
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very
sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so
intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a
memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off
the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more
than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.
And so, <i>Newsweek</i>, civilized defender of the indefensible,
attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears (“it remained to be
seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on
its cover, chained.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the
Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our
ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian
land.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not
only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can,
here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from
a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so
very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis,
and did so. Very probably an exercise in futility, but one must let no
opportunity slide.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
I am something like twenty years older than you, of
that generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that “there
are no healthy brothers—<i>none at all</i>.” I am in no way equipped to
dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without descending into what, at
the moment, would be irrelevant subtleties) for I know too well what he
means. My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In
considering you, and Huey, and George and (especially) Jonathan Jackson,
I began to apprehend what you may have had in mind when you spoke of
the uses to which we could put the experience of the slave. What has
happened, it seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole
new generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and,
in that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be
victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly impertinent and
insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison, battling for her
life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say, for I think that you will
perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all, from the
position of a spectator.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSeudwWzzGFayszxmwBjaPjEI8bltlxvHJu-6D03rIYbbpWNYqiwFEVOPaS4Wg3cEWWD7l6Yc9oi3twFqFQ39VrGDIsnpbMLBf0RQfRCK1zGkkYDdTR7ncPRoBhhua8kGJOYE/s1600/101211-shows-black-girls-rock-angela-davis-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSeudwWzzGFayszxmwBjaPjEI8bltlxvHJu-6D03rIYbbpWNYqiwFEVOPaS4Wg3cEWWD7l6Yc9oi3twFqFQ39VrGDIsnpbMLBf0RQfRCK1zGkkYDdTR7ncPRoBhhua8kGJOYE/s640/101211-shows-black-girls-rock-angela-davis-4.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b>Sister Angela Davis in 1970.</b></i></span></span> </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="indent">
I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not
appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am my
father’s son. At bottom, my father’s expectations and mine were the
same, the expectations of his generation and mine were the same; and
neither the immense difference in our ages nor the move from the South
to the North could alter these expectations or make our lives more
viable. For, in fact, to use the brutal parlance of that hour, the
interior language of that despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger laborer
preacher, and so was I. I jumped the track but that’s of no more
importance here, in itself, than the fact that <i>some</i> poor Spaniards become rich bull fighters, or that <i>some</i>
poor black boys become rich—boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if
ever, afforded the people more than a great emotional catharsis, though I
don’t mean to be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius
Clay became Muhammed Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and
sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was made on the
people and a very different kind of instruction had begun.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has
always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves. When I
was little I despised myself, I did not know any better. And this
meant, albeit unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I
also despised my father. <i>And</i> my mother. <i>And</i> my brothers. <i>And</i>
my sisters. Black people were killing each other every Saturday night
out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to
them, or to me, that it was <i>intended</i> that they should; that they
were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should
consider themselves no better than animals. Everything supported this
sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so one was ready, when it came
time to go to work, to be treated as a slave. So one was ready, when
human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for
salvation—this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so
little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in time to
help you save your child!<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
There is always, of course, more to any picture than
can speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning,
watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some
tremendous strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our
legacy today. But that particular aspect of our journey now begins to be
behind us. The secret is out: we are men!</div>
<div class="indent">
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has
frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, “to life,” but that
is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced people still
cowering in their wagon trains and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
The nation, <i>if</i> America is a nation, is not in the least prepared
for this day. It is a day which the Americans never expected or desired
to see, however piously they may declare their belief in “progress and
democracy.” These words, now, on American lips, have become a kind of
universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people, strong believers in
arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with the algebra of their
history.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning
what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can
be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special
interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect
it. One glance at the American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that
America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future
to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people,
appear willing to consign the blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past
conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal)
countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell,
and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the <i>Kings’ Row</i> basket
case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to
carry out what they insist is the will of the people.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the above-named, <i>are</i>
the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much about the
forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as they do
about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of
the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not
merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to
be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and
victimizes whites and blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare
admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal
danger for the blacks and tragedy for the nation.<br />
</div>
<div class="indent">
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans
take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk
out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people
to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and
surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial
war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a
distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience
of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, <i>sufficiently worthwhile</i>,
to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country,
their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in
our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is
happening, needless to say, already, all around us.</div>
<div class="indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="indent">
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast
place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for
George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration
camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them,
too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no
more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering,
as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people
are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of
their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the blacks, the
most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at
their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not
realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same
soil, is not a <i>racial</i> war but a <i>civil</i> war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.</div>
<div class="indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="indent">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigot2wpEJZxSHiv2ZnZfByzVfE1tuNRDpfMR0ya6fT2KPXsv_fnyheAtdTjTVqwh6bfaYX3zKdKGH8MwYP-_qWOazYDrdhJWU0-dsam8re8F2VEN6iwlCTxUM4rG7dwEQ8H9U/s1600/black_power_by_thinkdoctor1-d5hl635.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1415" data-original-width="900" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigot2wpEJZxSHiv2ZnZfByzVfE1tuNRDpfMR0ya6fT2KPXsv_fnyheAtdTjTVqwh6bfaYX3zKdKGH8MwYP-_qWOazYDrdhJWU0-dsam8re8F2VEN6iwlCTxUM4rG7dwEQ8H9U/s400/black_power_by_thinkdoctor1-d5hl635.png" width="253" /></a>So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows
we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each
other—<i>we</i> are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we <i>do</i>
feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with inexorable
forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the
condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to
be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to
all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does
not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s
profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a
deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire
to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.</div>
<div class="indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="indent">
We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the
blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is
greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system
have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is
doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever
could have. And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we
have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but
lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love,
life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.</div>
<div class="indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="indent">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
The enormous revolution in black consciousness which
has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or
the end of America. Some of us, white and black, know how great a price
has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new
people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are
worse than the murderers hired in our name.</div>
<div class="indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="indent">
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though
it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the
corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they
will be coming for us that night.</div>
<div class="indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="indent">
Therefore: peace.</div>
<i>Brother James</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-63111085508157059102017-06-12T10:54:00.002-04:002017-06-12T10:57:50.989-04:00Urban League's Marshall Plan Is About Making Black America More In Hock To Capitalist America<span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Urban League's Tired Ole <span style="color: red;">"Let The Market Liberate Us" </span>Policy Gets a 21st Century Tired Upgrade: <span style="color: red;">The Main Street Marshall Plan</span></b></span></span><br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="https://soba.iamempowered.com/sites/soba.iamempowered.com/themes/soba/flexpaper/SOBA2017-MSMP-FP3/#PreviewMode=Miniature" title="" type="text/html" width="400"></iframe>
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: large;">We Welcome your critique of this plan hatched by one of the most bourgeois socalled "Black-led" organizations in the US. We also would like to here your specific alternatives to this domestic Marshall Plan that benefits the masses of Blackfolk and not the capitalists of all colors.</span></span><br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-8164697804951772322017-05-11T13:59:00.001-04:002017-05-11T13:59:16.714-04:00Jay Smooth Speaks Truth On TrumDontCare Bill<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Here's what HipHoptivist, Jay Smooth, Has to say about the Horrendous TrumDontCare House bill on healthcare:</b></span></span><br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FR4QCl8vt_s" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-3769345182617499852017-03-31T16:03:00.003-04:002017-03-31T16:05:19.333-04:00<br />
<article>
<h1>
<span style="color: #134f5c;">The Makings of a Heroic Mistake: Richard Wright’s “Bright and
Morning Star,” Communism, and the Contradictions of Emergent
Subjectivity</span></h1>
<footer class="article-info">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="author">
<b>Joseph G. Ramsey</b><br />
<i>mediationsjournal.org </i><b><br /></b></div>
<div class="author">
</div>
</footer>
<div class="No-Indent">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGwIxDvplfIBLC7dTc1AMheKSA1UZw48fr6BBs6CBlFXaufhoF3WSjWu5QAtsUvPhiErscbWS9eNzcT9zCVMPvlvLoXIrcMWM6FSxJV7DlcW8zt7snj3ugPHQBaIGedHscFPA/s1600/richard-wright-1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGwIxDvplfIBLC7dTc1AMheKSA1UZw48fr6BBs6CBlFXaufhoF3WSjWu5QAtsUvPhiErscbWS9eNzcT9zCVMPvlvLoXIrcMWM6FSxJV7DlcW8zt7snj3ugPHQBaIGedHscFPA/s320/richard-wright-1.jpg" width="223" /></a>Close readers of <i><b>Richard Wright</b></i>’s fiction are
hard-pressed to find a hero who embodies a positive mode of
intellectual, moral, or political engagement.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_1" id="endref_1">1</a> </div>
<div class="No-Indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="No-Indent">
This point is especially true when one bears in mind the often
catastrophic impact that the actions of Wright’s would-be heroes have on
women, and black women in particular.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_2" id="endref_2">2</a> <cite>Native Son</cite>
(1940), Wright’s most influential and popular novel — widely hailed
(and sometimes denounced) as the first black best-seller of the 20th
century — features one of U.S. literature’s most infamous anti-heroes,
Bigger Thomas, a brutally inarticulate tough who, under pressure, kills
without remorse: not only does Bigger unintentionally suffocate
left-wing socialite Mary Dalton, but also, more deliberately, he murders
his girlfriend, Bessie, in part to keep her hidden from the police
(adding to a long list of lesser anti-social acts).<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_3" id="endref_3">3</a>
According to Wright himself, as articulated in his 1940 essay
“How Bigger Was Born,” Bigger represents the contradictory possibilities
inherent in the “dislocated” and “disinherited” multiracial underclass
of modern society, potentiality which, as he then saw it, could become a
force “of either Communism or Fascism.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_4" id="endref_4">4</a></div>
<div class="No-Indent">
</div>
<cite>Lawd Today,</cite> Wright’s first novel, (written in 1936,
published posthumously), similarly features a bigoted and patriarchal
black worker, Jake Johnson, whose misdirected aggression and
psychological vulnerability manifest themselves in both wife-beating and
a declared affinity for fascism abroad. Arguably Wright’s last major
novel, <cite>The Outsider</cite> (1953), written in exile, presents us
with Cross Damon, a super-alienated worker-intellectual who offers
penetrating reflections on the state of the world, but also comes to
embody the very traits of cynicism that he would rebel against. Driven
to excess by sensual and philosophical passions alike, Damon conspires
to fake his own death in order to cut himself off from his wife, his
mother, his children, and social responsibility generally, setting loose
a spiral of deceit, betrayal, and murderous duplicity that ultimately
consumes him (as well as several others). Damon too, like Bigger,
becomes an unrepentant, serial murderer.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_5" id="endref_5">5</a><br />
<br />
While the unpublished manuscripts and posthumous publications
complicate the picture somewhat, if Richard Wright’s major works offer
readers a sense of “what is to be done,” almost always it is <cite>negatively,</cite> relayed by dramatizing the limits and the consequences of inadequate, existing modes of social thought and action.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_6" id="endref_6">6</a>
His fiction further explores how an alienating social environment
can pervert even positive human aspirations into their opposite,
compounding rather than abolishing oppression.<br />
<br />
Wright’s short story collection, <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> (1938, 1940), might appear to provide exception to the anti-heroic rule.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_7" id="endref_7">7</a>
Written during the height of Wright’s commitment to the (then
rapidly growing) Depression-era Communist Party, and based upon
extensive investigation into contemporary struggles of black Communists
in the US South, <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> presents a range of
characters who bravely stand their ground against white racist terror,
and who often pay the ultimate price for it: exile, torture, death.<br />
<br />
Chief among them is Sue, the main character of the collection’s closing
novella, “Bright and Morning Star,” a story added to the collection in
1940, though originally published in <cite>The New Masses</cite> in May 1938.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_8" id="endref_8">8</a>
Readers have long hailed Sue as that rare thing, a Wright hero
(indeed, that even rarer thing, a heroine!), one who overcomes inner and
outer conflicts to intervene bravely, nobly, and skillfully on the side
of social justice, transforming herself in the process of saving the
day. Sue may represent the last and best hope of individual heroism in
the major published fiction of Richard Wright.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_9" id="endref_9">9</a><br />
<br />
Indeed, until at least 2008 Wright scholars universally held that
“Bright and Morning Star,” had, if not a happy ending, then at least a
heroic and redemptive one. According to this long-unchallenged reading
of the novella, the main character “Aunt” Sue is able to meet the
demands of crisis, saving the underground interracial communist
collective her sons have helped to found from vicious state repression,
through a heroic act of self-sacrifice. Certainly, her transformation is
remarkable. The middle-aged, widowed mother of two young activists, Sue
not only personally weathers racist violence and endures the certainty
of her sons’ torture and death, but she deploys folk wisdom in the
service of radical resistance.<br />
<br />
She tricks the white authorities who aim
to trick <cite>her</cite> into betraying her sons’ cause, exploiting her
oppressors’ racist and sexist blindness to foil their anti-red plot.
Her tactics are quite ingenious: posing as a mourning mother come to
fetch the body of her soon-to-be-executed son, Johnny-Boy, Sue uses a
white sheet to conceal a loaded gun, with which she kills the treasonous
party-infiltrator (a white man ironically named Booker), before he can
expose the fledgling organization.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_10" id="endref_10">10</a>
In this dominant reading, Sue not only redeems her earlier error
of trusting Booker with the names of the party members (against her
better instincts) but allows the underground revolutionaries to live to
see another day, at the cost of her own life.<br />
<br />
She makes her martyred
sons’ cause her own, melding her inherited black Christian outlook with
an emerging communist worldview, becoming perhaps the only major female
character in Wright’s published oeuvre to display serious psychological
complexity and genuine political development, and the only main
character in Wright’s fiction to make such a direct and deliberate
contribution to the Communist cause. Novelist-critic Sherley Anne
Williams has underscored Aunt Sue’s exceptional, and heroic, status
within Wright’s oeuvre, describing “Bright and Morning Star” as “one of
the most deft and moving renderings of a black woman’s experience in the
canon of American literature.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_11" id="endref_11">11</a> The flat and undeveloped or even outright stereotypical depictions of other black women in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, Williams argues, “are somewhat redeemed in the character of Aunt Sue.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_12" id="endref_12">12</a><br />
<br />
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More recently, Cheryl Higashida, in what may be the most lucid and richly contextualized reading of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
and “Bright and Morning Star” to date, concludes that, “It is precisely
by transforming and uniting both ideologies [Communism and black
nationalism] into a synthetic perspective that <cite>Sue saves the Party from being destroyed by the state.</cite>”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_13" id="endref_13">13</a>
Though critics continue to debate “Bright and Morning Star” from
sharply contending perspectives, they tend to agree that Sue is to be
read as a hero who saves the party.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_14" id="endref_14">14</a>
This is true even of critics who take a more anti-communist view,
reading Sue as a nationalist rebuke to Communism, or as heralding
Wright’s own later break from the Party.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_15" id="endref_15">15</a><br />
<br />
With Gregory Meyerson’s 2008 essay, “Aunt Sue’s Mistake,” however,
the heroic status of Sue’s final act has been radically called into
question. Where previous critics have found meaningful individual
self-sacrifice that leads to collective salvation, Meyerson — attending
to long-overlooked textual evidence — has revealed individualist false
consciousness leading to catastrophic unintended consequences: namely,
the destruction of the fledgling communist movement that Sue has been
hailed for saving.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_16" id="endref_16">16</a>
“The problem with this widely-held reading,” Meyerson writes, “is
that it is very carefully shown by the story itself – through its
painstaking thematic patterning — to be a <cite>mis</cite>reading. Sue’s victory over the racists in “Bright and Morning Star”<cite></cite>
proves to be, tragically, Pyrrhic ... flying in the face of the book’s
main lessons. Ironically,” he argues, “Sue’s actions do not guarantee
the survival of the party; <cite>they all but guarantee its destruction</cite>.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_17" id="endref_17">17</a><br />
<br />
The core of Meyerson’s corrective reading comes down to one, crucial,
long-overlooked, but now indisputable fact. In the course of pursuing
her self-sacrificing, solitary, and “total act” of salvation, Sue
neglects — in fact, deliberately avoids — doing the <cite>other</cite>
thing that needs to be done. Acting alone, she kills the stool pigeon,
Booker, yes — and in dramatic, seemingly heroic, fashion — but she fails
to save the party, for she <cite>fails to warn the other comrades</cite>
about the sheriff’s plan to ambush their scheduled red meeting — a fate
which, Sue realizes, means their capture, death, and destruction come
morning.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_18" id="endref_18">18</a>
By acting “erlone,” instead of with others, Sue helps to bring
about the annihilation of the party she appears to be “saving.” We
shouldn’t be surprised either, Meyerson argues; for Sue’s solitary act
of martyrdom flies in the face of the recurrent anti-individualist
lessons that run through every story of Wright’s celebrated collection.<br />
<br />
Meyerson makes a very compelling case, both regarding <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
as a whole, and “‘Bright and Morning Star” in particular, a case that
has yet to receive the attention it deserves.<br />
<br />
As he shows in detail,
throughout <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, individualistic action
consistently fails in the face of systemic oppression. Not only do
characters die despite and because of their (often astounding,
back-breaking, brave) individual efforts, but their deaths “don’t mean <cite>nothing,</cite>” as Silas, another brave — and brutally patriarchal — martyr figure puts it in “Long Black Song.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_19" id="endref_19">19</a> The basic lesson is made explicit in “Fire and Cloud” (the story which closed the original 1938 edition of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>)
when Reverend Taylor, following his brutal beating at the hands of
state-sanctioned racists, counters his son’s angry proposal to meet
white violence with violence of their own: “Don be a fool, son! Don thow
yo life erway! <cite>We cant do nuthin erlone.</cite>”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_20" id="endref_20">20</a>
Rev. Taylor elaborates the point further, anticipating the
militant mass march of black and white workers and peasants that ends
the story: “We gotta git wid the people, son…Wes too much erlone this
way! Wes los when we erlone! Wes gotta be wid our folks….”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_21" id="endref_21">21</a><br />
<br />
To Meyerson’s own useful review, I would add here that the very colloquial (mis)spelling of the word — alone as <cite>erlone</cite> — implies the way in which, for Wright, acting <cite>alone</cite> is almost necessarily to <cite>err</cite>.
The absence of positive heroes in Wright’s fiction here comes full
circle as a critique of the very idea of individual heroism. In a sense,
the only heroes to be upheld are collective(s): it is only to the
extent that individuals admit or participate in such a collective
project, that they too can become, in a sense, heroic. They can’t do
nothin’ <cite>erlone</cite>. <a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_22" id="endref_22">22</a><br />
<br />
A crucial and corollary lesson of the collection <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children,</cite> however — albeit a subtler one — is that collective action is not only necessary but <cite>possible</cite>, even in circumstances that may appear almost fatalistically desperate and determined — but <cite>only if one finds the courage to speak up</cite>
to transform the inherited conditions of the situation, bringing out
their latent collectivity. For instance, as Meyerson shows, in the
famously “fatalistic” story, “Down by the Riverside,” protagonist
Brother Mann, though trapped by the interlocking dangers of rising flood
waters and a racist police state, has several opportunities to speak up
and potentially win allies to his cause, allies that could help him
(and perhaps his wife, Lulu) to survive this crisis. He has at least two
consciously recognized chances to break out of his isolation, to shift
what will become his doomed coordinates of possibility; but Mann remains
silent, thus participating in the sealing of his own “fate.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_23" id="endref_23">23</a> Collective agency exists as potentiality in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>,
even for seemingly isolated individuals, but only if they dare to seize
the moment and break the spell of isolation and fatalism. Only if they
cease to think and act upon their situation as individuals,
individualistically.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_24" id="endref_24">24</a> <br />
<h2>
Exploring Aunt Sue’s Mistake</h2>
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<div class="no-Indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="no-Indent">
In the wake of Meyerson’s scandalously corrective
reading, new and vital aspects of Wright’s widely celebrated, widely
misunderstood text begin to emerge. Building on Meyerson’s revelation
that Sue makes an “individualist” mistake, the present essay will
explore in detail the question of how so and why she comes to make it. I
will further consider the question of what Wright’s depiction of this
mistake-process suggests, for him and for us: both what it says about
Wright’s late Thirties conception of the relationship between individual
psychology and collective, egalitarian politics, and what that may mean
for re-conceiving radical political subjectivity today.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_25" id="endref_25">25</a> </div>
<div class="no-Indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="no-Indent">
A close reading of Sue’s subjective processes, we shall see,
reveals a complex dialectic of emergent political consciousness:
disclosing interrelations between individuality and collectivity,
courage and fear, insight and blindness, symbolic empowerment and
ideological mystification. In this new light, “Bright and Morning Star”
becomes for us a story that does not only document Wright’s deep
commitment and faith in the communist cause, but also foregrounds the
difficulty of sustaining communist practice, dramatizing the
precariousness of the bonds between comrades and their allies, even, and
perhaps especially, when everything depends on them. </div>
<div class="no-Indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="no-Indent">
No longer a heroic
story of individual sacrifice, “Bright and Morning Star” turns out to
be a cautionary tale about the need for communists to develop more
thoroughly collective methods of work as a means of sustaining comrades’
faith in one another — and in the people — such faith being
particularly necessary in moments of life-and-death crisis.</div>
<div class="no-Indent">
<br /></div>
The story further stands as a reminder of how Wright’s existential
reflections — about the difficulty of sustaining meaningful human
relationships in a deeply alienating modern world — are found not only
in later works such as <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite> or the <cite>The Outsider</cite>;
they are rather a key aspect of his 1930s fiction as well. Our reading
of “Bright and Morning Star” thus will complicate the common but
all-too-simple (and Cold-War-inflected) periodization of Wright’s work
into “early Marxism” vs. “late existentialism,” early “proletarian
didacticism” vs. later “novels of ideas.” Such schemas suggests a binary
opposition between communist radicalism and deep individual
psychological investigation that oversimplifies both Wright himself and
the dialectical interactions between individuality and collectivity that
he was at pains to reveal.<br />
<h2>
Keeping Quiet To Protect Reva — The Subject Supposed to Believe</h2>
<div class="no-indent">
Meyerson’s essay can be summed up as establishing five crucial points: </div>
<div class="no-indent">
1) <cite>that</cite>
Sue makes a mistake; </div>
<div class="no-indent">
2) that the consequences of this mistake are
catastrophic, dooming the local branch of the party; 3) that Sue on some
level knows this, and yet proceeds as if she does not;<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_26" id="endref_26">26</a> </div>
<div class="no-indent">
4) that this mistake is all the more glaring when “Bright and
Morning Star” is read in relationship to the consistently
anti-individualist lessons of the <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
collection; and </div>
<div class="no-indent">
5) and that the critics — “all of them” — have also made
mistakes in overlooking Sue’s mistake for so long. Accepting these key
points, we now need to fully excavate the ground they uncover, attending
to the question of how Sue comes to make her error, and what this
erring means. </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
At this point the relationship between Sue and Reva takes on great
significance. For it is Reva, the young white communist — appearing
twice in Sue’s home as a party messenger — who most concretely presents
Sue with the opportunity to think and act collectively in her moment of
crisis, providing Sue the chance to inform the other comrades about the
morning’s ambush, and thus with a chance to save them. How precisely Sue
comes to neglect this crucial task is thus worth closer analysis, as is
the question of what Wright means to imply — about emergent political
subjectivity, about intra-party and interracial relations — through this
depiction of failed communication. That the Sue-Reva scenes provide us
with the Wright-rarity of an extended interracial woman-to-woman
encounter adds an important additional aspect to consider.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_27" id="endref_27">27</a><br />
<br />
Virtually alone among Wright’s fictional depictions of white women, Reva is presented very sympathetically.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_28" id="endref_28">28</a> She is a young white communist whom Sue sees as an ally and even a
friend, an impoverished local tenant farmer who has been actively
risking her life and her health for the cause, and who appears to have
genuine personal affection for Sue and for Sue’s son, Johnny-Boy. <br />
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As
Wright puts it, Sue “liked Reva; the brightest glow her heart had ever
known was when she had learned that Reva loved Johnny-Boy.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_29" id="endref_29">29</a>
In marked contrast to Sue’s (ultimately validated) suspicion
towards the new white party recruit, Booker, there is no suggestion in
the text that she does not trust Reva (or Reva’s father, Lem); she has
known them a long time and accepts the sincerity of their red commitment
to class-based inter-racial unity. And yet, later, at the crucial
moment, Sue not only neglects to tell Reva (both about Johnny-Boy’s
capture, and Sue’s own giving the comrades’ names to Booker), but
verbally misleads her — suppressing crucial information, effectively
lying to her at least twice. Finally, Sue literally <cite>puts Reva to bed</cite>,
over Reva’s own protestations and even her suspicions that something
else is wrong. (Reva: “Yuh worried about something…Ah wanna stay up wid
yuh.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_30" id="endref_30">30</a>
) Sue hushes her, treating a friend and ally, as a “chile” who
cannot handle the truth, who must be put to bed, ushered out of sight.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_31" id="endref_31">31</a><br />
<br />
The alienation is truly profound. We do not have here a case of a
character who is simply trapped in a solitary struggle, but rather a
case of a character who is playing a part in constructing her own
solitude, and then acting within those constructed (and terribly
inadequate) confines as if they were fated or beyond her control. <a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_32" id="endref_32">32</a><br />
<br />
Wright describes Reva’s importance for Sue and for Sue’s emergent
radical consciousness during their first scene together. Reva has come
to deliver news of the planned police ambush, and to ask Sue to send
Johnny-Boy to warn the comrades, so they can avoid capture. Wright
offers Sue’s thoughts:<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Reva believed in black folks and not for anything in the
world would [Sue] falter before her. In Reva’s trust and acceptance of
her she had found her first feelings of humanity. Reva’s love was her
refuge from shame and degradation. If in the early days of her life the
white mountain had driven her back from the earth, then in her last days
Reva’s love was drawing her towards it, like the beacon that swung
through the night outside.</i><a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_33" id="endref_33">33</a> </blockquote>
<div class="no-indent">
What stands out about this passage — besides the
analogy to the Memphis airport “beacon,” an ominous figure that slices
across almost every scene in “Bright and Morning Star” — is not only the
way Sue is concerned with preserving Reva’s belief in black folks, but
the way that Sue’s feeling of her own emergent humanity is bound up with
and dependent upon that belief. <a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_34" id="endref_34">34</a>
It might be more precise to say: dependent on her own perception
of Reva’s belief, or even, her own belief in Reva’s belief. We have here
something like what Zizek, following Jacques Lacan, calls the “subject
supposed to believe.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_35" id="endref_35">35</a>
That is, for Sue, Reva figures not only as a person, but as a
symbol, or more precisely: a sustaining symbolizer. Reva’s (presumed,
posited, projected) belief in Sue (and in “black folks”), functions as a
symbolic support for Sue’s own emergent/transforming consciousness. “In
Reva’s trust and acceptance of her she had found her first feelings of
humanity. Reva’s love was her refuge from shame and degradation.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_36" id="endref_36">36</a>
Wright depicts Sue as having a deep need for Reva’s belief/love;
it functions, for her, as a kind of personalized proof that humanity can
transcend racial barriers; Sue needs to feel believed <cite>in</cite>, in order to believe (in) <cite>herself</cite>. </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
An interesting reflexive element here is that Sue sees Reva as seeing <cite>her</cite>
— Sue — as a representative of “black folks.” Sue believes that “Reva
believes” not just in Sue or in Johnny-Boy, but in “black folks” more
generally. This is not at all to say that Sue sees <cite>herself</cite>
this way, as in some sense “representative” of “black folks.”
Nonetheless, Sue’s perception of Reva’s faith in “black folks” generally
exerts a powerful force on Sue, one that, as we shall see, can become a
source of both liberation and of alienation.<br />
<br />
The paradox of objective
intersubjective belief here is that Sue need not <cite>actually</cite> believe in her own representative-ness in order to <cite>act</cite> <cite>as if</cite>
she believes in it. She may not believe in race (subjectively) and yet
may still perform/recreate it (intersubjectively); for she believes in
(and feels she depends on) the <cite>other’s</cite> belief, and acts in such a way as to protect that belief<cite>.</cite>
Sue perceives that she must bear the burden of representing “black
folks” in general before Reva’s eyes, for the compound reason that Sue’s
individual “faltering” could undermine not only her white comrade’s
belief in racial equality, but also Sue’s own belief in her <cite>own</cite> growing humanity.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_37" id="endref_37">37</a><br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
We should add that this very need to protect Reva’s belief can also be read as a symptom of a <cite>lack</cite> of belief of another sort: namely a lack of faith that a “white” person (however <cite>red</cite>)
might in fact accept Sue for who she actually is, that Reva could
handle the truth, that this young white woman could remain loving of her
and committed to anti-racism without an idealized buffer of
ever-dependable “black folks.” “Bright and Morning Star” thus
anticipates Wright’s recurrent later critique of the tendency of white
liberals and communists to idealize black people or black oppression, a
critique that is present clearly not only in <cite>Native Son</cite>, but in <cite>The Outsider</cite>, and in Wright’s autobiographical writings published under the title <cite>American Hunger</cite>.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_38" id="endref_38">38</a>
But whereas in later depictions this critique tends to align with
an anti-Communist — or even anti-communist — perspective, here Wright
articulates it as an internal (self)criticism of the communist movement.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_39" id="endref_39">39</a><br />
<br />
It’s important to note, however, that Sue’s investment in (or
dependence on) Reva’s belief is not simply depicted as some kind of
“false consciousness” that can be easily opposed to and/or corrected by
something like the clarity of “scientific truth.” The situation is more
deeply contradictory: Wright suggests that without Reva — not only Reva
as material actor (who makes tea, who bandages wounds, who brings news)
but Reva as symbolic force (whose love represents for Sue the
possibility of achieving full humanity) — Sue would not have been able
to face the racist “white mountain.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_40" id="endref_40">40</a>
She needed another to believe in her own aspiring humanity in
order to assert and sustain that humanity in the face of a world that
otherwise fails to recognize it. Her emergent subjectivity depends upon
Reva as symbolic anchor. This psychological-ideological process, Wright
leads us to believe, though based on a kind of reification, has had the
positive and enabling effect of helping Sue to transition in a communist
direction, towards a more self-consciously, insistently human
subjectivity, enabling her courageous political resistance to white
supremacy.<br />
<br />
Alongside her growing love and respect for her own sons’
radical vision, Sue needed to believe that Reva (a “white person”)
believed in her (and in “black folks”) to make this leap. Communist
conversion required the belief of comrades, over and above their
knowledge or strategic wisdom.<br />
<br />
One is reminded at this point of Wright’s dialectical treatment of
black consciousness in his influential 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro
Writing” — a text he developed almost simultaneously with “Bright and
Morning Star.” In that early manifesto, which like <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>,
seeks to delineate sharply a modern literary and political practice
from the “Uncle Toms” who have come before, Wright argues for taking
seriously and working through the understandably, and perhaps even
necessarily, nationalist dynamic of Negro experience, precisely in order
ultimately to transcend this nationalist horizon — towards a
proletarian, class conscious, internationalist standpoint. As Wright
wrote:<br />
<blockquote>
Negro writers must accept the national implications of
their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and
transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in
order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it…. It means a
nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that is aware of
the dangers of its position; that knows its ultimate aims are
unrealizable within the framework of a capitalist America; a nationalism
whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and
in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_41" id="endref_41">41</a> </blockquote>
<div class="no-indent">
Far from an inevitable historical process, however,
this dialectical path through nationalism is fraught with danger:
narrow nationalism on one-side, race-blind economism on the other. In <cite>Native Son</cite>, as well as in <cite>Lawd Today</cite>,
we see Wright’s less-than-optimistic account of how such nationalist
sentiments, if not properly worked through, may leave the oppressed open
to the lures of mystification, misogyny, self-destructive violence, and
even affinity for fascism. Similarly, in “Bright and Morning Star,”
Wright shows us how an intersubjective structure that is a necessary
mediation towards a higher political state of consciousness may persist,
even after it has done its crucial work, in ways that do not help but
rather hinder progress on to some ostensibly “higher” stage of
consciousness. Transcending the nationalist (and religious) aspect of
folk consciousness and achieving true interracial trust and solidarity
remains a protracted affair, a struggle that continues within and around
the ranks of the communist movement. </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Thus Reva’s symbolic power continues to determine Sue’s subjectivity,
becoming, in the second Reva scene, a deadly threat to the life of
Reva, and many others, black and white alike. In these crucial moments,
Sue addresses herself not to the actual Reva (or to the political
project with which Reva has taken up), but to the Reva image Sue feels
the need to protect. “No she would not tell Reva; Reva was all she had
left … Reva’s trust would never be shaken.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_42" id="endref_42">42</a>
In a kind of dialectical Marxian-psychoanalytic irony, Wright
suggests that the very symbols that enable growth can become fetters on
further development, or even worse, chains that threaten to pull the new
communist subject — and the communist project — back into the
alienation from which it has just begun to emerge.<br />
<br />
It is in the second Reva scene that we see the damage done, the
chains pull, the dialectical bridge buckle. To review the characters’
immediate situation: since Reva’s first visit, Sue has relayed the
message about warning the comrades to Johnny-Boy, who has dutifully set
out to do just that. After he leaves, Sue’s home is invaded by the
sheriff’s posse; they question her about Johnny-Boy and about the party,
beat her when she refuses to talk, and then again when she “talks
back.”<br />
<br />
Finally knocked unconscious, Sue awakens to find the newly
recruited white “comrade” Booker in her house. Offering Sue sympathy and
attending to her injuries, Booker reports that Johnny-Boy has been
captured (before getting the chance to warn the other party members),
and persuades Sue — against her better instincts — to tell this
“comrade” the names of the party members, ostensibly so he can go warn
them himself. Reva arrives for the second time at some point after
Booker has left, hoping that Sue has relayed the message to Johnny-Boy
as planned, and seeking confirmation of that fact. She promptly informs
Sue that Booker is indeed, a “stool” (confirming Sue’s fears).<br />
<br />
At first it seems that Sue is planning to tell Reva the news — about
Booker, about Johnny-Boy’s capture, and about the fact he hasn’t been
able to warn the comrades as planned. As Wright informs us, “She was
wondering how to tell Reva about Johnny-Boy and Booker. Ahll wait a lil
while longer, she thought.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_43" id="endref_43">43</a>
While Reva dresses Sue’s bleeding scalp, Sue thinks again how
“She was feeling better now; in just a little while she would tell
Reva.”<span class="Footnote-reference"> </span><a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_44" id="endref_44">44</a>
One is reminded of the opening scene between Sue and Johnny-Boy,
where Sue similarly waits until the work of nurturing and caring is done
— allowing Johnny-Boy to eat, warm up, and dry off — before she drops
upon him the hard news of “what is to be done.”<br />
<br />
But unlike Sue in this
earlier scene, Reva puts the question to her directly, before such
soothing can occur:<br />
<blockquote>
“Did Johnny-Boy come?”<br />
[Sue] hesitated.<br />
“Yeah.”<br />
“He done gone t tell the others?” Reva’s voice sounded so clear and confident that it mocked her. Lawd, I cant tell this chile…<br />
“Yuh tol im, didn’t yuh An Sue?”<br />
“Y-y-yeah…”<br />
“Gee! Thas good! Ah tol pa he dindt hafta worry ef Johnny-Boy got the news. Mabbe thingsll come out awright.”<br />
“Ah hope…”<br />
She could not go on; she had gone as far as she could. For the first time that night she began to cry.<span class="Footnote-reference"> </span><a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_45" id="endref_45">45</a> </blockquote>
<div class="no-indent">
Sue here misleads Reva, effectively lying by way of
omission. Why can’t Sue bring herself to tell Reva the truth? The
immediate “reason” Wright provides has to do with how Reva’s voice
sounds, “so clear and confident that it mocked her.” Reva’s clarity and
confidence prompt Sue to see Reva in a protective mode, as a “chile,”
not capable of hearing the brutal truth. Similarly, once Sue’s crying
begins to make <cite>Reva</cite> cry, “She forced herself to stop. Naw; Ah cant carry on this way in fronta Reva…Right now she had <cite>a deep need for Reva to believe in her.</cite>”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_46" id="endref_46">46</a>
We see that Sue is motivated not so much by protecting Reva as by
protecting Reva’s belief in her own trustworthiness. </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="no-indent">
Sue cannot bring
herself to show her own vulnerability around this young woman who both
“believed in black folks,” and who has deep feelings for her (now
captured) son. The very feelings that have helped to buoy her up now
hold her back.</div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
It would be one-sided to put the blame on Sue here (her
individualism, her Christian martyrdom, her residual nationalism), for
Wright also directs us to the material context of the characters’
interaction, asking us to consider Reva’s role (and even Johnny-Boy’s)
as well. Reva refers to Sue as “An” [Aunt], in a way hailing Sue to
continue to assume a protective role that hearkens back to the days of
“mammy.” Further, the contrast with the opening scene between Johnny-Boy
and Sue is illuminating; it serves as a counter example, a successful
scene of communication that sets off the later, failed one. In the
former scene, Sue deliberately and patiently puts off telling Johnny-Boy
the bad news about the sheriff watching Lem’s house — news which will
require Johnny-Boy’s prompt action — until he has a chance to “eat and
get dry…Theres time yet.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_47" id="endref_47">47</a>
Sue allows him to rest until well past midnight, not with a
desire to avoid telling him — Wright indicates that she knows she will
and must, that everything depends on the comrades being warned — but
wanting to take the time to tell him in the right way.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_48" id="endref_48">48</a><br />
<br />
In the later scene, conditions have changed: time is running short
and Sue’s ears are still ringing from her beating at the hands of the
sheriff. Yet the failure of Sue and Reva to connect cannot be blamed
exclusively on the enemy’s violent repression or the urgency of the
situation; a genuine opportunity is missed — and Reva contributes to the
miscommunication as well. Arguably, Reva’s “confident” rush to get good
news from Sue makes it all the more unbearable for her to deliver the
bad news truth. It’s also worth noting, as we parse the devastating
disconnect, that — in stark contrast to later portrayals of white
communists, Jan Erlone, Boris Max, and fellow traveler Mary Dalton in <cite>Native Son</cite> — Wright depicts Reva in “Bright and Morning Star” as extremely <cite>similar</cite>
to Sue at the level of material conditions. Besides the fact that both
are women — with the hint of love between Sue’s son Johnny-Boy and Reva
adding a near-familial connection — we learn that, like Sue’s son, Sugg,
Reva’s own brother is in jail, presumably for political reasons. “Ma
cries ever day…” she confides to Sue.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_49" id="endref_49">49</a><br />
<br />
Similarly, Reva’s poverty appears to be as acute as Sue’s.
Helping Reva with her coat, Sue is struck by the “scant flesh of the
girl’s shoulders. She don git enuff t eat.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_50" id="endref_50">50</a>
Though “white,” Reva and her family are dealing with the same
kind of threats that affect Sue and hers — police terror and hunger.
This makes the tragic disconnect between these two comrades all the more
remarkable, tragic, and sobering. We have here not — as in <cite>Native Son</cite>
— an account of the great (if still perhaps bridgeable) cultural or
social distance separating Communist activists and those they would
represent and organize, but rather an account of how barriers to trust,
communication, and collectivity can emerge even between people
(comrades!) whose conditions of life are quite similar. <br />
<h2>
The Desire to Deny the Enemy to His Own Face </h2>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="no-indent">
Ironically, alongside this failure to communicate
with a comrade, Wright draws our attention to Sue’s psychological desire
to communicate to her enemy, suggesting how this urge to be “heard” by
the agents of repression clouds her strategic judgment. This desire is
totally understandable, of course — perhaps, like her desire to protect
her comrades, it is even necessary for (and constitutive of) her
radicalization. Yet in the moment of crisis, the urge to prove the enemy
other wrong <cite>to the enemy’s own face</cite>, like the felt need to
protect a comrade from an unsettling truth, throws Sue, her comrades,
and their would-be-collective project into danger, death, and doom. </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
Sue’s individualism takes the form of a desire to sacrifice her body
in order to prove herself to the racist enemy that confronts her.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_51" id="endref_51">51</a>
Again, it is in a sense a “selfless” desire, and yet one that
loses sight of actual others — and of the necessities of the situation —
in its flight from responsibility, a narcissistic substitution of
fantasy for strategy. Just as Sue’s desire to “protect” Reva leads to
her failing actually to protect her, Sue’s desire to deny the other, to
show and to prove to the other that “yuh didn’t git what yuh wanted,”
actually allows the sheriff and company <cite>to “git”</cite> what they
want, the destruction of the local communist organization. Early on,
while Sue is still alone and waiting for Johnny-Boy’s initial return,
she reflects: “Lawd, Johnny-Boy…Ah just wan them white folks t try t
make me tell who is in the part n who ain! Ah just wan em t try, n Ahll
show em something they never thought a black woman could have!”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_52" id="endref_52">52</a> The lines reveal Sue’s political desire as <cite>a desire to see the enemy other seeing her</cite>
own strength in action, a desire not only to disprove the Enemy’s
notion of what a “black woman” is capable of — or to laugh at the
deluded racists behind their backs — but to <cite>have “them” watch her as she disproves it</cite>.
In itself, there is nothing wrong with this; arguably such desires for
recognition are a necessary moment in a process of revolutionary
self-assertion.<br />
<br />
The point, as it emerges through “Bright and Morning
Star,” is that such rebel desire for recognition from the enemy, despite
— or perhaps because of — its psychological appeal, threatens also to
create a kind of tunnel vision, drawing one’s eyes away from what is to
be done, leaving the subject reactive, stuck in the enemy’s universe.
Mired in immediate reaction, locked into seeking the enemy’s gaze, it
becomes difficult to create new coordinates of subjectivity that aim not
to ‘be heard” by ruling powers, but to subvert and supplant them.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_53" id="endref_53">53</a><br />
<br />
Later, Sue gets the chance to act on her desire for recognition,
after her house is broken into by the sheriff and his posse. Watching
the racist, red-hunting thugs tear through her home, Sue recognizes that
they don’t yet know where Johnny-Boy is. “She was consumed with a
bitter pride…She gave him up because <cite>she wanted them to know they could not get what they wanted</cite> by bluffing and killing.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_54" id="endref_54">54</a>
Sue’s strength in the face of racist, anticommunist repression is
impressive. But as she experiences the moment, it is not enough for her
to deny them; she <cite>wants them to know they are being denied</cite>. This other-orientation leads Sue to confront the sheriff as he is about to leave: <br />
<blockquote>
Yuh didn’t git whut yuh wanted! she thought exultingly. N yuh ain gonna never git it! Hotly something ached in her <cite>to make them feel the intensity of her pride and freedom</cite>; her heart groped to turn the bitter hours of her life into words of a kind that would <cite>make them feel</cite>
that she had taken all they had done to her in stride and could still
take more. Her faith surged so strongly in her she was all but blinded.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_55" id="endref_55">55</a> </blockquote>
<div class="no-indent">
Sue’s faith-surging shouts provoke the departing
sheriff; he re-enters the house to hit her so hard that she loses
consciousness. Sue reflects later (ironically right as she is in the
midst of going silent before her comrade, Reva), that “If she had not
shouted to the sheriff, she would have been strong enough to have
resisted Booker; she would have been able to tell the comrades herself.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_56" id="endref_56">56</a> </div>
<h2>
“Bright and Morning Star,” or, the ambiguity of symbolic redemption</h2>
<div class="no-indent">
Sue’s radicalization in “Bright and Morning Star,”
like Reverend Taylor’s in “Fire and Cloud,” is cast in deeply Christian
terms, suggesting the potential for a kind of synthesis of religious and
communist symbolism.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_57" id="endref_57">57</a> As Cheryl Higashida has shown, the novellas in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
represent a fleshing out of concepts Wright outlined in his 1937 essay,
“Blueprint for Negro Writing,” where he wrote that “Negro writers who
seek to mould or influence the consciousness of the Negro people must
address their messages to them through the ideologies and attitudes
fostered in this warping way of life” of Jim Crow segregation.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_58" id="endref_58">58</a>
Thus, though Wright had a very critical view of the “warping”
effects of established Christianity, both in his own life and in the
lives of black people generally, he saw religion and religious symbolism
not as a static or unchanging thing but as one that could alter (and be
altered — “moulded”) in relationship to changing historical and social
conditions, one that revolutionary writers needed to take seriously — as
he himself did.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_59" id="endref_59">59</a> </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="no-indent">
Thus, for Rev. Taylor in “Fire and Cloud,” the specter of social
justice is likened to the visiting of hellfire upon the oppressors, and,
later, following his decision to march alongside the “Reds,” the masses
mobilizing to demand bread come to stand in the place of a redemptive
“Gawd.” Likewise, for Sue in “Bright and Morning Star,” under the
influence of her activist sons and her own life of labor and struggle,
“[t]he wrongs and sufferings of black men had taken the place of Him
nailed to the Cross; the meager beginnings of the party become another
Resurrection.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_60" id="endref_60">60</a></div>
<div class="no-indent">
</div>
In marked contrast with the rousing symbolic synthesis that closes
“Fire and Cloud,” however, the symbolism in “Bright and Morning Star”
plays an overtly contradictory role. Whereas Rev. Taylor in “Fire and
Cloud” comes to see the existence of “Gawd” as at once confirmed and
made flesh by the red-led, interracial, mass mobilization of the poor to
demand bread — Christianity and communism aligning in a conclusion that
is likened to “a baptism of clean joy” — for Sue in “Bright and Morning
Star”, the redemptive discourse of Christianity at once enables the
development of radical subjectivity, on one hand, and yet threatens to
hold it back or to compromise it, on the other.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_61" id="endref_61">61</a>
Her Christian martyr’s ambition — “to be like Him [Jesus] and
suffer without a mumbling word” — is shown to be both an impetus and an
impediment to collective action.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_62" id="endref_62">62</a><br />
<br />
If “Fire and Cloud” depicts the progressive promise of a
Christian-Communist synthesis, “Bright and Morning Star” suggests the
promise, but also the challenges and dangers of such a fusion.<br />
<br />
Startlingly, the very title of Wright’s story, “Bright and Morning
Star,” foregrounds this ambiguous, double-edged status of redemptive
Christian symbolism. The phrase, which recurs throughout the story,
alludes to the Bible; Sue clearly sees it as a symbol for Jesus (though
she sings it in such a way that the “he” in question could equally well
apply to her son Johnny-Boy, for whose safe return her heart longs).<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_63" id="endref_63">63</a><br />
<br />
However, the Biblical allusion is a contradictory one; it points
readers to the possibility that what appears to be the coming of
redemption may in fact be the arrival of its<cite></cite> opposite<cite>.</cite>
The first reference in the Bible to the “morning star” as an individual
is in Isaiah 14:12, and refers not to Jesus, but to Satan: “How you
have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been
cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!” (New
International Version). Both the King James Version and New King James
Version of the text translate “morning star” as “Lucifer, son of the
morning.” Yet, in Revelation 22:16, Jesus identifies Himself as the
morning star: “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify to you about
these things for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of
David, the bright morning star.” The “bright and morning star” could be
Christ, or anti-Christ.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_64" id="endref_64">64</a>
Wright’s frequently ominous descriptions of the distant Memphis
beacon-light that cuts across virtually every scene of the story further
signal the double-edged symbolism, with the beacon light described as
being “Like a gleaming sword above her head,” a “blade of light.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_65" id="endref_65">65</a>
The point here of course is not to engage scriptural debate about
the proper interpretation — or proper translation — of the “bright and
morning star(s).”<br />
<br />
The point is that the very title of Wright’s story — a
title which reverberates in Sue’s hymn singing, in the distant Memphis
airport “beacon,” and, crucially, at the precise moment of Sue’s fateful
decision — refers us to a Biblical symbol that is widely taken to
signify in two opposed and incompatible ways. <a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_66" id="endref_66">66</a>
The status of the “bright and morning star,” the symbol of
redemption, is unclear; what appears to be a beacon of hope may turn out
to be the headlights of doom.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As we’ve shown, things stand similarly with Wright’s story itself.
For the long-established reading of “Bright and Morning Star,” Sue
appears akin to a savior. But in reality, despite her best and even in
many ways heroic efforts, she presides over the destruction not the
redemption of the comrades, making “Bright and Morning Star” a story
about collective betrayal that takes the form of what looks like — and
is mistaken for — individual martyrdom and salvation. If religious
signs, and the emotions they unleash, align with the radical
subjectivity of Taylor at the end of “Fire and Cloud,” in “Bright and
Morning Star” Wright confronts us with the possibility that the former
may be misread as the latter, redemption and resurrection fantasies
substituting for rather than supporting and spurring on revolutionary
practice, with catastrophic results.<br />
<br />
What is at stake here, and what the title “Bright and Morning Star”
points us towards, is not just the irony of readers and critics
misinterpreting Sue’s act, (interesting as this may be), but the tragic
irony of Sue herself misinterpreting her situation (and its symbolism)
so as to come to the point of committing this mistaken act in the first
place.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_67" id="endref_67">67</a>
This isn’t just a case of Wright slipping one by two generations
of critics (a noteworthy fact, nonetheless); a close analysis of Sue’s
‘”internal”’ psychological processes, and of the material conditions
that set the context for these processes, takes the issue to another
level, revealing “Bright and Morning Star” to be a story about the
misleading or illusory appearance of redemption.<br />
<br />
“Bright and Morning
Star” thus becomes a story about how betrayal can take the form of what
looks like salvation, about how the brightness of a star (or a beacon)
can confuse or even blind one to the situation at hand, about how easy
it is to lapse into “individualism” in the name of saving (or taking
revenge on) others, especially in moments of crisis. “Bright and Morning
Star” is not just a story about a mistake Sue made, but about the <cite>makings</cite> of this mistake. <br />
<h2>
Grasping the Transindividual Structure of Individualism </h2>
<div class="no-indent">
On one level, what I have written above can be seen
as an extension of Meyerson’s approach; I agree with him that in a
sense Sue falls prey to “individualism.” And yet, moving beyond an
acknowledgment of “false consciousness,” my close reading of “Bright and
Morning Star” has revealed an interesting paradox: Sue’s
“individualism” tends to take the form of its ostensible opposite: a
concern for (or even an obsession with) others, friends as well as
enemies. Sue makes her crucial error not when she is concerned for
herself (or even for her family), but when she is worried about
upsetting another, her comrade (or worried about showing up the enemy).
Her “individualist” going-it-alone is shown by Wright to be an effect of
her attempt to be (or to appear to be) what (she thinks) her newfound
ally expects from her (or, on the other hand, to defy what she thinks
the enemy thinks of her). </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
<div class="no-indent">
“Individualism” here is not a sign of
selfishness or indifference for the collective, so much as — one the one
hand — a lack of faith in the ability of another member of that
collective to grasp and to accept the fullness of her own contradictory
being, and — on the other hand — a too narrow focus on the enemy as the
“audience” for her activism. Sue tries to “go it alone” for the sake of
others, to protect their faith, or to make them feel their failure.
Individualist “false consciousness” is a symptom of a broader — and
collective — lapse.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_68" id="endref_68">68</a></div>
<div class="no-indent">
</div>
We can thus intuit here Wright’s suggestion of yet another — more
collective — failure of faith, this one attributable to the local
Communist party-movement itself, for not having involved Sue (this
black, working mother and widow, this devout Christian) sooner and more
fully in their organizing (in the weeks and months leading up to the
crisis-night of the story). Sue’s early reflection on how “Johnny-Boy
ain the one t trust nobody t do nothing. He gotta do it all hissef…”
thus reverberates with irony, and not just because, as other critics
have noted, Johnny-Boy has been all too trusting when it has come to
allowing white men — such as the traitor Booker — into the fledgling
party.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_69" id="endref_69">69</a>
An additional irony, just as profound and tragic, emerges from
the recognition that Johnny-Boy’s (individualistic) bearing of burdens
by himself has — however unintentionally — allowed Sue to remain
marginalized and under-politicized within the movement she is
increasingly sympathetic to.<br />
<br />
Insofar as Sue’s heroic lapse is a (very
understandable) sign of her lack of experience with communist political
activity prior to this crucial crisis moment, we can hypothesize that
Johnny-Boy’s own individualist mode of communist work has inadvertently
contributed to Sue’s individualistic error. Doing the political work for
others — rather than challenging them to take it up themselves — is
here shown to be yet another “heroic” mistake. A mistake that breeds
other mistakes. <br />
<h2>
The Stakes of a Scandalous Rereading</h2>
<div class="no-indent">
The present reading offers us more than a
descriptive correction of “Bright and Morning Star.” Fully grasping the
subjective process by which Sue ultimately betrays the cause she aims to
defend enriches our understanding of Richard Wright’s pro-communist
1930’s fiction, foregrounding and reframing his interest in human
consciousness — and in relationships between comrades and the masses of
people — as a crucial site of struggle, one with deep implications for
the communist movement he sought to build.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_70" id="endref_70">70</a>
Long hailed as an exemplary achievement of
pro-communist/proletarian literature, “Bright and Morning Star” comes to
stand as not only a compelling narrative that reflects actual, ongoing
radical struggles of the time (though it is this, too), but an example
of Wright using fiction as a kind of dialectical psychoanalytic tool
through which to contribute to the radical cause, not (only) by touting
its achievements, but by illuminating the internal and existential
contradictions that threaten to undermine that movement from within. The
powerful draw of martyr-like “heroism” was among the dangers Wright
sought to bring to light.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_71" id="endref_71">71</a></div>
<div class="no-indent">
</div>
More broadly, re-reading “Bright and Morning Star” in this way gives
us occasion to consider the (contradictory) formal dynamics of political
subjectivization itself, understood as the process by which a
particular, singular individual in specific material circumstances comes
to infuse his/her life with the practical consequences of a political
commitment to a universal, collective, revolutionary, and egalitarian
process.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_72" id="endref_72">72</a>
In this vein, Meyerson’s corrective reading of “Bright and
Morning Star” has given us the chance not only to document (Wright’s
awareness of) the dangers of individualistic, martyr-like substitutions
for collective action, but also to explore the basis for this subjective
error, as it can be traced to the workings of human consciousness and
to comradely relations, in their complex interaction with the social and
political conditions faced by an emergent, besieged communist project.<br />
<br />
“Bright and Morning Star” thus becomes not only a critical warning
about the danger of lapsing into individualist modes of thought and thus
betraying causes that one seeks to support, but a call to study,
engage, and transform the latent conditions that make such betrayal
possible — including, but not limited to, the gendered division of
labor, the persistence of racialized attitudes within the communist
movement (on both sides of the “race” line), and the subjective
deformations and disconnections these give rise to. This possibility,
far from being best understood as a foreign or false ideology that is
imported into the communist movement from the “outside,” or as some
residual “bourgeois” element, is perhaps better grasped as a danger that
is always present, a possibility that is immanent to the political
process of subjectivization itself, not only because subjectivization is
always a matter of working with those contents inherited from the past,
but insofar as this subjectivization necessarily involves a tense
dialectic of individuality and collectivity in the crisis-time of the
present.<br />
<br />
Similarly, our reading of Wright’s novella suggests the continued
relevance of his work — and perhaps of US proletarian fiction more
generally — to contemporary theoretical discussion, developed by figures
such as Alain Badiou and Jodi Dean, theorists who approach communism as
a matter of subjectification and collective desire.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_73" id="endref_73">73</a><br />
<br />
Arguing that, against the “democratic drive” that now dominates
on the Left, “communist desire designates the subjectification of the
gap necessary for politics, the division within the people,” Dean has
insisted that “this subjectification is collective — our desire and our
collective desire for us…Communist desire is a desire for collectivity…
the desire for collective desiring.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_74" id="endref_74">74</a>
Against this framework of collective desire for collectivity,
Dean criticizes Badiou for emphasizing acts of “individual decision and
will.” “Such an emphasis,” she writes, “thereby assents to capitalist
form, rendering communism as just another content, and object of
individual desire rather than the desire for a collective subject. In
Badiou’s version,” she adds, “the individual’s active participation in a
new subject doesn’t even require any radical change on the part of the
individual — he or she can remain ‘the individual that he or she is.’
What gets lost is the common that gives communism its force.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_75" id="endref_75">75</a><br />
<br />
I gesture towards this debate here merely to suggest that
Wright’s text offers a means of mediating between Dean’s emphasis on
collective desire and Badiou’s focus on individual incorporation in the
communist Subject. Wright’s story explores the relationship between
individuality and collectivity<cite></cite> in the precarious light of a
communist horizon; it thus opens up space for discussion about the ways
in which particular individuals may become incorporated (or fail to
become incorporated) within a communist Subject.<br />
<br />
At the same time,
“Bright and Morning Star” recounts Sue’s subjective process in such a
way as to foreground for readers the complex terrain of revolutionary
desire, confronting us with how vexing the struggle to align personal
desire with strategic action can be, of how individualist <cite>form</cite> may subsume communist <cite>content</cite>, even when some notion of a “communist horizon” is ostensibly in view, and a committed communist party at work.<br />
<br />
Sue reminds us that to care about comrades and to dream of destroying
enemies is necessarily to risk excesses of both caution and revenge.
Similarly, to cultivate a will and a revolutionary faith that is up to
the task of sacrifice is to court the fantasy of substitutive martyrdom;
to be willing to die for a symbol of redemption is to risk dying for
the symbol without materializing the redemption as revolutionary praxis.
None of which eliminates the need to nonetheless heroically dare to act
in the face of these dangers. Leaps of faith, like symbols, remain
necessary — despite their dangers. For Wright, the stakes were high; the
role of the revolutionary artist was nothing less than to “fashion
symbols by which his people will live and die….”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_76" id="endref_76">76</a><br />
<br />
As my reading of “Bright and Morning Star” has hopefully made
clear, however, Wright’s radical Thirties fiction was not only concerned
with <cite>fashioning</cite> such finished symbols as heroes to be
upheld — or better yet, fixed beacons or “bright and morning stars,” to
be followed to the red horizon — but equally with depicting the
contradictory potential that symbols and symbolism imply for human
consciousness, and thus for political struggle.<br />
<h2>
<span style="color: #134f5c;">Conclusion: Rethinking the Time-Line and Gender-Lines of Wright’s Class War</span></h2>
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<div class="no-indent">
Our reading of “Bright and Morning Star” sheds new
light on Wright’s famous self-critical comments regarding the original
reception of the 1938 version of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>. Responding to the popular reception of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>,
Wright expressed frustration that the emotional experience of his
stories was preventing readers from grasping their social and political
implications. Famously, he quipped that he “had made an awfully naïve
mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters
could read and weep over and feel good about” (“How Bigger Was Born”).
Critics who reference this famous line of self-critique generally take
it to refer to <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> as a whole, making no
distinction between the 1938 and 1940 versions. But this conflation of
the two editions risks erasing “Bright and Morning Star” from view
altogether. More specifically, it risks blinding us to how “Bright and
Morning Star” does not merely represent a continuation of patterns
established previously in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, but rather in some ways, signifies a significant departure, a reflexive amendment that alters the meaning and impact of the <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> as a (reframed) whole. </div>
<div class="no-indent">
<br /></div>
Notably, Wright’s critique of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> in “How Bigger Was Born” was written and published before<cite></cite> “Bright and Morning Star” appeared as part of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
later that same year. In fact, Wright was working to get his publisher
to add “Bright and Morning Star” (and the “autobiographical sketch” “The
Ethics of Living Jim Crow”) to <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> at
roughly the same moment that he was writing, delivering, developing and
publishing the speech that would become a pamphlet, and soon after an
appendix to <cite>Native Son</cite>.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_77" id="endref_77">77</a> At the very least then, it is misleading to read Wright’s famous self-critical comments on <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
as applying directly to the version that includes “Bright and Morning
Star.”<br />
<br />
Indeed, it would seem more plausible to read “Bright and Morning
Star” as a part of Wright’s own critical reflection on the 1938 version
of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, complicating the triumphal and
cathartic, indeed “baptismal” ending “Fire and Cloud”. Adding “Bright
and Morning Star” to the end of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> thus
can be seen as a challenge to such cathartic modes of reading, a final
warning about how “tears” and individual emotional release — however
well intended — may obscure a clear view of the situation, blinding one
to the actuality of what must be done. Even a “baptism of clean joy”
cannot wash away those contradictions that still linger on beneath the
surface.<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_78" id="endref_78">78</a>
It is thus not only “banker’s daughters” whose emotions risk
blinding them to the realities of social struggle; rather, Wright
suggests, the oppressed themselves can fall victim to the blindness of
cathartic release, the temptation of “total acts” guided by ambiguous
“bright and morning stars.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_79" id="endref_79">79</a><br />
<br />
For those accustomed to seeing Sue as that rare thing, a Richard Wright hero, not to mention, a sympathetic, richly drawn hero<cite>ine</cite>,
the re-interpretation of “Bright and Morning Star” opened up by
Meyerson and developed further here may seem like a symbolic loss: Does
this re-reading merely add more evidence to support Sherley Anne
Williams contention that even at his exceptional best, “Wright’s loving
characterization [of Aunt Sue] also reinforces the image of the black
woman as a symbol of the reactionary aspects in Afro-American tradition
implicit in the preceding three stories [of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>]”?<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_80" id="endref_80">80</a>
Similarly, in her insightful 2009 essay, Cheryl Higashida notes
that the domestic scene of “Bright and Morning Star” can be seen as
limiting the otherwise progressive gender politics of this exceptional
story. “In representing female solidarity arising out of the domestic
sphere, Wright also confines Sue and Reva’s relationship within it.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_81" id="endref_81">81</a> These are valid concerns. And yet, in re-evaluating the gender politics of the closing story of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>,
we would do well to reframe the discussion somewhat.<br />
<br />
For one, can we
not read this politicizing of domestic space as itself a positive,
progressive, even proto-feminist move? Contrary to a certain
masculinist, militant bias that would suggest that the class war is won
primarily on the picket lines and the barricades — an approach
privileging highly confrontational, even overtly violent actions as the
primary site or figure for radical politics — “Bright and Morning Star,”
as we have re-interpreted it, suggests that the struggle may be won or
lost in the “private” sphere, in the kitchen and the pantry. With
“Bright and Morning Star,” Wright revises his famously violent and
bloody collection to suggest that the key moments in the struggle for
communism may involve not (just) guns, but conversations; trust,
comfort, and patience among comrades may be as important as militancy,
political consciousness, or courage.<br />
<br />
Appreciating this aspect of Wright’s work thus means rethinking a
line of Wright criticism that extends back to Zora Neale Hurston’s
original review of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> (in 1938), a review that took to task a version of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> that did not<cite></cite> yet include “Bright and Morning Star.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_82" id="endref_82">82</a>
Notoriously, Hurston accused Wright of offering readers — and
especially black male readers--“wish fulfillment” grounded in violence.
“In each story,” she wrote, “the hero suffers but he gets his man.” To
this she added that “Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to
pass in the entire work” <a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_83" id="endref_83">83</a><br />
<br />
Putting to one side the retaliatory harshness of Hurston’s review as an interpretation of even the 1938 version of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>,
it is tempting to read “Bright and Morning Star” as a kind of reply —
perhaps even a self-corrective one — to Hurston’s critique. That is,
“Bright and Morning Star” certainly does provide us with what may appear
to be violent “wish-fulfillment,” but it presents it in order to
critique it. Sue “gets her man”… and that that isn’t enough<cite>.</cite>
Dramatizing the limits of heroic violent individualist action, Wright
gives us a story that is precisely about the need for “understanding and
sympathy” between comrades, and about how difficult it is to achieve
this combination in the context of race-class struggles in the Jim Crow
South.<br />
<br />
Beyond replying to Hurston, “Bright and Morning Star” suggests not
only that such gun-slinging heroism can be inadequate to the task of
revolution in times of crisis, but that a focus on this dramatic,
climactic, “total” mode of action threatens to blind subjects to the
less dramatic but nonetheless essential social and political tasks,
tasks that remain essential if individual confrontational heroics are
actually to mean anything at all. It’s not just that violence is risky
or inadequate, but that thinking in terms of such “total acts” aimed at
blotting out of the Enemy can blind us to other crucial, collective work
that needs to be done. Embedded in “Bright and Morning Star” then is an
argument for taking seriously the contexts of comradeship, the mundane
habits of speaking and listening, the cultivation of interpersonal
relations — “understanding and sympathy” — traditionally “feminine” and
feminist concerns. Sue’s error is that she reaches for Johnny-Boy’s gun
instead of finding words for Reva.<br />
<br />
In order to change the world, Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star”
suggests, we need to get better at understanding the processes by which
human consciousness changes, as both subject and object of the world it
seeks to shape, and also better at transforming the way comrades relate
to one another, and to the masses of people in their uneven, emerging
political development. In this light, critical examination of the
weaknesses and vulnerabilities of existing political collectivities — or
the contradictions at work in revolutionary symbolism — is not a
diversion or a “retreat” from the “real movement that abolishes the
present state of things.”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_84" id="endref_84">84</a><br />
<br />
It is rather a part of that emancipatory movement, insofar as the
things to be abolished and transformed are not just out there, but also
in here, internal to political consciousness and, indeed, to the
relations between comrades and the people. To become true participants
in such a communist movement, Wright reminds us, is not only a matter of
courageously “showing” the enemy, or of “proving” oneself a hero. It is
a matter of more fully and honestly engaging the masses of people and
fellow comrades alike, in the light of a strategic view of what truly
needs to be done.<br />
<br />
Revolution is not only a matter of producing or
clinging to symbols, but of grasping their meanings more fully, of
making space and time for full and collective communication that can
transcend the social divisions created by white supremacist, patriarchal
capitalism, even in the midst of crisis. Even the best symbol can
buckle or boomerang, if not handled dialectically, critically, and
collectively.<br />
<br />
Here, in the light of his own communist fiction, Wright’s classic
metaphor for revolutionary writing too demands renewed critical
reflection. In <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>, Wright famously wrote of H.L. Mencken as his first radical literary influence: “The man was <cite>fighting with words</cite>.<br />
<br />
He was <cite>using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club</cite> … Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon?”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_85" id="endref_85">85</a>
Here is where the classic quote usually breaks off, with Wright
endorsing the idea of using words “as a weapon.” But Wright goes on:
“No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he
said, but <cite>how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.</cite>”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_86" id="endref_86">86</a>
It’s not the weapon but the will and courage to wield it that
most strikes the young Wright.<br />
<br />
Where does the courage to speak such
fighting truths come from?<br />
<br />
Of course, reading against the grain here,
the idea of using words “as one would use a club” can signify doubly; a <cite>writer’s club</cite> is not only a metaphoric <cite>weapon</cite> that can be gripped by an individual, but also a <cite>group</cite>
where people meet to build trust, to chart the best course, to choose
the best metaphoric weapons, and to gather courage for collective
action. Similarly, Wright’s vision of a writer “fighting with words”
takes on an enriched dialectical meaning in light of the struggle
“Bright and Morning Star” dramatizes, the struggle to ‘mould’ the
‘warped’ materials of an oppressive society in a revolutionary
direction. The struggle is not just to target the enemy (whether with
words or with bullets), but also to cultivate — in oneself and in others
— the courage to speak suppressed truths.<br />
<br />
Words then become not just
“weapons” to be deployed against an enemy, but part of the very terrain
of the struggle to constitute revolutionary collectivity as such. And
so, yes, perhaps we should use Richard Wright’s communist writing as one
would use a <cite>club,</cite> not just as a weapon<cite> but as a collective space for critical reflection in the midst of struggle</cite>.<br />
<br />
As we do so, we might recall that Wright’s own courage to speak so
powerfully was sustained by his participation in the Chicago John Reed
Club, that short-lived worker-writer project that fused his life-work
with mid-20th century Communism.<br />
<br />
As Wright later described that
movement’s passionate call: “It did not say: ‘Be like us and we will
like you, maybe.’<br />
<br />
It said: ‘If you possess enough courage to speak out
what you are, you will find that you are not alone.’”<a href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#end_87" id="endref_87">87</a><br />
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<ol class="endnotes">
<li id="end_1">Here I follow Barbara Foley, who has argued convincingly in her essay, “The Politics of Poetics: Ideology and Narrative Form in <cite>American Tragedy</cite> and <cite>Native Son,</cite>” that Wright’s literary practice in <cite>Native Son</cite>
(New York: Harper Collins, 1993) is aimed more at getting readers to
scrutinize critically the social conditions shaping the narrative before
them than at getting readers to “feel for” or identify with the
protagonist of that narrative. I would add only that while <cite>Native Son</cite>
may be a privileged case of Wright’s “apologue” approach, such a
tendency characterizes a great deal of Wright’s oeuvre. Foley’s essay
can be found in the anthology <cite>Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present</cite>, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. (New York: Amistad, 1993).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_1">back</a></li>
<li id="end_2">My approach differs here from that taken by a critic such
as Sherley Anne Williams, who appears to argue the opposite in her
quite brilliant and illuminating essay “Papa Dick and Sister Woman:
Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright,” in <cite>Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays</cite>,
ed. Arnold Rampersad (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1995).
Williams finds that Wright’s male characters all too often embody a
tradition of “black male heroism” (64) which “tends to foreground black
male protagonists’ struggle for self-definition and against oppression
and their social environment in such a way as to push women into the
“background.” As she writes, “Neither women or ‘women’s questions’
figure centrally in Wright’s fiction; when they appear at all, they are
subsumed under larger philosophical or political themes” (64). I do not
contest that a number of Wright protagonists can be viewed as “heroic”
in the problematically macho sense that Sherley Anne Williams outlines.
My point is precisely that, read closely, and in the wake of the work of
black feminist criticism, these characters no longer appear heroic. I
will go one step further below, to argue that — against the grain of the
“black male tradition” which Williams criticizes — the supposedly
“heroic” characters’ in Wright’s fiction, whatever their own imputed
intentions, <cite>are shown by Wright to fail</cite>, and even, in many cases to <cite>compound rather than to relieve the oppression against which they seek to act</cite>. Williams herself admits that “their acts of heroism” are “often nihilistic and Pyrrhic” (67). <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_2">back</a></li>
<li id="end_3">There are a number of critics for whom Bigger Thomas
represents a “hero” of one sort or another. For an interesting, but to
my mind problematic reading of Bigger as a kind of “existential hero”
see Petar Ramadanovic’s essay “Native Son’s Tragedy: Traversing the
Death Drive with Bigger Thomas,” in <cite>Richard Wright: New Edition,</cite>
ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2009). A more recent, and
very rich reappraisal of Bigger as a positively exemplary figure can be
found in Anthony Dawahare, “Richard Wright’s Native Son and the
Dialectics of Black Experience.” Richard Wright in a Post-Racial
Imaginary, ed. Alice Mikal Craven and Yoko Nakamura (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2014)<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_3">back</a></li>
<li id="end_4">“How Bigger Was Born” <cite>Native Son</cite> (New York:
Harper Collins, 1993) 521. That Wright would later come to equate
somewhat these two social tendencies, (reminding of Hannah Arendt’s
thesis of “two totalitarianisms”) in his 1953 novel <cite>The Outsider</cite>,
should not keep us from seeing the radical distinction he drew between
them earlier. While sharing roots in a common situation of modern
alienation, Communism and Fascism were, for the early Wright,
diametrically opposed social-political responses to that situation.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_4">back</a></li>
<li id="end_5">Richard Wright, <cite>The Outsider</cite> (New York: Harper Collins, 1993).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_5">back</a></li>
<li id="end_6">See for instance Barbara Foley’s essay, “A Dramatic
Picture ... Of Woman from Feudalism to Fascism: Richard Wright’s Black
Hope.” in <cite>Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary</cite>, ed. Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (New York, Bloomsbury: 2014).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_6">back</a></li>
<li id="end_7">The 1938 edition of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
(New York: Harper, 2004) contained in order, “Big Boy Leaves Home,”
“Down by the Riverside,” “Long Black Song,” and “Fire and Cloud.” The
1940 edition added, at Wright’s insistence, the opening
“autobiographical sketch,” “Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” and the closing
story, “Bright and Morning Star.” <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_7">back</a></li>
<li id="end_8">The story was subsequently included in both Edward O’Brien’s <cite>Best American Short Stories of 1939</cite> and <cite>Fifty Best American Short Stories (1914-1939)</cite>.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_8">back</a></li>
<li id="end_9">For present purposes I exclude here Wright’s non-fiction works, such as <cite>Ten Million Black Voices</cite> (1941) and his autobiography <cite>Black Boy</cite> (<cite>American Hunger)</cite>
(1945, 1977). Reverend Taylor, the protagonist of “Fire and Cloud” is
another obvious candidate. His heroism however hinges precisely on his
coming to refuse individualist leadership over or apart from “the
people.” In effect, I would argue, echoing Gregory Meyerson and others,
that the real hero of “Fire and Cloud” is not so much Taylor as the mass
of militant workers and peasants; Taylor’s major “heroic” contribution
is to realize this basic fact and to step back and out of the way,
merging with and being subsumed by this emerging collective subject.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_9">back</a></li>
<li id="end_10">It is worth noting that the basic arc of Sue’s final
heroism — hiding a gun in a white sheet to shoot the racists who have
violated her loved one — here repeats almost exactly a tale that Richard
Wright would later report having heard and been deeply inspired by as a
child. In his autobiography, <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>, written years after “Bright and Morning Star” and <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children,</cite>
Wright devotes two pages to discussing the overheard story. That Wright
singles out this overheard childhood tale underscores its importance
(to him as a child and/or to him as an author in the mid-1940s).
Moreover, the way he reflects on this story, and its
psychological-emotional resonance in his life, as a kind of symptom of
his sense of powerlessness as a child, has implications for how we
should read the “Bright and Morning Star” version as well. I am treating
this topic in a forthcoming essay.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_10">back</a></li>
<li id="end_11">Sherely Anne Williams “Papa Dick and Sister Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright,” 67.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_11">back</a></li>
<li id="end_12">Williams does qualify her praise a bit, noting that
“Wright’s loving characterization also reinforces the image of the black
woman as a symbol of the reactionary aspects in Afro-American tradition
implicit in the preceding three stories” (Williams 67). <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_12">back</a></li>
<li id="end_13">Cheryl Higashida, “Aunt Sue’s Children: Reviewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism” (<cite>Bloom’s Modern Critical Views New Edition of Richard Wright</cite>,
ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2009) 89. In this essay, she
invaluably locates Sue within an emergent discourse of interracial
proletarian solidarity that emerged during the Communist-led effort to
free the Scottsboro Boys, arguing that “Sue is Wright’s rendition of a
Popular Front symbol — the radical black mother” (86). “In contrast to
her sons’ monolithic Communism that uncritically privileges class over
race and gender,” she continues, “Sue constantly negotiates and
eventually transcends the contradictions between black nationalism and
Communist integrationism.”<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_13">back</a></li>
<li id="end_14">For a range of readings of the story that reproduce this
heroic interpretation of the ending, despite their marked differences
in other areas, see: Edward Margolies, “Wright’s Craft: The Short
Stories” in Gates and Appiah, <cite>Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present</cite> (New York: Amistad, 1993). Richard Yarbrough’s introduction to Richard Wright, <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), ix-xxix, especially xxvi-viii; Barbara Foley, <cite>Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941</cite> (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 206-9; Abdul JanMohamed, “Rehistoricizing Wright: “Psychopolitical Functions of Death in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>” in <cite>Richard Wright</cite> (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views), ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House) 191-228; and Anthony Dawahare, <cite>Nationalism, Marxism and African American Literature between the Wars</cite> (Oxford: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2003) 117. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_14">back</a></li>
<li id="end_15">For a recent example, see A. C. Kilinski’s “Flinging a
New Star: ‘Fire and Cloud’ and ‘Bright and Morning Star’ as Reflections
of Richard Wright’s Changing Relationship with Communism,” <cite>Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies</cite> 5.1 (2012). <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_15">back</a></li>
<li id="end_16">Gregory Meyerson, “Aunt Sue’s Mistake: False Consciousness in Richard Wright’s ‘Bright and Morning Star’” <cite>Reconstruction: Studies in Culture</cite>, <a href="http://reconstruction.eserver.org/issues/084/meyerson.shtml"><span class="Hyperlink-0">http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/084/meyerson.shtml</span></a>,
ed. Graham Barnfield and Joseph G. Ramsey. The conclusion of the essay
offers a useful reader-response analysis of what may account for the
universal misreading of this widely hailed story. To date, I am not
aware of a single scholarly citation of Meyerson’s 2008 article.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_16">back</a></li>
<li id="end_17"> Gregory Meyerson, “Aunt Sue’s Mistake: False Consciousness in Richard Wright’s ‘Bright and Morning Star.’”<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_17">back</a></li>
<li id="end_18">Richard Wright “Bright and Morning Star” <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> (New York: Harper, 2004) 235.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_18">back</a></li>
<li id="end_19">Richard Wright “Long Black Song” <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
(New York: Harper, 2004) 153. Uttering this statement, Silas initiates a
gun battle that he knows will lead to his death, leaving his wife Sarah
and their newborn baby destitute, homeless, and abandoned. Whatever
their symbolic force, such individual ‘heroics’ leave the others in the
story no better off. Positive appraisals of Silas’s last stand, such as
George Yarborough’s in the Harper Modern Classic introduction of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
— Yarborough deems Silas and Mann’s choice of death-terms “an
existential triumph of no small order” (xxiv) — demand a great deal of
qualification.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_19">back</a></li>
<li id="end_20">Richard Wright, “Fire and cloud,” <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> (New York: Harper, 2004) 209, emphasis added.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_20">back</a></li>
<li id="end_21">Richard Wright “Fire and could” 210<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_21">back</a></li>
<li id="end_22">This interpretation also casts new light on Wright’s — otherwise quite odd — naming of Mary Dalton’s communist lover in <cite>Native Son</cite>, Jan <cite>Erlone</cite>. In light of Wright’s playing on this trope in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>,
Erlone’s last name calls our attention to the way this would-be
communist has become detached and disconnected from the common people he
would ostensibly serve or represent. A full tracing of Wright’s complex
and evolving negotiation of the relationship between collectivity and
individuality is beyond the scope of this essay. However, readers surely
will agree that from the stories of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, to <cite>Native Son</cite>, to <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>, to <cite>The Outsider,</cite>
while Wright’s work often implies criticisms of actually existing
collectives (from the lynch mobs of the South to the contradiction
ridden Communist Party) he simultaneously explores the dread,
desperation, and often the death to which isolated individuals are
destined, insofar as they attempt or are forced to try to manage their
dangerous situations <cite>erlone</cite>. We might provisionally
conclude that despite its political shifts after 1940, Wright’s work
consistently embodies a negative, anti-individualist politics, if not a
positively collectivist one.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_22">back</a></li>
<li id="end_23">See Meyerson’s discussion of “Down by the Riverside” in <cite>Reconstruction 8.4</cite>.
The two key moments in “Down by the Riverside” are 1) when Mann fails
to ask the pastor to exchange boats — which he knows could allow him to
avoid the police, who are looking for Mr. Heartfield’s stolen vessel;
and 2) when Mann neglects to speak up to the black man Brinkley, to stop
them from heading to the Heartfield’s house, where Mann knows his doom
awaits. A third, less collective moment comes when, after arriving at
the house, Mann briefly considers killing the rest of the Heartfield
family with his axe — a moment that clearly foreshadows Bigger Thomas’s
notorious suffocation of Mary Dalton in <cite>Native Son</cite>.
Meyerson helpfully draws out the way the Wright’s text foregrounds these
silences as moments of self-conscious alienation. Mann knows that he
must speak up, but he cannot bring himself to do so.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_23">back</a></li>
<li id="end_24">We should add here that Wright’s opening story, “Big Boy
Leaves Home,” does provide a more collective model of community
resistance, albeit a defensive one. It is only due to Big Boy’s reliance
on his family, and their reliance on neighbors and networks across the
Black community, that he is able to escape the lynch mob that is looking
for him.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_24">back</a></li>
<li id="end_25">This essay will thus attempt to provide a more
satisfying answer to the question of “What was Wright ‘trying to say’ by
thus subverting his reader’s expectations [in “Bright and Morning
Star”]?” A question to which Meyerson in his essay admits: “I don’t have
a fully convincing answer.” <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_25">back</a></li>
<li id="end_26">The most extended of several passages clarifying this
point comes on page 244: “Then all the horror of it flashed upon her;
[Sue] saw flung out over the rainy countryside an array of shacks where
white and black comrades were sleeping; in the morning they would be
rising and going to Lem’s; then they would be caught. And that meant
terror, prison, and death. The comrades would have to be told; she would
have to tell them; she could not entrust Johnny-Boy’s work to another…”<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_26">back</a></li>
<li id="end_27">The Aunt Sue-Reva relationship has been insightfully
explored in somewhat competing ways by Sherley Anne Williams and by
Cheryl Higashida. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_27">back</a></li>
<li id="end_28">For an overview of Wright’s depictions of white women,
an account that does not attend to Reva’s exceptional status, see Tara
T. Green “The Virgin Mary, Eve, and Mary Magdalene in Richard Wright’s
novels. In <cite>Richard Wright: New Edition</cite> edited by Harold Bloom. (New York: Chelsea House, 2009) 35-53.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_28">back</a></li>
<li id="end_29">Richard Wright, “Bright and Morning Star” 231.That Sue
refers to Reva as “the brightest glow,” using language so close to the
symbolically overdetermined title of Wright’s story, “Bright and Morning
Star” again suggests the importance, perhaps even the emblematic
status, of the Sue-Reva relationship. We will return to this symbolism
below.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_29">back</a></li>
<li id="end_30">Richard Wright, “Bright and Morning Star” 250-251.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_30">back</a></li>
<li id="end_31">Once she is sound asleep, Sue fetches the pistol from
the dresser beside her bed, watching the young communist sleep as she
quietly gathers the weapon. Re-read in light of Sue’s mistake, this
scene ominously foreshadows Booker Thomas’s silent smothering of (white
communist fellow traveler) Mary Dalton in the crucial scene of Wright’s <cite>Native Son</cite>.
And indeed, Sue’s fear of disturbing Reva leads inexorably to death,
destruction, and police repression in the community every bit as much as
Bigger’s suffocating Mary, an act which is similarly executed to
prevent a racially tinged misunderstanding from coming between a Black
person and his would-be white allies. Sue now appears as a forerunner
for Bigger Thomas. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_31">back</a></li>
<li id="end_32">It’s also worth noting here the uncanny similarity between the name <cite>Reva</cite> and <cite>Eva</cite>,
the name of the main romantic interest and potential artistic comrade
(another young white woman) that Cross Damon briefly connects with but
ultimately drives to death (by suicide) in Wright’s later novel, <cite>The Outsider</cite>.
As with the Sue-Reva relationship, the major tension and struggle
structuring the Damon-Eva relation — and arguably the book’s climactic
section itself — is the question of whether it is possible to fully and
meaningfully communicate across racial lines. Though he knows what he’d
like to say to Eva, Damon Cross doubts that Eva’s life-experience and
worldview will allow her to accept him and his situation in all its
complexity (and horror). Indeed, in some ways, like the disconnect in
“Bright and Morning Star” (to be discussed further below), Eva’s very
(romanticizing, oversimplifying) sympathy for oppressed black people —
or at least Damon’s perception of this sympathy — becomes not just a
bridge but ultimately a barrier to meaningful mutual understanding.
Unlike in “Bright and Morning Star,” however, Damon does finally spill
his heart out to Eva, though never in its full complexity (he too is
convinced that Eva can’t handle the truth), and only after he has
committed a number of irreversible and violent acts. Shocked by his
confessions (of murder as well as love) Eva leaps to her death through a
window, in a sense confirming Damon’s sense that she could never
understand him. While a full discussion of the parallels, similarities,
and differences between the various scenes of failed interracial
communication in Wright’s work — even or especially between would-be
intimates — demands more space than the present essay offers, we can at
least observe here that Wright’s concern with the complex psychological
and cultural barriers to interracial communication — even and perhaps
especially between would-be friends, lovers, comrades, and confidantes —
runs through from his earliest to his latest fiction. Closely related
to this is Wright’s ongoing concern with exposing and challenging white
liberals and communists idealization of black people. Such a
de-idealizing of “the oppressed black masses” can be seen as a black-red
thread running through “Bright and Morning Star” (among other stories
in <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>), <cite>Native Son</cite>, as well as <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>, and <cite>The Outsider</cite>. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_32">back</a></li>
<li id="end_33">“Bright and Morning Star” 229.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_33">back</a></li>
<li id="end_34">“Like a gleaming sword above her head” (221), a “blade of light” (226). <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_34">back</a></li>
<li id="end_35">For an astute discussion of this concept, see Zizek “The
Interpassive Subject,” Talk given at Centre Georges Pompidou, 1998. A
classic example is that of belief in Santa Claus, as it operates in
households with children approaching adolescence. The parents don’t
believe — but think (or want to believe) that the kids do. The kids
don’t believe — but don’t want to disturb their parents’ belief that
they still do. Each ‘believes’ for the other. They don’t believe in
Santa Claus, but believe in the other’s belief in Santa Claus, or (in
the case of the child who performs belief for the parents) believe that
the other still believes in one’s own belief. The fascinating thing of
course is that the entire ritual can continue, and can retain its
“magic,” even as none of the participating parties “actually” believe in
old Kris Kringle. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_35">back</a></li>
<li id="end_36">“Bright and Morning Star” (229)<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_36">back</a></li>
<li id="end_37">Again, this may or may not be in fact the case; what Reva <cite>actually</cite>
believes or is capable of is another matter; we are dealing here with
Sue’s subjective perceptions, which is all that Wright’s text allows us.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_37">back</a></li>
<li id="end_38">See for instance <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>
where Wright notes that “I talked with white Communists about my
experiences with black Communists, and I could not make them understand
what I was talking about. White Communists had idealized all Negroes to
the extent that they did not see the same Negroes I saw” (339).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_38">back</a></li>
<li id="end_39">Here and elsewhere I use the term <cite>anti-Communist</cite>
to describe ideas or actions that are antagonistic to the particular
institutions, positions, or leadership of the Communist Party; <cite>anti-communist</cite> signifies ideas or actions antagonistic to the ideas and goals of communism as such. Wright’s <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite> is in many respects an anti-Communist text; however, it is not until <cite>The Outsider</cite> that Wright’s anti-Communism slides into outright anti-communism. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_39">back</a></li>
<li id="end_40">Anthony Dawahare brilliantly explores Wright’s use of
“the white mountain” to explore the reification and de-reification of
consciousness in <cite>Native Son,</cite> particularly at the very end
of the novel. This developing treatment of this “white mountain” across
these two late-thirties texts is yet another piece of evidence
suggesting the deep connections between “Bright and Morning Star” and <cite>Native Son</cite>, suggesting the ways in which Aunt Sue is a kind of predecessor for Bigger Thomas. See Dawahare’s “Richard Wright’s <cite>Native Son</cite> and the Dialectics of Black Experience” in <cite>Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary</cite>, ed. Alice Mikal Craen and William E. Dow (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_40">back</a></li>
<li id="end_41">Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” <cite>The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader</cite> ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin, 1995) 199.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_41">back</a></li>
<li id="end_42">“Bright and Morning star” (250, 253).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_42">back</a></li>
<li id="end_43">“Bright and Morning Star” 248.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_43">back</a></li>
<li id="end_44">“Bright and Morning Star” 248.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_44">back</a></li>
<li id="end_45">“Bright and Morning Star” 248-249.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_45">back</a></li>
<li id="end_46">“Bright and Morning Star” 249, emphasis added<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_46">back</a></li>
<li id="end_47">“Bright and Morning Star” 231.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_47">back</a></li>
<li id="end_48">The role that perceptions of time and depictions of temporality play in this story, and across <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, deserves further study.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_48">back</a></li>
<li id="end_49">“Bright and Morning Star” 229.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_49">back</a></li>
<li id="end_50">“Bright and Morning Star” 229-230.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_50">back</a></li>
<li id="end_51">This recalls also the moment in “Long Black Song,” where
Silas’s long speech addressed to the dead white man, is juxtaposed to
his failure to communicate with his wife, Sarah. “He began to talk to no
one in particular; he simply stood over the dead white man and talked
out of his life…” (<cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> 152).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_51">back</a></li>
<li id="end_52">“Bright and Morning Star” 225<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_52">back</a></li>
<li id="end_53">One could perhaps speak here of a distinction between a <cite>subject of rebellion</cite> — aimed at gaining recognition from an oppressor (or an oppressive system), and a <cite>subject of revolution</cite>,
which aims not to gain recognition from an oppressor, but to supplant
that oppressor (or oppressive system) entirely. Paulo Freire addresses
the issue in the opening chapter of <cite>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</cite>
(New York: Continuum, 2000): “The oppressed, having internalized the
image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of
freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it
with autonomy and responsibility.”<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_53">back</a></li>
<li id="end_54">“Bright and Morning Star” 239-240, emphasis added.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_54">back</a></li>
<li id="end_55">“Bright and Morning Star” 240, emphasis added.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_55">back</a></li>
<li id="end_56">“Bright and Morning Star” 251.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_56">back</a></li>
<li id="end_57">This itself is an interesting fact, considering, as
Cornell West has recently put it, Wright’s status as “the most secular
thinker the Black tradition has ever produced.” <cite>Black Prophetic Fire: in Dialogue with and Edited by Christa Bushendorf</cite> (Beacon Press, 2014) 22.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_57">back</a></li>
<li id="end_58"> Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” 198-199.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_58">back</a></li>
<li id="end_59">For Wright’s most sustained critical — but also deeply dialectical — treatment of the Church, see <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>, “Part One: Southern Night.” <cite>Twelve Million Black Voices</cite>
(New York: Basic Books, 2008) also engages the contradictory —
ideological, but also utopian — tendencies at work in the Black Church. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_59">back</a></li>
<li id="end_60">“Fire and Cloud,” 204 and “Bright and Morning Star” 225.
Wright was not merely imagining this christian-communist dialectic. For
the classic study of the syncretic practices that characterized
Communist work in the Jim Crow South, see Robin Kelley’s <cite>Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression</cite> (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990). <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_60">back</a></li>
<li id="end_61">“Fire and Cloud” 220.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_61">back</a></li>
<li id="end_62">“Bright and Morning Star” 224.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_62">back</a></li>
<li id="end_63">Sue sings, “He’s the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and
Mawnin Star / He’s the fairest of Ten Thousand T Mah Soul” (222), as she
hopes for Johnny-Boy’s return in time for supper. While an earlier
verse of this hymn — “Though all the world forsake me, and Satan tempt
me sore, / Through Jesus I shall safely reach the goal,” — makes it
clear that the song refers to Jesus, the lines Wright includes in
“Bright and Morning Star” do not.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_63">back</a></li>
<li id="end_64">Just to show how open this startling title-secret has
been for some time: As of August 9, 2013, a Google search for the phrase
“Bright and Morning Star,” retrieves the following top ‘results’: <cite>“Is
the Morning Star in the Bible Jesus or Lucifer?”; “The Bright and
Morning Star — Jesus of Lucifer?; “Why are both Jesus and Satan referred
to as the Morning Star?”</cite> Among other intertextual signs that
Wright was often thinking about the coincidence of Christ/Antichrist we
can include: his writings on Seventh Day Adventism; his paraphrase of
black church doctrine in <cite>12 Million Black Voices</cite> (68-75),
where both Satan/Lucifer and God/Jesus are depicted as “going down” to
earth; and Wright’s later naming of his protagonist in <cite>The Outsider,</cite> Cross Damon. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_64">back</a></li>
<li id="end_65">“Bright and Morning Star” 221, 226.The likening of light
as “blades” also echoes — and gathers ominous association from — the
closing pages of “Big Boy Leaves Homes,” as Big Boy hides from the light
in the back of his Chicago-borne wagon.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_65">back</a></li>
<li id="end_66">“Ah got to make her go t bed! Yes; Booker would tell the
names of the comrades to the sheriff. If she could only stop him some
way! <cite>That was the answer, the point, the star that grew bright in the morning of new hope</cite>….
Ah could wade the creek n beat him [Booker] there…but what would she do
after that? ‘Reva, honey, go t bed. Ahem alright. Yuh need res.”
(250-1, emphasis added).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_66">back</a></li>
<li id="end_67">In “Aunt Sue’s Mistake: False Consciousness in Richard
Wright’s ‘Bright and Morning Star,’” Meyerson offers some compelling
reader reception analysis near the end of the “Aunt Sue’s Mistake”
essay. “That Wright’s closing story, and hence his collection as a
whole, has been so long misread, that Sue’s narcissistic death-dream has
been mistaken for a radical and heroic encounter with reality, even on
the left, is perhaps testimony to the continuing power that such
fantasies of the “total act” continue to exert on contemporary readers.”<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_67">back</a></li>
<li id="end_68">In a sense we can see false consciousness here (in a
political register) as somewhat analogous to Marx’s famous critique of
commodity fetishism (in an economic one). In the first chapter of <cite>Capital vol. 1,</cite>
Marx traces the way in which the mystified consciousness of fetishism
is not merely a matter of ideology, but is the effect of actual social
relations of production; the crucial corollary is that to abolish,
overcome, and transform this fetishism of commodities requires not just
scientific discovery, but an actual revolutionary transformation of the
social relations that give rise to this mystification. Similarly, one
could hypothesize that the individualist errors Sue makes cannot be
educated away in a direct sense, but only by addressing the lack of
collectivity of which “individualism” is a symptom; communist
consciousness requires communist social relations within the movement
itself! <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_68">back</a></li>
<li id="end_69">“Bright and Morning Star” 221. This is in accordance
with Johnny-Boy’s belief that class commonality is more fundamental than
racial difference, and that, furthermore, practically speaking, it is
impossible to grow the party if one maintains a stance of suspicion
towards potential comrades (234).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_69">back</a></li>
<li id="end_70">For a very clear and useful review of Richard Wright as a
writer deeply committed to Marxism and the communist cause, see James
Smethurst’s essay, “After Modernism: Richard Wright Interprets the Black
Belt,” <cite>Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary</cite>, ed. Alie Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (Bloomsbury: New York, 2014).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_70">back</a></li>
<li id="end_71">Likewise, we can see “Bright and Morning Star” as
offering a sobering counterpoint to more triumphalist tendencies in
proletarian literature or socialist realism, which, though — contrary to
anti-communist stereotypes — seldom depicting the revolutionary road
ahead as an easy one or victory as inevitable, often did suggest that
the revolutionary consciousness that had been gained would not be easily
lost. This counterpoint becomes clear when one juxtaposes “Bright and
Morning Star” to one of Wright’s likely models for this story, Maxim
Gorky’s <cite>Mother</cite>. I take up the many textual relations of these two works in a forthcoming essay.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_71">back</a></li>
<li id="end_72">For a compelling formal account of communist political subjectivization see the closing chapter on Alain Badiou’s <cite>The Communist Hypothesis</cite> (New York: Verso, 2010). Also see Badiou’s <cite>The Rebirth of History: Living in a Time of Riots</cite>. (New York: Verso, 2012). <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_72">back</a></li>
<li id="end_73">See Dean’s penultimate chapter, “Desire” in <cite>The Communist Horizon</cite> (New York: Verso, 2012). Notably, Dean’s most recent book, <cite>Crowds and Party</cite>
(Verso, 2016) published while the present essay was in production,
turns to the Chicago section of Richard Wright’s autobiography <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>
in order to develop her account of the relationship between
individuality and collectivity in the U.S. Communist Party the 1930s. I
review Dean’s discussion of these issues — and of Wright’s treatment of
them — in a forthcoming essay.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_73">back</a></li>
<li id="end_74">Jodi Dean, <cite>The Communist Horizon,</cite> 179, 197, 199.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_74">back</a></li>
<li id="end_75"><cite>The Communist Horizon</cite> 195. <a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_75">back</a></li>
<li id="end_76">“Blueprint for Negro Writing” 199.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_76">back</a></li>
<li id="end_77">The “Note on the text” in the Harper Perennial edition of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>
points out that Wright wanted “Bright and Morning Star” added to the
1938 edition of the text, but was refused by publishers. Rejected,
“Bright and Morning Star” first appeared in <cite>The New Masses</cite> in May 1938, two months after the appearance of the first edition of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>.
Wright offered to pay the costs of adding “Bright and Morning Star” to
the 1940 edition out of his own pocket (298). Apparently, he felt it was
important that the story be added to the volume.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_77">back</a></li>
<li id="end_78">A recent essay by April Conley Kilinski does explore the
rupture signified by adding “Bright and Morning Star” (and “The Ethics
Of Living Jim Crow”) to <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite> in 1940.
Kilinksi however argues in a direction diametrically opposed to the
present project, arguing that the addition of “Bright and Morning Star”
represents the beginning of a mid-to-late-Thirties <cite>anti-communist</cite>
turn in Wright’s work, rather than a swerve within that continued
pro-communist orientation. Kilinksi’s interpretation, which would date
Wright’s break with the Communist party and with communism in 1937,
hinges on a seriously flawed reading of both Wright’s 1937 essay
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” and his later biography <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite>.
Lacking the space to refute in full here, I will just note that the
linchpin of the misinterpretation is Kilinski’s erasure of the
explicitly pro-Marxist and implicitly pro-communist perspective in both
of these texts. She also ignores the fact that in 1937, for instance,
Wright wrote over 200 article for the pro-Communist <cite>Daily Worker</cite> newspaper, and would continue producing fiction, poetry, and journalism for pro-Communist publications such as <cite>The New Masses</cite>
for years to come. See A.C. Kiliniski “Flinging a New Star: ‘Fire and
Cloud’ and ‘Bright and Morning Star’ as Reflections of Richard Wright’s
Changing Relationship with Communism” in <cite>Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies</cite>: Vol. 5, No. 1, 2012.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_78">back</a></li>
<li id="end_79">Perhaps then we can say of emotional catharsis what Sue
says at the very outset of “Bright and Morning Star,” lines which, for
readers of <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children</cite>, come but a page after Rev.
Taylor’s teary-eyed epiphany at the end of F&C: “Rains good n bad.
It kin make seeds bus up thu the groun, er it kin bog things down lika
watah-soaked coffin” (221).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_79">back</a></li>
<li id="end_80">“Papa Dick and Sister Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright,” 67.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_80">back</a></li>
<li id="end_81">“Aunt Sue’s Children: Reviewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism” 91.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_81">back</a></li>
<li id="end_82">Hurston’s review is at least in part a response to
Wright’s own scathing — and equally uncharitable — criticism of
Hurston’s novel, <cite>Their Eyes Were Watching God</cite>. For a
brilliant critical discussion of Wright and Hurston’s fiction that
complicates the operative opposition that frames much “debate” about
these two writers, see William Maxwell “Black Belt/Black Folk: The
End(s) of the Richard Wright –– Zora Neale Hurston Debate,”<cite> New Negro, Old Left</cite>: <cite>African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars</cite> (New York: Columbia UP, 1999).<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_82">back</a></li>
<li id="end_83">Zora Neal Hurston, “Stories of Conflict,” <cite>Saturday Review of Books.</cite> April 2, 1938, 32-33<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_83">back</a></li>
<li id="end_84"><cite>Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The German Ideology</cite> ed. Chris Arthur<cite></cite> (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) 56-57.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_84">back</a></li>
<li id="end_85">Wright, <cite>Black Boy (American Hunger).</cite> The first part only is quoted in the Yarborough introduction to <cite>Uncle Tom’s Children,</cite> xiii.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_85">back</a></li>
<li id="end_86"><cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite> 248, emphasis added.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_86">back</a></li>
<li id="end_87"><cite>Black Boy (American Hunger)</cite> 318.<a class="return" href="http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/heroic-mistake#endref_87">back</a></li>
</ol>
</article>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-47716071296867256162017-03-28T19:23:00.003-04:002017-03-28T19:23:28.185-04:00VIDEO: Luister (Listen)- Deep Racism at South Africa's Stellenbosch University<span style="color: #351c75;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Luister (Listen)- Deep Racism at South Africa's Stellenbosch University</b></span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYWl6qDYOu2dFm4YASzo7c-NUb9NHTyXlFYtBwThlcmWz1Lq2pt_guUdFOgRuYG4c59JF_A6zxudBrADReXBm3qN6sZUXGc8G3qWhpVKsXfMtpiKS7ly8YtP80AzwTbL5HL9Q/s1600/luister+video.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYWl6qDYOu2dFm4YASzo7c-NUb9NHTyXlFYtBwThlcmWz1Lq2pt_guUdFOgRuYG4c59JF_A6zxudBrADReXBm3qN6sZUXGc8G3qWhpVKsXfMtpiKS7ly8YtP80AzwTbL5HL9Q/s640/luister+video.png" width="640" /></a></div>
Luister is a documentary about the lives of students of colour who
attend Stellenbosch University, a South African institution of higher
learning. In a series of interviews, students recount instances of
racial prejudice that they continue to experience in the town of
Stellenbosch, and the enormous challenges that they face due to the use
of Afrikaans as a language of teaching at the university. Luister is a
film about Afrikaans as a language and a culture. It is a film about the
continuing racism that exists within a divided society. It is a film
about a group of students whose stories have been ignored. Luister is
the Afrikaans word for Listen.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sF3rTBQTQk4" width="560"></iframe>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-37307267304148155892017-03-27T13:58:00.000-04:002017-03-27T13:58:07.566-04:00BlackFoto Exhibit: “#1960NOW” creates a type of dialogue and solidarity between two generations and their methods of activism<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Black Artist Captures the Current Black Struggle with Passion and Compassion</b></span></span></span><br />
<h2>
Photographer Sheila Pree Bright demonstrates how little has changed in exhibit “#1960NOW”</h2>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmAgEUeFyNJdQf3r54Od1aHg-aYRKsU_TVOM5nj0HPIVHY4rSEHnIDQoa2r0sCaEdiiP1NO5FQOpioCnM0VOYdJTA9HSpgGNwVeRkSyLCWnC0dgV3UqgyGD_gKr8C4tgoham8/s1600/Sheila-Pree-Bright-NewPortrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmAgEUeFyNJdQf3r54Od1aHg-aYRKsU_TVOM5nj0HPIVHY4rSEHnIDQoa2r0sCaEdiiP1NO5FQOpioCnM0VOYdJTA9HSpgGNwVeRkSyLCWnC0dgV3UqgyGD_gKr8C4tgoham8/s640/Sheila-Pree-Bright-NewPortrait.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Through film, portraits and protest images, Bright connects activists from the 1960s with those of today </b></i></span></div>
<br /><b>VIDEO: http://www.salon.com/2017/03/27/photographer-sheila-pree-bright-demonstrates-how-little-has-changed-in-exhibit-1960now/</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">There are images of </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/06/28/who-is-bree-newsome-why-the-woman-who-took-down-the-confederate-flag-became-an-activist/?utm_term=.de6b2452ee05" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bree Newsome</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, the woman who scaled a pole and removed the Confederate flag in North Carolina; </span><a href="http://www.myajc.com/news/lonnie-king-more-than-five-decades-later-work-remains/0wSUjKa6GcjuJaAZDtQooJ/" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lonnie King Jr.</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, who co-founded the Atlanta Student Movement and led sit-ins in segregated establishments during the civil rights movement; </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwHvCy-a-Pg" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kwame Rose</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, who confronted Geraldo Rivera of Fox News about its biased reporting during protests in Baltimore; </span><a href="https://ndaraya.wordpress.com/2016/09/28/roslyn-pope-atlanta-student-movement-icon/" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rosyln Pope</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, who drafted </span><a href="http://www.crmvet.org/docs/aa4hr.htm" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">an appeal for human rights</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in 1960; </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/storywall/transgender-today/stories/raquel-willis" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Raquel Willis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,
a trans activist and writer of color. These are just some of the icons
photographed by artist-photographer Sheila Pree Bright for her exhibit
“1960NOW.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bright
lives in Atlanta and began her project by photographing and discovering
lesser-known activists from the civil rights movement and the city’s
profound organizing history. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Then Trayvon Martin was killed.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">So she
felt compelled to get on the ground and inside communities to capture
“the pain, the love and the frustration” of the Black Lives Matter
movement that was growing across the country, Bright said. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Her
portraits evolved from a body of work called “#1960WHO” to become
“#1960NOW.” Her framework became intergenerational and she took
portraits “of the elders and the young people to talk about our
humanity,” she said. Bright photographed in Ferguson, Missouri;
Baltimore, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The portraits have a tight focus on the eyes and only in one does a subject smile.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“I
wanted them to show confidence,” Bright said. But Charles Black — a
leader in the Atlanta Student Movement in the 1960s — even smiled in
his portrait. “I don’t want you to smile,” Bright instructed. Black
replied to her, “That’s how I got through the movement.”</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5xl9y-_WEqzZX03M8Dv52mqMGYeNRoPhNWYErhP4Zt0bgRyzDQ7MbXXgoj-4nu82x_Hof7E_6j7iAqRBQVGdy7X_0xd42-p_X5qWlxQHMWy5_Af7TqQJuWPINTCMUpn76bDc/s1600/we+are+not+disposable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5xl9y-_WEqzZX03M8Dv52mqMGYeNRoPhNWYErhP4Zt0bgRyzDQ7MbXXgoj-4nu82x_Hof7E_6j7iAqRBQVGdy7X_0xd42-p_X5qWlxQHMWy5_Af7TqQJuWPINTCMUpn76bDc/s640/we+are+not+disposable.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
“<b>#1960NOW</b>”
calls on viewers to seriously explore the connections between the civil
rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. It puts aside
differences in leadership modes and the debate over <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-rise-of-respectability-politics" target="_blank">respectability politics</a>. “#1960NOW” creates a type of dialogue and solidarity between the two generations and their methods of activism.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">There’s
Mike Brown Sr., father of the slain Ferguson teen, marching with his
head down and wearing a hoodie that reads, “Mike Brown chosen for
change.” There’s singer-actor Janelle Monae, with her eyes closed, her
head tilted back in anguish. There are three young girls holding signs
staring intensely, a woman with tears pouring down her face that are
visible even from behind her large sunglasses.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“It
becomes very emotional being on the ground. I’m not on the sidelines
photographing, I get within the march and walk with them, and talk with
them, and photograph,” Bright said. “I’m not just clicking the shutter
of the camera, I’m looking for moments.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Although
Bright describes herself as an observer, she resists being labeled a
photo journalist. There was a deliberate effort on her part to show the
nuance of the Black Lives Matter movement that many mainstream media
outlets had missed, she said. “They depict angry black males; they’re
thugs; they’re criminals,” she said about how mainstream outlets have
represented communities of color, which results in mistrust. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="toggle-group target hideOnInit" data-toggle-group="story-14723552" style="opacity: 1;">
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“I
want you to see the pain,” she said about her work. “I want you to feel
these people and look at these black bodies as human.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">But
this wasn’t so easy to accomplish. Bright was in Baltimore when Freddie
Gray passed away and the following day when protests began. “I didn’t
know anybody, and I literally got cussed out. They said ‘we don’t want
you here’ — because the only time that you come into these neighborhoods
is for something negative.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“So
I had to gain their trust and I started talking to a woman that lived
in the community,” Bright said. A woman opened her home and became
Bright’s entry and guide to the neighborhood. “In all of my work, even
if it wasn’t a protest . . . they had to trust me.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">There’s
a film component to the exhibit as well. Like the photographs, it’s a
mashup of iconic moments in the history of black protest: Nina Simone
declaring the artist must </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qL3nHvliN4" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reflect</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the times; Janelle Monae chanting “</span><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sandra Bland</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” in New York City; speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and </span><a href="http://www.biography.com/people/stokely-carmichael-9238629" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kwame Ture</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Kwame Rose going toe-to-toe with the Fox News anchor. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">“On
the ground, young people were saying to me, ‘We are fighting the same
fights our parents and our grandparents were fighting.’ So I wanted to
show that connection through film,” Bright said.</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpw9athhIJb6mL0YKOt1Hxq-wgWe93P8vLQOei_Dbh_UBI-EHt03LOBN9hGmJqXUqc_bqS8cunKzkLeWAgbt9sHeRd_kM8X3f0ssmHI6mCGlkbaymi25cApavxEdcWYbbwIkE/s1600/Photographer+Sheila+Pree+Bright.pn+g.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpw9athhIJb6mL0YKOt1Hxq-wgWe93P8vLQOei_Dbh_UBI-EHt03LOBN9hGmJqXUqc_bqS8cunKzkLeWAgbt9sHeRd_kM8X3f0ssmHI6mCGlkbaymi25cApavxEdcWYbbwIkE/s320/Photographer+Sheila+Pree+Bright.pn+g.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><h1>
<span style="color: #0b5394;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Photographer Sheila Pree Bright</i></span></span></h1>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
But by
photographing contemporary activists who are trans, undocumented and on a
spectrum of gender and sexuality, Bright doesn’t gloss over the
engagement with identity politics that is central to Black Lives Matter.<br />
<br />
<div class="inarticle-content_2 in-article">
</div>
For the future, Bright hopes the
commitment to protest, especially under the new administration, remains
sincere.<br />
<br />
“I went to the women’s march in Atlanta and it was a totally
different vibe from me shooting protest images,” she said. “And even
though this was a protest, I felt like it was more like a parade. People
were taking their selfies, they were shaking the cops’ hands and
everybody was just so happy about it, and for me, I was questioning how
long is this going to last?”<br />
<br />
“A lot of these women were mothers,” Bright observed, asking, “Where was the compassion when 12-year-old <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/nov/26/cleveland-video-tamir-rice-shooting-police" target="_blank">Tamir Rice</a> was killed?”<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">For Bright the answer to that question hasn’t been so clear and she wonders whether protesters </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">really
try to learn about one another or if they exist in separate bubbles.
She finds partial engagement to be privileged and unequal.</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">“When a black person or person of color is born, you’re born into the movement,” she said. “Whether you like it or not.”</span><br />
<br />
After
all, one emblematic sign from the women’s march in Los Angeles in
January, carried by Persian-American actor Amir Talai, captured a lot
of attention and <a href="http://fusion.net/story/382776/amir-talai-viral-photo-womens-march-nice-white-ladies-black-lives-matter/" target="_blank">sparked a lot of discussion</a>. “I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next #blacklivesmatter march right?”</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-21376846520860912612017-03-13T12:06:00.000-04:002017-03-13T12:06:43.218-04:00Mass Incarceration Contributes Significantly to the Racial Achievement Gap<h1 class="page-title">
<span style="color: #134f5c;"><span class="title-presub">Mass incarceration and children’s outcomes </span><span class="subtitle">Criminal justice policy is education policy </span></span></h1>
<h1 class="page-title">
<span style="color: #134f5c;"><span class="subtitle"><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>(PDF of report is below)</i></span></span></span></span> </h1>
<div class="entry-meta">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtjzPKC2x_lCNyYiAxMIaGMzGjyqDRHoc7YX5AIWGxduZLd_pKQ66OCLz2BE-HTcLaH7Et7NOvNIaLkPDTz5ffQTGN2sbigJb9nuqdv51SAihm2xHlifRhuDMEpeSVRFuuwIw/s1600/1+in+3+black+men+will+be+imprisoned.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtjzPKC2x_lCNyYiAxMIaGMzGjyqDRHoc7YX5AIWGxduZLd_pKQ66OCLz2BE-HTcLaH7Et7NOvNIaLkPDTz5ffQTGN2sbigJb9nuqdv51SAihm2xHlifRhuDMEpeSVRFuuwIw/s640/1+in+3+black+men+will+be+imprisoned.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="authors">
<span class="loop-type"> </span> </div>
<div class="authors">
• By <b><a href="http://www.epi.org/people/leila-morsy">Leila Morsy</a> and <a href="http://www.epi.org/people/richard-rothstein">Richard Rothstein</a></b> </div>
<div class="authors">
• December 15, 2016 </div>
<div class="authors">
• epi.org </div>
</div>
<h2>
Executive summary</h2>
As many as one in ten African American students has an incarcerated
parent. One in four has a parent who is or has been incarcerated. The
discriminatory incarceration of African American parents is an important
cause of their children’s lowered performance, especially in schools
where the trauma of parental incarceration is concentrated. In this
report, we review studies from many disciplines showing that parental
incarceration leads to an array of cognitive and noncognitive outcomes
known to affect children’s performance in school, and we conclude that
our criminal justice system makes an important contribution to the
racial achievement gap.<br />
Educators have paid too little heed to this criminal justice crisis.
Criminal justice reform should be a policy priority for educators who
are committed to improving the achievement of African American children.
While reform of federal policy may seem implausible in a Trump
administration, educators can seize opportunities for such advocacy at
state and local levels because many more parents are incarcerated in
state than in federal prisons. In 2014, over 700,000 prisoners
nationwide were serving sentences of a year or longer for nonviolent
crimes. Over 600,000 of these were in state, not federal, prisons.<br />
<br />
Research in criminal justice, health, sociology, epidemiology, and
economics demonstrates that when parents are incarcerated, children do
worse across cognitive and noncognitive outcome measures.<br />
<br />
Key findings include:<br />
<ul>
<li>An African American child is six times as likely as a white child to
have or have had an incarcerated parent. A growing share of African
Americans have been arrested for drug crimes, yet African Americans are
no more likely than whites to sell or use drugs.</li>
<li>Independent of other social and economic characteristics, children of incarcerated parents are more likely to:
<ul>
<li>drop out of school</li>
<li>develop learning disabilities, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)</li>
<li>misbehave in school</li>
<li>suffer from migraines, asthma, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and homelessness</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Each of these conditions presents a challenge to student performance.<br />
<br />
To improve their students’ outcomes, educators should join forces with criminal justice reformers to:<br />
<ul>
<li>eliminate disparities between minimum sentences for possession of crack vs. powder cocaine</li>
<li>repeal mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes</li>
<li>encourage President Obama to increase the pace of pardons and commutations in the final days of his term</li>
<li>increase funding for social, educational, and employment programs for released offenders</li>
</ul>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-12547556464562221352017-03-06T15:52:00.002-05:002017-03-06T15:52:27.204-05:00Amilcar Cabral’s Revolutionary Anti-colonialist Ideas<span style="color: #674ea7;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span title="Cabral, culture and resistance">Cabral, Culture and Resistance for the 21st Century Revolutionary Struggle</span></b></span></span><br />
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<span title="Cabral, culture and resistance"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="">
<b class="">Abstract</b><br />
<br class="" />
<span style="color: #741b47;"><i>Racism has been at the core of the expansion of capitalism since its birth in Europe. The extension and domination of capitalism depended critically on the dehumanization of the colonial subject. And fundamental to the process of dehumanization has been the need to destroy, modify or recast the culture of the colonized, for it was principally through culture that the colonized would seek to resist domination and assert their claim to humanity. Drawing on the writings of the Guinea Bissau agronomist, poet, military strategist, and revolutionary leader and theorist, Amilcar Cabral, this essay considers the processes that led to the dehumanization of the people of the continent as part of the liberal project and how culture has been and remains such an important component of the struggle for liberation and the resistance to the dehumanization associated with the current state of liberalism, namely neoliberalism.</i></span></div>
<div class="">
<span style="color: #741b47;"><i><br class="" /></i></span></div>
<div class="">
<div class="">
<span style="color: #741b47;"><i>Warm regards,</i></span></div>
<div class="">
<span style="color: #741b47;"><i><br class="" /></i></span></div>
<div class="">
<span style="color: #741b47;"><i>Firoze Manji</i></span></div>
<div class="">
<br /></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-23561972102727023282017-02-22T11:46:00.000-05:002017-02-22T11:46:00.355-05:00DC: Our Segregated Capital- An Increasingly Diverse City with Racially Polarized Schools<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="color: red;">DC:</span> Our Segregated Capital An Increasingly Diverse City with Racially Polarized Schools</b></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="1" height="700" scrolling="yes" src="https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/8200673/2236994?da=y&ifr=y" width="900"></iframe>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Executive Summary</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Washington was one of the first districts ordered to desegregate by the Supreme Court in<br />l954 when segregation by law was ruled unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of<br />Education. The DC plan that was implemented was not busing or other mandatory<br />desegregation but neighborhood schools, and the city had almost completely resegregated<br />before the busing issue arose elsewhere in the l970s. For decades the city became more<br />and more African American and the school system had only a handful of white students.<br />Since 1980, however, the white population of Washington has climbed considerably, and<br />the black population has dropped sharply because of the exodus of the black middle class,<br />so there no longer is a black majority in DC. From 1980 to 2010 the city’s black<br />population fell 31% while the white population grew 35% and the Latino population<br />soared 210% from a small base. Shortly afterwards the city reached a non-black majority<br />for the first time in more than a half century.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The highly diverse population has not been reflected substantially in school enrollment.<br />The schools are much more segregated than the city or the metro area. Residential<br />segregation remains high in the city but isolation in schools is substantially greater. In<br />other words, many people who live in diverse communities are sending their children to<br />segregated schools.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The District of Columbia enrolls only about one-twelfth of the students in its huge<br />metropolitan area and it has two school systems: District of Columbia Public Schools<br />(called public schools, in this report) and District of Columbia Public Charter School<br />Board, which is not a system but a collection of widely varying publicly funded schools<br />independently run by non-public bodies (called charter schools). During the 2013-2014<br />school year the public schools served 43,307 students and the charters 32,416 students.<br />Both had large black majorities, but the public schools had more diversity with two-thirds<br />(67% ) blacks, one sixth (17%) Latinos, 13% whites, and 2% Asians. In contrast, African<br />American and Latino students comprised 93% of the total charter enrollment where the<br />combined whites and Asian students were slightly more than 5%.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The District of Columbia’s total enrollment in public and charter schools dropped less<br />than 3% from 1992 to 2013, but there was a major redistribution to the charter school<br />sector. In 2013 total enrollment was close to 76,000. The African American share of the<br />total school enrollment declined from 89% to 73% between 1992 and 2013. The<br />percentage of white students doubled over the last two decades from 4% to 9%. The<br />Latino proportion also increased by 8.7 percentage points, and one seventh of students in<br />DC were Latino in 2013. The Asian share remained unchanged as Asian numbers soared<br />in the suburbs.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />Since the charter school movement started in DC in l996 the District’s private school<br />enrollment has plummeted in spite of tuition vouchers, except for white students whose<br />private enrollment is basically unchanged. Many students of color left private schools for<br />charter schools, sometimes the same school converted to a charter. The city also has a</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">small voucher program which helps pay the cost of participating private schools for a few<br />thousand students from low income families.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The charter schools overall have a less diverse and more segregated enrollment than the<br />public schools. Though they are much newer and developed in a period of rapidly<br />increasing diversity in the city, they have attracted few whites and Asians.<br />Black students are by far the most segregated group in the city and the region by race and<br />poverty. The historic extreme segregation of the public schools has modestly diminished<br />while the much newer charters have an even higher level of racial separation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />There has been some gradual and modest progress in reducing segregation. The overall<br />share of African American and Latino students who attended intensely segregated<br />schools (90-100% nonwhite schools) and apartheid schools (99-100% nonwhite schools)<br />decreased between 1992 and 2013 but remained very high. For African American<br />students, nearly 90% of Washington black students went to apartheid schools in 1992, but<br />the percentage dropped to 71% in 2013.<br />Schools segregated by race and class have, on average, clearly weaker educational<br />outcomes.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />In 2013, the combined share of whites and Asians was approximately 10% in the District<br />of Columbia public schools, but these students, on average, attended schools where<br />nearly half of their classmates were white and Asian. In contrast, the combined share of<br />African American, Latino, and Native American students were 88% in 2013, but 93% of<br />the classmates of these students came from the same groups. The region’s growing Latino<br />enrollment is largely outside the District.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />Latino students are a relatively small sector in the city and are significantly less<br />segregated in the city than black students and far less segregated than Latinos are at a<br />national level.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The patterns of intense double segregation are by poverty as well as race. Racial<br />segregation is strongly related to segregation by concentrated poverty, and this double<br />segregation is strongly related to the highly unequal educational outcomes. There are<br />very intense economic and educational gaps by race in DC.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />Students from poor families comprise 67% and 57% of black and Latino students’<br />classmates, respectively, in 2013 while white students in DC had less than one-fourth<br />poor classmates in their schools in the same year.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />In Washington gentrification often involves predominantly white home buyers moving<br />into what had been an historic African American area creating diverse neighborhoods at<br />least for some time as the process unfolds. Gentrification as well as massive black<br />suburbanization have played a major role in changing the share of black and white<br />residents.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">In comparing public and charter schools of the District of Columbia, double segregation –<br />segregation by race and poverty -- was higher in the charter schools where nearly threefourths<br />of the students were low income, and black and Latino students had far more poor<br />classmates than did their Asian and white counterparts. In public schools more than half<br />of students were poor, and black and Latino students tended to attend schools with a far<br />higher percentage of low-income classmates than white students. The percent of black<br />students in a school was highly correlated with the proportion of students living in<br />poverty. There was no significant relationship between the Latino share and the<br />proportion of low-income students, a very different pattern than is found in New York,<br />Chicago, Los Angeles and many cities with larger shares of Latino students.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The report examines both the whole vast metropolitan area and the immediate metro<br />regions comprising DC and the Montgomery, Prince George’s County, Alexandria,<br />Arlington, and Fairfax districts. Except the Prince George’s district, the other districts<br />differed remarkably from Washington DC in terms of student demographics with<br />substantially more white and Asian students. In the Arlington and Fairfax districts, in<br />particular, more than half of the total enrollments were from white and Asian groups. All<br />districts, however, showed significant patterns of school segregation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />There is no evidence that these patterns are self-curing. They are extending into large<br />sectors of suburbia, and the opportunities for diverse schools in the city are not being<br />realized.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />Washington is not the most segregated district in the metro region for black students.<br />The segregation of the large suburban Prince George’s County is even more severe.<br />Prince George’s was one of the nation’s first large suburban districts to experience<br />massive resegregation. (Our previous statewide studies of Maryland and Virginia schools<br />can be found at civilrightsproject.ucla.edu)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The relatively small Alexandria district showed positive potential by enrolling a balanced<br />number of each racial group: whites (27%), blacks (33%), and Latinos (32%). The<br />segregation level in the district was the lowest among the six immediate metro districts.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />This report analyzes the magnitude and trend of racial segregation and its education<br />consequence among schools in the District of Columbia. The report draws on data<br />sources from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Office of the<br />State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). The principal data sources are the Public<br />Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data of 1992, 2002, and 2012 (NCES),<br />the Washington DC’s Comprehensive Assessment Results of 2013 (OSSE), and the<br />Equity Report Data of 2013 (OSSE). These are all public data sets available for<br />independent analysis by other groups or interested residents.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />This report is organized as follows. The first section reviews the social and historical<br />background and context of the District of Columbia. The second section analyzes<br />NCES’s Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data to examine racial and ethnic changes in the nation, Border States, and Washington DC between 1992 and<br />2013. The third section, based on data sources from NCES as well as OSSE, explores<br />Washington DC’s public schools and public charter schools that comprise the two<br />systems of the District of Columbia in order to investigate overall racial and ethnic<br />changes and relationships between racial segregation and academic achievement. The<br />final data section concerns metropolitan areas that surround the District of Columbia to<br />understand school segregation patterns in DC in a larger geographical and sociopolitical<br />context.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />The report ends with the conclusions we draw from the data and a set of<br />recommendations for voluntary action about ways to begin to reverse these patterns based<br />on research and experience in communities across the U.S.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-91831931318952662162017-01-12T12:02:00.002-05:002017-01-12T12:02:20.807-05:00Frantz Fanon: Writings on Alienation and Freedom- His Uncollected Writings<br />
<hgroup>
<h1>
<span style="color: #cc0000;">
Where Life Is Seized</span></h1>
<h1>
<img alt="Fanon speaking in Accra in 1958" height="464" src="https://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/edillus/shtz01_3902_01.jpg" width="520" /> <span style="color: #134f5c;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Fanon speaking in Accra in 1958 </i></span></span></h1>
<h2>
<span style="font-size: small;">Adam Shatz- <span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>lrb.co.uk</i></span></span></h2>
</hgroup>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJbkRa4lzNLfhqsIwAhG-lNz_KfoOqjXQ3MYIt1K7aonwiwAClhBeUU8mxJez7SiDj2YsX2I6h1-9Sf1_2LNrerEYSXGta6TjhIMGFQ2QIqycRcvr53y5_wfok7KFEcOG_K4s/s1600/ecrits-sur-l-alienation-et-la-liberte-frantz-fanon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJbkRa4lzNLfhqsIwAhG-lNz_KfoOqjXQ3MYIt1K7aonwiwAClhBeUU8mxJez7SiDj2YsX2I6h1-9Sf1_2LNrerEYSXGta6TjhIMGFQ2QIqycRcvr53y5_wfok7KFEcOG_K4s/s640/ecrits-sur-l-alienation-et-la-liberte-frantz-fanon.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<ul class="books">
<li><b><cite>Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté</cite> </b>by <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Fanon,+Frantz">Frantz Fanon</a>, edited by <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Young,+Robert">Robert Young</a> and <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Khalfa,+Jean">Jean Khalfa</a><br />
La Découverte, 688pp, £22.00, October 2015, ISBN: 978-2-7071-8638-6</li>
</ul>
<div class="subscriber-ad print-hide" id="OA_aff8600f" title="book review">
</div>
<div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcapslede">Author</span> of the anti-racist jeremiad <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>; spokesman for the Algerian Revolution and author of <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>,
the ‘bible’ of decolonisation; inspiration to Third World
revolutionaries from the refugee camps of Palestine to the back streets
of Tehran and Beirut, Harlem and Oakland; founder, avant la lettre, of
post-colonialism; hero to the alienated <i>banlieusards</i> of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the <i>cités</i>:
Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of
them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent
resistance.</div>
<div class=" mpu" id="article-body">
<div class="edillus" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 520px;">
<br /></div>
Fanon
was not a pacifist, but the emphasis on his belief in violence – or
‘terrorism’, as his adversaries would say – has obscured the radical
humanism that lies at the heart of his work. In her 1970 study, <i>On Violence</i>,
addressed in part to Fanon’s student admirers, Hannah Arendt pointed
out that both his followers and his detractors seemed to have read only
the first chapter – also entitled ‘On Violence’ – of <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>.
There Fanon described how violence could serve as a ‘cleansing force’
for the colonised, liberating them not only from their colonial masters,
but from their inferiority complex. Decolonisation, he suggested, was
nothing less than the ‘creation of new men’ – a notion much in vogue
among 1960s revolutionaries, from Che Guevara to Malcolm X. <i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> has few of the autobiographical, elegiac cadences of his first book, <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>,
but explores the same relationship between racism, colonialism, mental
illness and freedom. Crucially, it ends with a harrowing account of the
mental disorders Fanon encountered as a psychiatrist during the Algerian
War of Independence. The argumentative force of this closing chapter,
and its position in the book, throw doubt on the first chapter. Violence
was never Fanon’s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage
for colonised communities and individuals who had become mentally ill,
in his view, as a result of the settler-colonial project, itself
saturated with violence and racism.<br />
<br />
Like Walter Benjamin, Fanon believed
that for the oppressed, the ‘“state of emergency” in which we live is
not the exception but the rule’, and that his revolutionary duty was to
help ‘bring about a real state of emergency’. Fanon’s clinical work was
the practice that underpinned his political thought. He was only
slightly exaggerating when he estimated that there were ‘more than ten
million men to treat’ in Algeria. For Fanon, colonialism was a
perversity. The coloniser and the colonised were locked together – and
constructed – by a fatal dialectic. There could be no reciprocity, only
war between the two, until the latter achieved freedom.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib2s50NN8UyI91uUf2WZO__N4VObLr7-g6GAWbu9hkStXMBF0v3GbbkUeXERo0u297HOx0YwVeRtcp4lwBpjz9c6ymd2jfj6yYljM2be2TcLzxUmh7_8hlMi_Wy48oA_hIqoo/s1600/SKIFF-2014_-Frantz-Fanon-Painting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib2s50NN8UyI91uUf2WZO__N4VObLr7-g6GAWbu9hkStXMBF0v3GbbkUeXERo0u297HOx0YwVeRtcp4lwBpjz9c6ymd2jfj6yYljM2be2TcLzxUmh7_8hlMi_Wy48oA_hIqoo/s640/SKIFF-2014_-Frantz-Fanon-Painting.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><i><b>A painting of Frantz Fanon at Yolé! Africa.</b></i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The pursuit of freedom lies at the heart of <i>Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté</i>,
an immense new volume of Fanon’s uncollected writings that includes his
youthful literary efforts, psychiatric notes and papers, articles on
Algeria and Third World liberation struggles and correspondence with his
publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert
Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised
– reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a
response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’:
the battlefields of the Second World War, the asylums of North Africa,
clandestine anti-colonial work.<br />
<br />
Fanon was born in 1925 in
Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, the fifth of eight children.
His father, Félix, a customs inspector, was a descendant of free black
cocoa farmers. His mother, Eléanoro, a shopkeeper, was the illegitimate
daughter of a mixed-race couple, and appears to have had ancestors in
Alsace (which accounts for the name Frantz). The <i>békés</i>,
descendants of the white creole elite, owned most of the land in
Martinique, a former slave colony based on sugar production, but Fanon
had little contact with them. He attended the prestigious Lycée Victor
Schoelcher, where his teacher was the poet Aimé Césaire, who had won
praise in Paris from André Breton for his 1939 poem ‘Notebook of a
Return to My Native Land’.<br />
<br />
Césaire was one of the founders of the
Négritude movement, which Fanon admired for its anti-colonialism, but
its appeal to racial authenticity troubled him: he thought of himself as
a son of the French Revolution rather than as an African, and the
struggles in the colonies as a sequel to the storming of the Bastille.
‘Je suis français’ were the first three words he learned to spell.<br />
After
the fall of France in 1940, Admiral Georges Robert, high commissioner
for the French West Indies – known to locals as Tan Robé – threw in his
lot with Pétain. Two French warships were blockaded in the harbour at
Fort-de-France, leaving several thousand white French sailors idle. For
the next three years they behaved like an occupying force. Fanon’s
elders adopted a wait-and-see attitude: why get mixed up in a white
man’s war? Fanon, however, insisted that ‘whenever human dignity and
freedom are at stake, it involves us.’ In 1943 he made his way to
Dominica, paying for his passage with cloth he had stolen from his
father, to enlist in De Gaulle’s army. He was too late: soon after his
arrival in Dominica, Tan Robé surrendered to the Allied forces, and
Fanon was sent home.<br />
<br />
But when the USS <i>Oregon</i> left Fort-de-France in March 1944, he was on board, with a thousand black volunteers and not a single <i>béké</i>.
During training at a camp in Morocco, he discovered a world of
fraternity without equality: white soldiers were at the top of a strict
racial hierarchy, with the <i>tirailleurs sénégalais</i> at the
bottom, and West Indians like himself occupying an ambiguous middle
ground. When his unit passed through Algeria he caught a glimpse of the
country he was to make his own a decade later; in Oran he was shocked to
see Arab children fighting over leftovers in a garbage bin.<br />
<br />
Not
long after landing in southern France, Fanon was wounded in the chest by
a mortar round.<br />
<br />
He was decorated; the citation was signed by Colonel
Raoul Salan, who would be one of the leaders of the French Algerian
putsch in 1961. Fanon took little pride in this honour. He felt, he told
his parents, that he had come to Europe to ‘defend an obsolete ideal’.
‘Never say: he died for the good cause … They are hiding a lot of things
from us.’ He was embittered by his encounters with peasants who
couldn’t be persuaded to fight the Germans and showed little
appreciation for those who did.<br />
<br />
He returned to Martinique to
finish his baccalauréat, took part in Césaire’s campaign for a seat in
the French parliament (on the Communist ticket) and set sail again for
France in 1946 to study medicine. He flirted with the idea of becoming a
surgeon, but dissection put him off, so he chose psychiatry. Lyon in
the first months was grim and unwelcoming, particularly for a young West
Indian, one of only thirty black students in a class of four hundred. A
housing shortage meant that he had to room in a former brothel
requisitioned by the Ministry of Education.<br />
<br />
He helped set up the
anti-colonial Overseas Students’ Association, and moved in Communist
Party circles, but he was more of a literary intellectual than a
militant, a devotee of journals such as <i>Les Temps modernes</i>, <i>Esprit</i> and <i>Présence Africaine</i>;
drawn to existentialism and phenomenology by Merleau-Ponty, whose
lectures he attended; gripped by the engagé theatre of Sartre and Camus,
and the novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading
Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician
of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval,
stocky, obsolete life that awaits me once I’ve finished my studies. I
don’t want “marriage”, children, a home, the family table.’<br />
<br />
Fanon
explored these feelings of antinomian revolt in a trilogy of plays, two
of which are reprinted here. (The third, ‘La Conspiration’, has been
lost.) As the editors point out, Fanon’s youthful protagonists are
driven by his own obsessions: ‘the self-transformation of consciousness
and the pursuit of dis-alienation’. In his 1948 play <i>‘L’Oeil se noie’</i>
(‘The Eye Drowns’), two brothers vie for the affection of a young
woman. ‘There is you and me and we sleep on a bed of wild flowers,’
Lucien, a sensualist, tells Ginette, while his brother François, a
delirious visionary, offers to show her ‘the doors of the Absolute/where
life is seized’. The characters in his 1949 play ‘<i>Les Mains parallèles’</i> (the title was a nod to Sartre’s <i>Les Mains sales</i>)
are possessed by a feverish sense that language itself has become
depleted, fatally severed from the real, as they struggle to reach ‘the
other side of the emaciated Word’. To Young, there is a whiff of
Nietzsche’s vitalism in these plays: the exaltation of individual will
and action, the creative destruction of inherited values.<br />
<br />
The dialogue –
highly formal, yet pulsing with erotic metaphors – owes everything to
Césaire.<br />
<br />
It is Césaire with a white mask, however: the question of
race is nowhere mentioned. In spite of his experiences during the war,
Fanon still identified himself primarily as a Frenchman, and therefore
more white than black. He moved in an almost entirely white world in
Lyon, but with his looks, his playful intelligence and his talent on the
dance floor, he never lacked for partners.<br />
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He had a daughter, <b>Mireille</b> (above),
with a French woman – the relationship collapsed soon after – and in
1949 married another, Marie-Josèphe Dublé, with whom he had a son. Josie
was the daughter of left-wing trade unionists, who embraced their new
son-in-law. She remained his life companion and closest interlocutor,
taking dictation while Fanon composed his thoughts, pacing back and
forth as if delivering a lecture. In <i>Frantz Fanon: A Portrait</i>
(2000), Alice Cherki, a Jewish-Algerian who was one of his interns in
Algeria, argues that this method of composition gave his writing ‘the
rhythm of a body in motion and the cadences of the breathing voice’.<br />
<br />
Outside
the home he shared with Josie, Fanon’s efforts to wish race away proved
impossible.<br />
<br />
Before settling in Lyon, Fanon had tended to see himself as
a Frenchman of Caribbean origin; the ‘real’ blacks, as he saw it, were
Africans like the <i>tirailleurs sénégalais</i>, whom he used to make
fun of as a child in Martinique and later fought alongside in the war.
As a student in France, he experienced a devastating shock when a little
boy saw him pass by and cried out: ‘Look, maman, a Negro, I’m afraid!’
The experience of seeing himself being seen – of being fixed by that
boy’s gaze – provided him with the primal scene of his first book, <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>.
It was hardly an isolated incident. Life in Lyon, even at its most
apparently pleasant, was a series of what we now call micro-aggressions,
from patronising compliments on his French, as if it weren’t his native
tongue, to well-meaning praise of his mind.<br />
<br />
Always in the background
was the implication that, as one of his friends said, he was ‘basically
white’: being articulate and clever were apparently not ‘black’ traits.<br />
<br />
Blacks,
he discovered, were not alone in their predicament. Lyon was home to a
small, isolated community of North African workers, mostly Algerians,
crowded into flats on the rue Moncey. Many complained of unexplained
pains. Their psychosomatic distress had been classified as an imaginary
illness, the ‘North African syndrome’, and attributed to cerebral and
cultural defects.<br />
<br />
For his colleagues, Fanon noted, ‘the North African is
a simulator, a liar, a malingerer, a sluggard, a thief.’ His own work
suggested the opposite: ‘Threatened in his affectivity, threatened in
his social activity, threatened in his membership in the community, the
North African combines all the conditions that make a man sick.’ Racial
marginalisation was a danger to mental health, and the medical
profession was reproducing its effects. Fanon published his findings in
1952 in a powerful essay for <i>Esprit</i>.<br />
<br />
Fanon’s research, as much as his own experiences of racism, informed <i>Black Skin, White Masks,</i>
his great study of the ‘lived experience of the black man’, earlier
mistranslated as ‘the fact of blackness’: for Fanon blackness was not a
fact so much as a racist phantasmagoria. The book is a dazzling work of
bricolage, combining psychiatry, phenomenology, sociology, literary
criticism and sudden eruptions of poetry (his debt to Césaire remained
profound). Published in the same year as Ralph Ellison’s <i>Invisible Man</i>,
the book proposes ‘nothing short of the liberation of the man of
colour’ not only from white supremacy, but from any restrictive
conception of Négritude: ‘The Negro is not. Anymore than the white man.’
Fanon’s argument – that the ‘Negro’ was a creation of the racist
imagination – was adapted from Sartre’s 1946 essay <i>Anti-Semite and Jew</i>,
which argued that the idea of ‘the Jew’ as the other was an invention
of the anti-Semite. Racism had created a shared pathology, a shadow
dance in which ‘the Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man
enslaved by his superiority alike, behave in accordance with a neurotic
orientation.’<br />
<br />
Much of <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i> is devoted to a
forensic analysis of the psychological injuries of racism, particularly
the ‘shame and self-contempt’ it spreads among its victims. Even a
relatively privileged, ‘assimilated’ black man like himself was
‘damned’: ‘When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my
colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of
my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.’<br />
<br />
But how was he to liberate himself from this infernal circle and – as Ta-Nehisi Coates would later put it in <i>Between the World and Me</i>
– ‘live free in this black body’? Fanon was briefly drawn to the racial
romanticism of the Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor, another figure in
the Négritude movement, who claimed that ‘emotion is completely Negro as
reason is Greek’: ‘I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the
irrational. And now how my voice vibrates!’ When he read Sartre’s ‘Black
Orpheus’, an introduction to a 1948 anthology of Négritude poets, he
was taken aback by the condescension: Sartre defended black
consciousness as an ‘anti-racist racism’, but downgraded it to a ‘weak
moment in a dialectical movement’ towards a society free of race and
class oppression. Yet by the end of <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>
Fanon has come to agree.<br />
<br />
The ‘only solution’, he declares, is to ‘rise
above this absurd drama that others have staged around me’ and ‘reach
out for the universal’, the ‘creation of a human world … of reciprocal
recognitions’, rather than seeking refuge in some ‘materialised Tower of
the Past’. If anyone is making that leap, he adds, it is not the
Négritude poets, but the Vietnamese rebels in Indochina, who are taking
their destiny into their own hands.<br />
<br />
Fanon submitted the manuscript of <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>
as his medical thesis, but it was rejected. Instead he wrote a 75-page
thesis on Friedrich’s Ataxia, a hereditary neurological condition often
accompanied by psychiatric symptoms. Fanon’s most reliable biographers –
Cherki and the British historian David Macey, whose book also appeared
in 2000 – have tended to dismiss the dissertation, but Young and Khalfa
make a strong case for its importance. In the very last line of <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>,
Fanon wrote: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who always questions!’
In his thesis, reprinted here in its entirety, we see him cutting
through the compartmentalising assumptions of his profession: the
‘systematic indifference’ of neurologists towards the ‘psychiatric
symptom’, the rigid opposition of mind and body, physical and mental.<br />
<br />
He
is not yet prepared to call for a politicised psychiatry, but he
insists on seeing ‘the human being … as a whole, an indissoluble unity’,
and on the need to investigate what Marcel Mauss called the ‘total
social fact’ – the intricate web of relations, institutions and beliefs
that forms social reality. The mentally-ill person, he writes, is above
all an ‘alienated individual’ who ‘no longer finds his place among men’,
and needs to be reintegrated into ‘the heart of the group’.<br />
<br />
These
ideas were very much in tune with the theories of the man who became
Fanon’s mentor at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole
in the Massif Central. Like Fanon, François Tosquelles was both a doctor
and a resistance fighter, having led the Spanish Republican Army’s
psychiatric services before crossing the Pyrenees in 1939. Under
Tosquelles’s leadership, Saint-Alban had become a sanctuary for
partisans and left-wing intellectuals, including the poet Paul Eluard
and the historian of science Georges Canguilhem. Tosquelles pioneered
‘institutional’ or ‘social’ therapy, which tried to turn the hospital
into a recognisable microcosm of the world outside. The idea underlying
social therapy – and Fanon’s thesis – was that patients were socially as
well as clinically alienated, and that their care depended on the
creation of a structure that relieved their isolation by involving them
in group activities. Fanon spent 15 months at Saint-Alban, and observed
there for the first time patients playing a part in their own recovery.<br />
<br />
In
1953 he took up a post at Blida-Joinville, an enormous, overcrowded
psychiatric hospital about 40 kilometres south of Algiers. He was
responsible for 187 patients: 165 European women and 22 Muslim men.
According to Cherki, he found some of them tied to their beds, others to
trees in the park. They lived in segregated quarters, the women in one
pavilion and the men in another: a mirror of what Fanon would later
describe as the ‘compartmentalised world’ of colonialism. The hospital’s
former director, Antoine Porot, the founder of the Algiers School of
colonial ethno-psychiatry, had justified this segregation on the grounds
of ‘divergent moral or social conceptions’. Several of Fanon’s
colleagues shared Porot’s view that Algerians were essentially different
from Europeans, suffering from primitive brain development that made
them childlike and lazy, as well as impulsive, violent and
untrustworthy. Fanon wrote to a former colleague at Saint-Alban that at
meetings ‘everyone is already tired, as if they sensed the vanity of any
dialogue. It seems that this is specifically North African and that in
no time at all I’ll be knackered too.’<br />
<br />
As a West Indian atheist
who was neither a Muslim ‘native’ nor a white European, Fanon stood at a
lonely remove from both the staff and the residents at Blida. He was
also a colonial administrator, as Macey observes, occupying ‘the
traditional position of the black citizen from an “old colony” with a
civilising mission to perform among the North African or black African
subjects of a “new colony”’. Since he spoke no Arabic or Berber, he
relied on interpreters with his Muslim patients. His closest friends in
Algeria would be left-wing European militants, many of them Jews.<br />
<br />
To
instil a sense of community among the staff – and perhaps to break out
of his solitude – Fanon created a weekly newsletter called <i>Notre Journal</i>.
Young and Khalfa include a number of Fanon’s contributions, which throw
light on his efforts to ‘dis-alienate’ the practice of psychiatry. In
one, he warns that ‘every time we abandon an attitude of understanding
and adopt an attitude of punishment, we are making a mistake.’ In
another, he defines the ‘modern hero’ as ‘someone who carries out his
task each day with conscience and love’. In a striking article published
in April 1954, he questions the spatial isolation of the modern asylum:<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Future
generations will wonder with interest what motive could have led us to
build psychiatric hospitals far from the centre. Several patients have
already asked me: Doctor, will we hear the Easter bells? … Whatever our
religion, daily life is set to the rhythm of a number of sounds and the
church bells represent an important element in this symphony … Easter
arrives, and the bells will die without being reborn, for they have
never existed at the psychiatric hospital of Blida. The psychiatric
hospital of Blida will continue to live in silence. A silence without
bells.</i></blockquote>
Restoring the symphonic order of everyday life
was the goal of social therapy, and Fanon pursued it with vigilance,
introducing basket-weaving, a theatre, ball games and other activities.
It was a great success with the European women, but a ‘total failure’
with the Muslim men. The older European doctors weren’t surprised: ‘You
don’t know them, when you’ve been in the hospital for 15 years like us,
then you’ll understand.’ But Fanon, to his credit, refused to
‘understand’.<br />
<br />
He suspected that the failure lay in his use of ‘imported
methods’, and that he might achieve different results if he could
provide his Muslim patients with forms of sociality that resembled their
lives outside. Working with a team of Algerian nurses, he established a
<i>café maure</i>, a traditional tea house where men drink coffee and
play cards, and later an Oriental salon for the hospital’s small group
of Muslim women. Arab musicians and storytellers came to perform, and
Muslim festivals were celebrated for the first time in the hospital’s
history. Once their cultural practices were recognised, Blida’s Muslim
community emerged from its slumbers. Fanon’s adversaries at the hospital
called him the ‘Arab Doctor’ behind his back.<br />
<br />
‘A revolutionary
attitude was indispensable,’ he concluded in a paper about this
experiment written with Jacques Azoulay, an Algerian-Jewish colleague,
‘since we needed to move from a position where the supremacy of Western
culture was assumed, to a cultural relativism … We had to try and seize
the North African social fact.’ His curiosity about Algeria led him far
outside the hospital gates. Deep in the <i>bled</i> of Kabylia, the
Berber heartland, he attended late night ceremonies where hysterics were
healed in ‘cathartic crises’, and learned of women using ‘white magic’
to render unfaithful husbands impotent. He discovered a more tolerant
attitude towards mental illness: Algerians blamed madness on genies, not
on the sufferer. In his writings on these practices, Fanon never used
the word ‘superstition’. Yet even as he insisted on the specificity of
North African culture, he was careful to avoid the essentialism of the
Algiers School. Like the characters in his plays, he wanted to pierce
the frozen, apparently ‘natural’ surface of reality, and uncover the
ferment beneath it.<br />
<br />
He was fascinated, for example, by the refusal of
Algerian suspects to confess to crimes when presented with overwhelming
evidence of their guilt. French ‘experts’ had attributed this to a
‘propensity to lie’. But for Fanon, it suggested that their ‘often
profound submission’ to French rule ‘should not be confused with an
acceptance of this power’. The ‘North African syndrome’ was not an
expression of cultural difference, but a masked form of resistance.<br />
<br />
Fanon
and Azoulay published their paper in October 1954. A month later, the
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) carried out its first attacks,
launching a war of independence that would last for nearly eight years.
It was a small organisation that had grown out of a split in the banned
Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD), a group led by
the founding father of modern Algerian nationalism, Messali Hadj. In its
first communiqué the FLN called for immediate and unconditional
independence – the ‘restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign,
democratic and social, within a framework provided by Islamic
principles’ – and declared that it would not lay down arms until this
objective was achieved.<br />
<br />
It had been nine years since the French army,
aided by settlers, massacred thousands of Algerians in the towns of
Sétif and Guelma, where nationalist riots had broken out on V-Day; the
prospects of reconciliation between Muslims and Europeans had never
seemed dimmer. Still, few Algerian Muslims in 1954 were prepared to
undertake an armed struggle, and scarcely any had heard of the FLN.
Winning over the Muslim majority to their cause and, not least,
persuading them that they had a chance against one of the world’s most
powerful militaries, required no small effort and no little coercion.<br />
<br />
Their case would be partly made for them by massive French repression:
the razing of entire villages, the forced relocation of more than two
million to ‘regroupment’ camps, widespread torture, and thousands of
summary executions and disappearances; as many as 300,000 Algerians died
during the war. Fanon, however, needed little convincing. When the
rebels contacted him in early 1955, he had already chosen his side;
according to Macey, his first thought was to join them in the maquis.<br />
<br />
Fanon
took great risks to help the rebels, allowing FLN meetings to be held
at the hospital, treating fighters at the day clinic, forbidding the
police from entering with their guns loaded. According to Simone de
Beauvoir, he taught fighters how to control their body language before
planting bombs or throwing grenades, so as not to alert the police. At
the same time, he was treating French servicemen who were involved in
torturing suspected rebels. He did not hand over their names to the FLN
for they, too, were victims of a colonial system whose dirty work they
were required to perform.<br />
<br />
Outside his residence in Blida, Fanon
discovered one former torturer suffering from a panic attack. The
patient, a police officer, told him that he had just seen an Algerian he
had tortured at the hospital. His victim had recognised him, and then
tried to commit suicide, afraid that his torturer had come to the
hospital to take him back to the station for further interrogations.<br />
<br />
In the famous chapter on violence in <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>,
Fanon would stress the psychologically empowering effects of armed
struggle on the colonised: ‘It rids the colonised of his inferiority
complex, of his contemplative or despairing attitudes. It makes him
intrepid, rehabilitates him in his own eyes.’ Yet he also bore witness
to the uglier side of the resistance, and recorded its psychological
toll on the colonised. One fighter told him that he had slit the throat
of a European woman in revenge for his mother’s killing by a soldier; he
expressed no contrition, but said that whenever he thought of his
mother, his victim appeared in her place, asking for her blood back.
Then there were the two Algerian boys, a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old,
who killed their best friend, the son of settlers. ‘The Europeans want
to kill all the Arabs,’ one of them explained: ‘We can’t kill the
grown-ups, but we can kill someone like him because he’s our age.’<br />
<br />
In
September 1956, Fanon flew to Paris to attend the First World
Conference of Black Writers and Artists, organised by the journal <i>Présence Africaine</i>.
In his speech, he argued that the defence of ‘Western values’ had
superseded biological racism in the arsenal of imperialism. He had
France’s <i>mission civilisatrice</i> in Algeria in mind: though he
barely alluded to the independence struggle, he insisted that a dialogue
between Western and non-Western cultures would not be possible until
colonialism was ended. That time had yet to arrive, however, and on 30
September, just after his return to Blida, a group of women militants in
Algiers slipped through checkpoints in the Casbah and planted bombs at
the Milk Bar, the Cafeteria on the rue Michelet and the Air France
terminal. The attacks, which killed three people and injured dozens,
were carried out in retaliation for a bombing in the Casbah by shadowy
elements in the French police: more than seventy people had died. The
Battle of Algiers had begun, and Raoul Salan, who authorised Fanon’s
medal of honour, was promoted to commander-in-chief of the army.<br />
<br />
Fearing
his cover would be blown, Fanon resigned in December. ‘If psychiatry is
the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a
stranger to his environment,’ he wrote, ‘I owe it to myself to affirm
that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state
of absolute depersonalisation … What is the status of Algeria? A
systematised dehumanisation.’ A month later, he was expelled. Before he
left, he had a brief meeting with Abane Ramdane, an FLN leader from
Kabylia who had powerfully shaped his vision of the Algerian struggle.<br />
<br />
Ramdane, sometimes described as the Robespierre of the Algerian
revolution, was a kindred spirit: a hardliner opposed to negotiation
prior to France’s recognition of independence, and a genuine moderniser
with progressive, republican values.<br />
<br />
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<div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcapslede">In</span>
1957 Fanon flew to Tunis, after passing through Paris – his last visit
to France. He divided his time between the Manouba Clinic, where he
resumed his psychiatric practice, and the offices of <i>El Moudjahid</i>,
the FLN’s French-language newspaper, which he helped edit. As the
Front’s media spokesman in Tunis, he cut a glamorous figure: a handsome
man of mysterious origin, with intense eyes and immaculately tailored
tweed suits. Living in an independent Arab country sympathetic to
Algeria’s struggle, Fanon no longer had to conceal his loyalties. Yet,
paradoxically, he learned to tread even more carefully than in Blida.
For all its claims to unity, the FLN was rife with factional tensions,
and Fanon – a non-Muslim black man who spoke no Arabic – was a
vulnerable outsider. He had no official position in the leadership. His
most powerful ally in the movement was Ramdane, the leader of the
‘interior’, but Fanon was now on the other side of the border, working
for the FLN’s ‘external’ forces, who saw Ramdane as a threat to their
interests.<br />
</div>
Fanon’s contributions to <i>El Moudjahid</i>, many of
them reprinted here, are unsigned but easily recognisable. Though
careful to pay lip service to the piety of Algerian Muslims, he
described their struggle as the ‘beginning of a new life, a new history’
that would bring about ‘the dissolution of all the chains of the past’.
In a notorious three-part series, he excoriated the ‘beautiful souls’
of the French left who denounced torture but refused to support the FLN
because of its attacks on civilians; at one point he suggested that
because Algeria was a settler colony, every French person was complicit
and therefore a legitimate target. The pieces sparked a row in Paris:
one journalist speculated that their author must be ‘a recent
intellectual convert to the FLN’ with ‘a taste for verbal outrages and
psychological striptease’. Fanon’s revolutionary zeal often had to be
toned down; his reference to ‘a nation as perverted as France’ was cut
before it went to press.<br />
<br />
His colleagues on <i>El Moudjahid</i> were
pragmatic nationalists, seeking to intensify the divisions in France
over Algeria, not to condemn France tout court. Unlike Fanon they didn’t
have to prove that they were Algerians.<br />
<br />
There is no doubting the
sincerity of Fanon’s writing for <i>El Moudjadid</i>: he tended to
gravitate to the most militant positions, and he had an old account to
settle with the French intelligentsia. But his fervour also made clear
his longing to be accepted as an Algerian. According to the historian
Mohammed Harbi, a left-wing FLN official who crossed paths (and swords)
with Fanon in Tunis, Fanon ‘had a very strong need to belong’.<br />
<br />
If
he had any doubts about the FLN’s methods, he kept them to himself. His
first public statement in Tunis, made at a press conference in May 1957,
was a response to a massacre of some three hundred civilians that the
FLN had carried out in a hamlet outside Melouza in southern Kabylia, a
stronghold of the rival Algerian National Movement, led by Messali Hadj.
Fanon denounced the ‘foul machinations over Melouza’, insinuating that
the French army was responsible. Whether or not he knew what really
happened at Melouza, it may not have mattered to him: as he wrote later,
‘truth is whatever hastens the disintegration of the colonial regime.’<br />
<br />
A year after the Melouza massacre, <i>El Moudjahid</i>’s
front page announced that Fanon’s friend Abane Ramdane had died ‘on the
field of honour’. In fact, Ramdane had been dead for five months, and
he was not killed on the battlefield. His erstwhile comrades had lured
him to a villa in Morocco, where he was strangled. The external
leadership had long wanted to seize control of the revolution, and
Ramdane, the figurehead of the internal struggle, stood in the way. Real
power now lay with the external elements of the FLN and the so-called
army of the frontiers.<br />
<br />
Fanon, who was close enough to the intelligence
services to know the truth of his friend’s murder, said nothing. Shaken,
he made his peace with the army of the frontiers, both for the sake of
the revolution – the military leadership, in Tunisia and Morocco, was
increasingly the dominant force – and to protect himself: according to
Harbi, his name was on a list of those to be executed in the event of an
internal challenge to the FLN leadership.<br />
<br />
He was scarcely more
secure in his position at the Manouba Clinic, where he began to
introduce social therapy. The clinic’s director, Dr Ben Soltan, took an
immediate dislike to Dr Fares, Fanon’s nom de guerre; he called him ‘the
Negro’ and plotted his destruction. After Fanon went over his head to
request more funds for occupational therapy, Soltan accused him of being
a Zionist spy – Israel was discreetly involved in the war against the
liberation movement, and had joined France and Britain in the invasion
of Suez – and of mistreating Arab patients on Israeli orders.<br />
<br />
The proof?
Fanon’s denunciation of anti-Semitism in <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>,
and his close friendships with two Tunisian-Jewish doctors. Dr Fares
managed to hold on to his position, but redirected his energies to the
Hôpital Charles-Nicolle, where he created Africa’s first psychiatric day
clinic, with the support of the local authorities.<br />
<br />
Fanon was
proud of his work at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre. In his papers on
its work – written with his colleague Charles Geronimi, a pied-noir
psychiatrist who also joined the FLN in Tunis – he sounds much like the
cheerful reformer at Blida. Psychiatric care, he declared, had been
stripped of its ‘carceral’ character now that mentally-ill patients
could spend the day at the centre and return home in the evening to
their families. As in Blida, a number of his patients were traumatised
veterans of the maquis, and in his lectures at the University of Tunis
Fanon tested out his evolving ideas about mental illness and
colonialism. One of his students was the Tunisian sociologist Lilia Ben
Salem, whose class notes Young and Khalfa reprint. ‘His personality
fascinated us,’ Ben Salem recalls: ‘He was authoritarian … distant,
passionate and fascinating; we asked him questions but he had a tendency
to deliver monologues, reflecting out loud. It was not only the doctor
expressing himself but above all the philosopher, the psychologist, the
sociologist.’ He improvised on the repressive function of colonial
psychiatry, black-on-black violence in the novels of Chester Himes, the
poetry of Césaire, the ubiquity of killing and suicide in blues lyrics.<br />
<br />
Yet
he seems to have been most at ease when he was writing – or, rather,
dictating to Josie or his secretary. His first book on the Algerian
struggle, <i>L’An V de la révolution algérienne</i> (translated as <i>A Dying Colonialism</i>),
was composed over three weeks in the spring of 1959. It is a passionate
account of a national awakening, as well as a document of the utopian
hopes it aroused in the author, who had come to think of himself as an
Algerian after three years in Blida. His keenest interest here is the
psychological impact of revolt on an oppressed people, their
transformation into historical subjects.<br />
<br />
Thanks to the revolution, he
writes, the ‘tense immobility of the dominated society’ has given way to
‘awareness, movement, creation’, freeing the colonised from ‘that
familiar tinge of resignation that specialists in underdeveloped
countries describe under the heading of <i>fatalism</i>’. (Cherki
suggests that he had ‘an uncanny ability of moving from flesh to word,
and showing how “bodily tensions” evolve into consciousness’.) The
struggle for independence, he argued, was a challenge to both French
rule and Algerian traditions, from the belief in djinn to the ‘values
governing sexual relations’. Apparent reassertions of tradition, such as
the embrace of the <i>haïk</i> by Algerian women, were in fact
politicised expressions of defiance.<br />
<br />
If women were covering themselves,
it was because ‘the occupier <i>was bent on unveiling Algeria</i>.’
Female partisans who removed the veil to pass as Europeans and carry out
attacks were, in his view, achieving ‘a new dialectic of the body and
of the world’. In <i>L’An V</i>, Fanon proposed a nationalism of the
will, rather than of ethnicity or religion. The European minority were
welcome to join the struggle so long as they repudiated their status as
colonisers. ‘What we Algerians want is to discover the man behind the
coloniser … We want an Algeria open to all.’<br />
<br />
He praised European
‘democrats’ who refused to give up the names of their comrades under
torture, and described Jews in the FLN as the ‘eyes and ears of the
revolution’. Fanon’s independent Algeria would be a multi-ethnic
republic, the collective creation of all those who threw themselves into
the struggle.<br />
<br />
This turned out to be wishful thinking, born in
large part from Fanon’s ecstatic experience of the ‘interior’ in Blida.
Women in the maquis would undergo a painful infringement of their rights
after independence; the pied noirs would flee en masse to France, along
with Algeria’s Jews.<br />
<br />
Those who envisaged a multi-ethnic Algeria were
always a distinct minority, and their numbers diminished with every
pied-noir or army atrocity. The single consensual demand inside the FLN –
aside from independence itself – was the re-establishment of Algeria’s
Islamic and Arab identity, which France had spent more than a century
repressing in a quixotic attempt to make Algeria French. Fanon was
correct that the attempt to ‘emancipate’ Muslim women by pressuring them
to remove their veils had only made the veil more popular; what he
failed (or refused) to see was that influential sectors of the
nationalist movement were keen to reinforce religious conservatism.
Left-wing elements in the FLN were furious that Algerian patriarchy had,
in Harbi’s words, ‘found in Fanon a mouthpiece who presented its
behaviour as progressive’.<br />
<br />
How could Fanon have paid so little
attention to the re-assertion of Islam in Algeria’s independence
struggle? Mostefa Lacheraf, a former FLN cadre turned historian, claims
that he was a ‘prisoner of European attitudes’. Others have argued that
he couched his positions in a secular idiom in order to appeal to the
European left. But Fanon’s letter to the Iranian writer Ali Shariati,
which Young and Khalfa include, suggests a different answer. Shariati,
who went on to become a champion of revolutionary Shiism and a major
influence on the Islamic left in Iran, was a student in Paris when he
first read Fanon. He wrote expressing his admiration, while advancing
his own ideas about the revolutionary potential of Islam in
anti-colonial struggles.<br />
<br />
Fanon was sceptical. If Négritude was a ‘great
black mirage’, Islam was a green one, a ‘withdrawal into oneself’
disguised as liberation from ‘alienation and depersonalisation’. The
content of Algerian nationalism would have to be an invention, not a
recovery of lost traditions or – as Shariati would later put it – ‘a
return to the self’. Fanon remained a Sartrean, committed to advancing
Algeria’s liberation as a universalist project.<br />
<br />
<div class="secast" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;"><b>*</b></span></span><br />
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<div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcapslede">By the time</span> <i>L’An V</i>
appeared, Fanon had been pushed aside as the FLN’s media spokesman in
Tunis. His replacement was the information minister of the newly formed
Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), M’hammed Yazid, a
suave diplomat with strong ties to the French left. Fanon became a
travelling ambassador and in March 1960 was appointed to Accra as the
FLN’s permanent representative. Libya supplied him with a ‘vrai faux
passeport’ that identified him as Omar Ibrahim Fanon. (French
intelligence wasn’t fooled: Fanon the Libyan would dodge at least two
attempts on his life.) He took to his new assignment with characteristic
zeal. An Algerian, he insisted, ‘cannot be a true Algerian, if he does
not feel in his core the indescribable tragedy that is unfolding in the
two Rhodesias or in Angola’.<br />
</div>
Algeria’s liberation, he wrote in <i>El Moudjahid</i>,
would be ‘an African victory’, a ‘step in the realisation of a free and
happy humanity’. Like another doctor turned revolutionary, Che Guevara,
Fanon saw Algeria’s war of decolonisation as a model for all of Africa
and first made his case – against the more conciliatory positions of the
host, Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah – at the 1958 All-African People’s
Conference in Accra, where he led the FLN delegation and gave an
electrifying speech advocating armed struggle as a uniquely effective
route to national liberation.<br />
<br />
Few of Africa’s leaders were prepared to
sign up. Most were cultural nationalists like Senegal’s president
Léopold Senghor, who advocated African unity while accepting French
interference in defence and economic policy – and siding with France at
the UN against Algerian independence.<br />
<br />
Fanon was infuriated by having to
argue the merits of the Algerian cause to Africans, and in one speech he
nearly burst into tears.<br />
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<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><i><b> <span class="" id="result_box" lang="en"><span class="">On the right, Franz Fanon represents the FLN in the Congo on 27 August 1960.</span></span></b></i></span><br />
<br />
Africa, Fanon believed, needed
unyielding militants like his friend Ramdane; he was impressed by Sékou
Touré, the ruthless dictator of Guinea, and once confessed that he had a
‘horror of weaknesses’: Touré appeared to have none. Fanon’s closest
allies at the conference in Accra were Patrice Lumumba, soon to be the
first prime minister of independent Congo, and Félix Moumié, a
revolutionary from Cameroon. In September 1960, Lumumba was overthrown
in a Belgian-sponsored coup, a prelude to his assassination; two months
later, Moumié was poisoned in Geneva. ‘Aggressive, violent, full of
anger, in love with his country, hating cowards’, Fanon wrote of his
murdered friend: ‘austere, hard, incorruptible’.<br />
<br />
In Accra Fanon also
befriended the Angolan guerrilla leader Holden Roberto, whom he mistook
for a tribune of the oppressed rural masses and favoured over the urban
Marxists of the MPLA; Roberto was a tribal chieftain, with ties to the
CIA and a well-deserved reputation for cruelty.<br />
<br />
In November 1960,
hard on the heels of Moumié’s death, Fanon undertook a daring
reconnaissance mission. The aim was to open a southern front on the
border with Mali, so arms and munitions could be transported from Bamako
across the Sahara. He was accompanied by an eight-man commando led by a
man called Chawki, a major in the Algerian Army of National Liberation
(ALN). They flew from Accra to Monrovia, where they planned to pick up a
connecting flight to Conakry. On arriving they were told that the plane
was full and that they would have to wait for an Air France flight the
following day. Suspecting a trap by French intelligence, they drove two
thousand kilometres into Mali; later they learned that the plane had
been diverted to Côte d’Ivoire and searched by French forces. (Fanon was
sure that the plot had been orchestrated with the knowledge of Félix
Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire’s first president.)<br />
<br />
The drive to Mali
took them through tropical forest, savannah and desert. Fanon was
beguiled; in his notes on the journey, he sounds like a man possessed.
‘With one ear glued to the red earth you can hear very distinctly the
sound of rusty chains, groans of distress,’ he wrote. The gravest threat
to Africa’s future was not colonialism but the ‘great appetites’ of
post-colonial elites, and their ‘absence of ideology’.<br />
<br />
It was his
mission, Fanon believed, to ‘stir up the Saharan population, infiltrate
to the Algerian high plateaus … Subdue the desert, deny it, assemble
Africa, create the continent.’ Unlike Algeria, Africa could not create
itself; it needed the help of foreign revolutionaries with energy and
vision. He was calling for a revolutionary vanguard, but his rhetoric of
conquest was not far from that of colonialism.<br />
<br />
The reconnaissance
mission came to nothing: the southern Sahara had never been an
important combat zone for the FLN, and there was little trust between
the Algerians and the desert tribes. Reading Fanon’s account, one senses
that his African hallucinations were born of a growing desperation.
This desperation was not only political, but physical. He had lost
weight in Mali, and when he returned to Tunis in December he was
diagnosed with leukaemia. Claude Lanzmann, who met him shortly
afterwards in Tunis, remembers him as ‘already so suffused with death
that it gave his every word the power both of prophecy and of the last
words of a dying man’. Fanon pleaded with the FLN to send him back to
Algeria. He wanted to die on the field of honour, and he missed the
fighters of the interior, whom he described to Lanzmann as
‘peasant-warrior-philosophers’.<br />
<br />
The request was denied. Still, he made himself useful to the soldiers in Tunisia. At an army post he gave lectures on the <i>Critique of Dialectical Reason</i>,
devoting special attention to Sartre’s analysis of ‘fraternity-terror’,
the feelings of brotherhood that grow out of a shared experience of
external threat. He had experienced this in Blida and with Major Chawki
in the desert, and he saw it again in the soldiers of the ALN. Many were
from rural backgrounds, uncompromising people of the sort he trusted to
maintain the integrity of the revolution throughout the Third World. It
was to these soldiers that he addressed his last and most influential
book, <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>, dictated in haste as his condition deteriorated.<br />
<br />
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</div>
<div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcapslede">In</span> <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>
Fanon characterised decolonisation as an inherently violent process, a
zero-sum struggle between coloniser and colonised. Albert Memmi, a
Tunisian-Jewish psychologist, had made a similar argument in his <i>Portrait du colonisé</i>,
published in 1957 with a preface by Sartre. But Fanon dramatised it
with unprecedented force. Europe, he writes, ‘is literally the creation
of the Third World … built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs,
Indians and Asians. This we are determined never to forget.’ His
colonial world is polarised, with a ‘sluggish, sated’ sector, ‘its belly
… permanently full of good things’, and a ‘famished sector, hungry for
bread, meat, shoes, coal and light … a sector of niggers, a sector of
towel-heads’. The clash is due not to misunderstanding or mutual
ignorance, but to the fact that they are ‘old acquaintances’: ‘The
colonised man is an envious man.<br />
<br />
The colonist is aware of this as he
catches the furtive glance, and constantly on his guard, realises
bitterly that: “They want to take our place.”’ Robbed of their land and
dignity, ‘reduced to the state of an animal’, the colonised sublimate
their defeat in religion, in ‘muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams
of aggressive vitality’, and in violence against their own people, until
they rise up against their masters and begin gradually to ‘decipher
social reality’. At first, the colonised adopt ‘the primitive
Manichaeism of the coloniser – black versus white, Arab versus Infidel’.
Eventually, however, they ‘realise … that some blacks can be whiter
than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or
independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the
population giving up their privileges and their interests.’ The war of
national liberation, in other words, must transcend ‘racism, hatred,
resentment and “the legitimate desire for revenge”’, and evolve into a
social revolution.<br />
</div>
The arguments in <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>,
particularly in its romantic claims about the ‘revolutionary
spontaneity’ of the peasantry, were deeply influenced by Fanon’s
relationship with the ALN. In fact, Algeria had never had a significant
peasant movement, and its peasants could hardly play a revolutionary
role when more than two million of them had been herded into camps. But
the rural utopia was, as Harbi notes, a ‘credo of the army’, which
depicted itself as the defender of Algeria’s peasantry. When Harbi told
Fanon he was projecting his political desires onto a rural world he
scarcely understood, ‘Fanon pouted, as if to say there could be little
interest in anything that seemed to him to come from an orthodox
Marxism.’ Like many of his comrades, Fanon distrusted Marxism because of
the French Communist Party’s chequered record on independence, notably
its vote, in 1955, in favour of ‘special powers’ to suppress the
rebellion. The FLN forced the party’s Algerian members to dissolve their
cause in the insurgency, or be treated as the enemy. Fanon dismissed
the working class as ‘the kernel of the colonised people most pampered
by the colonial regime’.<br />
<br />
Fanon persuaded himself that unlike the
proletariat, the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat were incorruptible
because they had nothing to lose. Ironically his odes to the peasantry –
‘the truth in their very being’, ‘the true voice of the country’ –
would underwrite the nostalgic ‘return to the self’ that he had always
dreaded. Houari Boumediene, the leader of the external forces in Tunisia
and later Algeria’s president, saw Fanon as ‘a modest man who wanted to
learn and understand, but … didn’t know the first thing about Algeria’s
peasants’. Yet Boumediene grasped the usefulness of Fanon’s position.
Like his arguments about the veil, Fanon’s celebration of peasant wisdom
provided the army with – in Harbi’s words – a ‘rationalisation of
Algerian conservatism’, and a valuable populist card to play in its
power struggles with the urbane, middle-class diplomats of the GPRA, and
the Marxists within the FLN.<br />
<br />
The same was true of Fanon’s claim
that ‘violence alone’ would lead to victory. By the late 1950s, the FLN
understood that it could never defeat the French army, and that there
would eventually be a negotiated settlement. International opinion
became a critical battlefield, and the principal ‘fighters’ were the
FLN’s external representatives: as the historian Matthew Connelly has
argued, the war was as much a ‘diplomatic revolution’ as a military
challenge. But the heroic myth of armed struggle, which Fanon did much
to burnish, allowed the soldiers of the ALN to present themselves as the
real victors, and impose themselves as the country’s rightful rulers.<br />
<br />
In
an 1841 essay endorsing the ‘pacification’ of Algeria, Tocqueville
wrote: ‘Men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find
it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that
we seize unarmed men, women and children … These, in my view, are
unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people that wants to wage
war on the Arabs is obliged to submit.’ Fanon, who believed that what
had been removed by force should be taken back by force, did little more
than turn Tocqueville on his head. Living on borrowed time, he was
determined to reveal the path towards a thoroughgoing decolonisation, a
rupture with the past rather than a mere transfer of power from the
colonial authorities to the native bourgeoisie he reviled for its lack
of vision, its opportunism, its infatuation with Europe.<br />
<br />
In Accra he had
come to despair of Africa’s prospects unless the Algerian model of
national liberation – as he conceived it – was adopted. The utopian,
exhortatory themes of <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> – the faith in
the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat; the therapeutic virtues of
violence; and the creation of a new humanism, a truly emancipated Third
World – must be handled with care. Cited as liturgy by Fanon’s admirers,
ridiculed as delusional messianism by detractors, they were a typically
Nietzschean expression of will, in defiant counterpoint to his
anxieties about the post-colonial order.<br />
<br />
Those anxieties were largely vindicated. <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>
is prophetic, but not for the reasons Fanon would have wished. For all
that he meant his book to be a manifesto for the coming revolution, he
was aware of the potential pitfalls of decolonisation. While he defended
anti-colonial violence as a necessary response to the ‘exhibitionist’
violence of the colonial system, he also predicted that ‘for many years
to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible
wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaught.’ As Arendt
pointed out, Fanon’s vision of a comradeship under arms going on to
drive a social revolution was questionable: solidarity of this kind, she
wrote, ‘can be actualised only under conditions of immediate danger to
life and limb’ and tends to wither in peacetime, as it did after
independence.<br />
<br />
The taste of power provided by violent revolt was
fleeting; the suffering and trauma of national liberation wars would
cast a long shadow. Fanon himself had seen that anti-colonial violence
was driven not only by a noble desire for justice, but by darker
impulses, including the dream of ‘becoming the persecutor’.<br />
<br />
Leaders
of post-colonial states were sure to entrench themselves by appealing
to ‘ultranationalism, chauvinism and racism’: here Fanon anticipated the
era of Mobutu and Mugabe. He warned, too, that the native bourgeoisie
in Africa would promote a folkloric form of ‘black culture’ in an
attempt to ‘reunite with a people in a past where they no longer exist’,
forgetting that by definition ‘“Negroes” are in the process of
disappearing’ with the destruction of white rule. But the native
bourgeoisie does not inspire confidence: disfigured by colonialism, it
has become ‘an acquisitive, voracious and petty caste, dominated by a
small-time racketeer mentality’. Like Naipaul’s ‘mimic men’, the African
bourgeois is not so much ‘a replica of Europe but rather its
caricature’.<br />
<div class="secast" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;"><b>*</b></span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyDIcxc0RgVUDBSNeSYCJEDLWH9CifUiLGE7j8P6g1YKip98OdUr86KEVnhyphenhyphen2cLwyxrTsYMpMvu4Kn-5c0a6PNnyKtgW-YdHEnwZrjQMhGkf8GMz35sqR7-aaBjX3b5P6DXfg/s1600/a19469713bcfdaa3390e4e019c640376.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyDIcxc0RgVUDBSNeSYCJEDLWH9CifUiLGE7j8P6g1YKip98OdUr86KEVnhyphenhyphen2cLwyxrTsYMpMvu4Kn-5c0a6PNnyKtgW-YdHEnwZrjQMhGkf8GMz35sqR7-aaBjX3b5P6DXfg/s640/a19469713bcfdaa3390e4e019c640376.jpg" width="440" /></a></div>
</div>
<div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcapslede">One</span>
of the earliest readers of Fanon’s manuscript was his hero, Sartre.
Fanon first contacted him in the spring of 1961 through his publisher,
François Maspero, to ask for a preface: ‘Tell him that every time I sit
down at my desk, I think of him.’ In late July 1961, they met for the
first time in Rome, where they were joined by Beauvoir and Lanzmann.
Just a few days before, defenders of Algérie française had set off a
bomb outside the apartment Sartre shared with his mother on the rue
Bonaparte: Sartre had signed the ‘Manifesto of the 121’, a declaration
of civil disobedience in protest against the Algerian War. Fanon and
Sartre’s first conversation lasted from lunch until 2 a.m., when
Beauvoir announced that Sartre needed to sleep.<br />
<br />
Fanon was indignant. ‘I
don’t like people who spare themselves,’ he said. Turning to Lanzmann,
he joked that he would ‘pay 20,000 francs a day to speak with Sartre
from morning till night for two weeks’. Over the next few days, Fanon
spoke about his life and the Algerian struggle in what Lanzmann calls a
‘prophetic trance’. He revealed himself as the author of the unsigned
attack on the French left in <i>El Moudjahid</i>, and urged Sartre to
renounce writing until Algeria was liberated. ‘We have rights over you,’
he said: ‘How can you continue to live normally, to write?’ He was
scornful of the picturesque trattoria where they took him to eat. The
pleasures of the Old World meant nothing to him.<br />
</div>
Fanon had
recently undergone treatment in the Soviet Union, where he was
prescribed Myleran, and was experiencing a brief period of remission.
But in Beauvoir’s account of the meeting in Rome, he comes across as a
haunted man, beset by self-doubt and remorse, full of apocalyptic
foreboding. The days after independence would be ‘terrible’, he
predicted, estimating that 150,000 would die. (His guess wasn’t far
off.)<br />
<br />
In public, Fanon had upheld the FLN line that Messali Hadj’s MNA
were collaborators, but the score-settling among Algerian rebels seemed
to horrify him nearly as much as French repression. He considered this
aversion to bloodletting a weakness typical of intellectuals and
struggled to overcome it: he told Sartre that ‘everything he had written
he had written against intellectuals, he had also written against
himself.’ He blamed himself for failing to prevent the deaths of Abane
and Lumumba, and worried that he might become a wandering ‘professional
revolutionary’ unless he put down roots. He insisted that ‘the Algerians
were his people’ but also seemed to long for Martinique; Beauvoir
sensed that ‘he was upset that he wasn’t active in his native land, and
even more that he wasn’t a native Algerian.’ He alluded obliquely to the
intrigues inside the FLN.<br />
<br />
When Beauvoir shook his feverish hand, she
felt as if she were ‘touching the passion that consumed it’.<br />
<br />
To
Sartre, Fanon was more than an intellectual disciple; he was the man of
action Sartre never forgave himself for not having been during the Nazi
Occupation. ‘The Third World discovers <i>itself</i> and speaks to <i>itself</i> through this voice,’ he declared in his preface to <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>.
How closely was he listening? Sartre addressed himself almost
exclusively to the question of violence, which he described with an
apocalyptic bravado that Fanon himself held in check.<br />
<br />
‘Killing a
European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go
oppressor and oppressed, leaving one man dead and the other man free,’
Sartre wrote: ‘For the first time, the survivor feels a <i>national</i>
soil under his feet.’ Throughout the colonies, he continued, ‘the
tribes are dancing and preparing to fight.’ The revolt of the Third
World, as depicted by Sartre, was a ‘murderous rampage’. Its targets
were indiscriminately chosen and altogether deserving of their fate.
Alice Cherki was not alone among Fanon’s friends in seeing Sartre’s
preface as a ‘betrayal’ that distorted Fanon’s more nuanced views.<br />
<br />
Writing
to Fanon in October 1961, Maspero described Sartre’s preface as
‘beautiful, violent and useful (at least for the French)’. Fanon,
however, never said a word about it: Sartre was writing for a French
audience he had ceased to care about. His principal concern was his
readership in the Third World, where his book was ‘feverishly awaited’,
he told Maspero. A week after Sartre filed his preface, Fanon was
admitted to a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland – this was his only visit
to the United States, a country he called ‘a nation of lynchers’. What
shocked him, he wrote to a friend in North Africa, was not ‘that I’m
dying, but that I’m dying in Washington of leukaemia, considering that I
could have died in battle with the enemy three months ago when I knew I
had this disease.<br />
<br />
We are nothing on earth if we are not, first of all,
slaves of a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of justice, the
cause of liberty.’ He died on 6 December, just as his book appeared in
Paris, where it was seized from bookshops by the police. In New York,
Algerian diplomats gave it as a Christmas gift. Beauvoir saw his picture
on the cover of <i>Jeune Afrique</i>, ‘younger, calmer than I had
seen him, and very handsome. His death weighed heavily because he had
charged his death with all the intensity of his life.’<br />
<br />
<div class="secast" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;"><b>*</b></span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0PtBW-TNYk2P2Z_3bdaOxwt4XkslBQqIyC5mc6Wh2okNojhU3LNVXe7pZjvFBBhxANPUs2owlryukxJHzzICZPzjw7GwmkmlDkWn_KN0F9UnfpEpAD9yTusbz0en3hV7gW0M/s1600/fanon1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0PtBW-TNYk2P2Z_3bdaOxwt4XkslBQqIyC5mc6Wh2okNojhU3LNVXe7pZjvFBBhxANPUs2owlryukxJHzzICZPzjw7GwmkmlDkWn_KN0F9UnfpEpAD9yTusbz0en3hV7gW0M/s640/fanon1.png" width="398" /></a></div>
</div>
<div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcapslede">Algeria</span>
achieved its independence in July 1962. It would soon become a leader
of the Non-Aligned Movement, and play host to the ANC, the PLO, the
Black Panthers and other national liberation movements, many of them
deeply influenced by Fanon. But over the years independent Algeria –
austere, pious, socially conservative – bore less and less resemblance
to the country he had fought for. Even if he had lived, it’s not clear
he would have ever been at home there, anymore than Che was in
post-revolutionary Havana.<br />
<br />
In a fascinating essay published in 1971,
Memmi characterised Fanon’s life as a thwarted quest to belong. The
‘germ of Fanon’s tragedy’, Memmi argued, was his alienation from
Martinique, his homeland. Once the dominated man recognises that he will
not be accepted by the dominant society, ‘he generally returns to
himself, to his people, to his past, sometimes … with excessive vigour,
transfiguring this people and this past to the point of creating
counter-myths.’ This was what Césaire had done, he suggested, by
returning home from the grandes écoles of Paris, inventing Négritude,
and becoming his people’s representative in the Assemblée Nationale. And
perhaps Shariati, by embracing Shiism, or Naipaul, by embracing Hindu
nationalism, followed a similar trajectory. Fanon, however, had no
desire for home; instead, after realising he could never be fully
French, he transferred his fierce identification with the country that
had spurned him to Algeria, the country that was battling France for its
independence. Once Muslim Algeria proved too ‘particularist’, it was
subsumed by something still larger: the African continent, the Third
World and ultimately the dream of ‘a totally unprecedented man, in a
totally reconstructed world’.</div>
<br />
But Fanon never disavowed his
Martiniquan roots, or his love of Césaire’s writing, from which he drew
his images of slave revolt in <i>The Wretched of the Earth.</i> Though
disappointed that Martinique, under Césaire’s leadership, had chosen to
remain an overseas department of France, he welcomed its 1959 uprising
as the sign of an emerging national consciousness. Memmi’s claim that
his ‘true problem’ was ‘how to be West Indian’ seems comically
reductive. Still, he captures something that Fanon’s admirers in today’s
anti-racist movements tend to overlook: his relentless questioning of
the ‘return to the self’.<br />
<br />
Memmi’s quarrel with Fanon arose out of his
own bitter experiences as an anti-colonial militant: disillusioned with
Arab nationalism, Memmi had become a Zionist, a believer in his people’s
special destiny. In his essay on Fanon, he wrote as if primordial
ethnic identification – and the contraction of empathy it often entails –
were the natural order of things, and Fanon an outlier, if not a
failure, for defying it.<br />
<br />
The utopian dimensions of Fanon’s writing
have not aged well. In much of the Third World, the dream of liberation
from Europe has been supplanted by the dream of emigration to Europe,
where refugees and their children now fight for acceptance rather than
independence.<br />
<br />
Universalism has turned into a debased currency: for all
the talk of ‘transnationalism’, the only two post-national projects on
offer are the flat world of globalisation, and the Islamist tabula rasa
of the Caliphate: Davos and <i>Dabiq</i>. Yet Fanon will not go away
so easily. A belief in the purifying properties of violence – in
creative destruction – is shared not only by Islamic State, whose
spectacular attacks and throat-slittings are a low-tech form of ‘shock
and awe’, but by the architects of drone warfare and ‘humanitarian’
intervention. The questions Fanon raised about the limits of Western
humanism, and the barriers separating the rich and poor worlds, are
still pertinent today. The boundaries that separate the West from the
rest, and from its internal others, have been redrawn since his death,
but they have not disappeared.<br />
<br />
The coercive ‘unveiling’ of Muslim women
has reappeared in France, where burkini-clad women have been chased off
beaches by police and jeering spectators. In the US, the killings of
unarmed black people by the police have furnished a grim new genre of
reality television, and a reminder of the vulnerability of the black
body. The president-elect has surrounded himself with avowed white
supremacists. The cities of the liberal West, with their slums and gated
enclaves, are nearly as ‘compartmentalised’ as colonial Algiers.<br />
<br />
The
tragedy of Fanon’s ‘impossible life’, as Memmi called it, was not that
he refused to return home, but that his vision of freedom and solidarity
lost out to the narrower affiliations of nation, tribe and sect. And
that tragedy is not his alone.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-53058438297277634302017-01-12T09:04:00.003-05:002017-01-12T09:04:53.939-05:00Reparations Demands On NY Life Still Stand!<h1 class="headline balance-text" id="headline" style="display: block; float: none; position: static; white-space: normal;">
<span style="color: #073763;">Insurance Policies on Slaves: New York Life’s Complicated Past</span></h1>
<div class="deck balance-text" id="story-deck" itemprop="headline" style="display: block; float: none; position: static; white-space: normal;">
<span style="color: red;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">In its 19th-century beginnings, New York Life Insurance sold 508 policies covering slaves. Their descendants are grappling with it.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="story-meta-footer" id="story-meta-footer">
<div class="byline-dateline">
<span class="byline" itemid="http://www.nytimes.com/by/rachel-l-swarns" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwB0JlMctrQmrVDNKmJ-CykCxmS468VOmhxR6scaM53MTHG8l0Zidv2Yh5gtm-7tN0mP4aN4wb6g7_TN0AqyhenAKJibQlweSwT7tVwsuGCUh45TpncoIbxwg_t7X0pnDGzeE/s1600/ny+life+slave+insurance+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwB0JlMctrQmrVDNKmJ-CykCxmS468VOmhxR6scaM53MTHG8l0Zidv2Yh5gtm-7tN0mP4aN4wb6g7_TN0AqyhenAKJibQlweSwT7tVwsuGCUh45TpncoIbxwg_t7X0pnDGzeE/s640/ny+life+slave+insurance+book.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">The bottom half of one of New York Life’s
19th-century ledgers lists an insurance policy taken out on a slave
named Harriett. The ledger is held by the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture.</span></b></i></span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></div>
<div class="byline-dateline">
<br /></div>
<div class="byline-dateline">
<span class="byline" itemid="http://www.nytimes.com/by/rachel-l-swarns" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">By <b><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/by/rachel-l-swarns" title="More Articles by RACHEL L. SWARNS"><span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="RACHEL L. SWARNS" data-twitter-handle="rachelswarns" itemprop="name">RACHEL L. SWARNS</span></a></b></span><b><time class="dateline" content="2016-12-23T12:09:42-05:00" datetime="2016-12-23T12:09:42-05:00" itemprop="dateModified"> </time></b></div>
<div class="byline-dateline">
<time class="dateline" content="2016-12-23T12:09:42-05:00" datetime="2016-12-23T12:09:42-05:00" itemprop="dateModified">DEC. 18, 2016-- nytimes.com</time> </div>
</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="302" data-total-count="302">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="302" data-total-count="302">
<a href="https://www.newyorklife.com/">New York Life</a>,
the nation’s third-largest life insurance company, opened in
Manhattan’s financial district in the spring of 1845. The firm possessed
a prime address — 58 Wall Street — and a board of trustees populated by
some of the city’s wealthiest merchants, bankers and railroad magnates.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="302" data-total-count="302">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="59" data-total-count="361">
Sales were sluggish that year. So the company looked south.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="59" data-total-count="361">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="335" data-total-count="696">
There,
in Richmond, Va., an enterprising New York Life agent sold more than 30
policies in a single day in February 1846. Soon, advertisements began
appearing in newspapers from Wilmington, N.C., to Louisville as the New
York-based company encouraged Southerners to buy insurance to protect
their most precious commodity: their slaves.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="335" data-total-count="696">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="249" data-total-count="945">
Alive,
slaves were among a white man’s most prized assets. Dead, they were
considered virtually worthless. Life insurance changed that calculus,
allowing slave owners to recoup three-quarters of a slave’s value in the
event of an untimely death.<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
</div>
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-large-horizontal media-100000004729954" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004729954" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1-master675.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="An ad taken out by Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance in 1847 in the Daily Democrat newspaper in Louisville, K.Y. offering slave policies. Nautilus was renamed New York Life Insurance in 1849." data-mediaviewer-credit="" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1-master675.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR1-master675.jpg" /></b></i></span><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">An ad taken out by Nautilus
Mutual Life Insurance in 1847 in the Daily Democrat newspaper in
Louisville, K.Y. offering slave policies. Nautilus was renamed New York
Life Insurance in 1849.</span></b></i></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="284" data-total-count="1229">
James
De Peyster Ogden, New York Life’s first president, would later describe
the American system of human bondage as “evil.” But by 1847, insurance
policies on slaves accounted for a third of the policies in a firm that
would become one of the nation’s Fortune 100 companies.</div>
<br /><div class="story-interrupter" id="story-continues-1">
</div>
<div class="story-body-supplemental">
<div class="story-body story-body-2">
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="393" data-total-count="1622" id="story-continues-2">
<a href="http://nyti.ms/2c77X30">Georgetown, Harvard</a> and other universities have drawn national attention to the <a href="http://slavery.virginia.edu/?p=250">legacy of slavery</a> this year as they have acknowledged benefiting from the slave trade and <a href="http://nyti.ms/29xv2v3">grappled with how to make amends</a>.
But slavery also generated business for some of the most prominent
modern-day corporations, underscoring the ties that many contemporary
institutions have to this painful period of history.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="393" data-total-count="1622" id="story-continues-2">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="181" data-total-count="1803" id="story-continues-3">
Banks
absorbed by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo allowed Southerners seeking
loans to use their slaves as collateral and took possession of some of
them when their owners defaulted.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="181" data-total-count="1803" id="story-continues-3">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="463" data-total-count="2266">
Like
New York Life, Aetna and US Life also sold insurance policies to slave
owners, particularly those whose laborers engaged in hazardous work in
mines, lumber mills, turpentine factories and steamboats in the
industrializing sectors of the South. US Life, a subsidiary of AIG,
declined to comment on its slave policy sales. </div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="463" data-total-count="2266">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="463" data-total-count="2266">
Wachovia, one of Wells
Fargo’s predecessor companies, has apologized for its historic ties to
slavery as have JPMorgan Chase and Aetna.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="463" data-total-count="2266">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="153" data-total-count="2419">
More
than 40 other firms, mostly based in the South, sold such policies,
too, though documentation is scarce and most closed their doors
generations ago.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="153" data-total-count="2419">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="370" data-total-count="2789">
New
York Life survived. Its foray into the slave insurance business did not
prove to be lucrative: The company ended up paying out nearly as much
in death claims — about $232,000 in today’s dollars — as it received in
annual payments. But in the span of about three years, it sold 508
policies, more than Aetna and US Life combined, according to available
records.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="370" data-total-count="2789">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="272" data-total-count="3061">
Now,
the descendants of one of those slaves — who were recently identified
by The New York Times — are coming to terms with the realization that
one of the nation’s biggest insurance companies sold policies on their
ancestors and hundreds of other enslaved laborers.<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
</div>
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-large-horizontal media-100000004822397 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004822397" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure6/xxslaveinsure6-master675.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="A ledger entry for policy No. 1055 taken out in 1847 by Nicholas Mills on the life of “Nathan York, Slave.” Mr. York had been insured under a previous policy, No. 447." data-mediaviewer-credit="Hilary Swift for The New York Times" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure6/xxslaveinsure6-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure6/xxslaveinsure6-master675.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure6/xxslaveinsure6-master675.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">A ledger entry for policy No.
1055 taken out in 1847 by Nicholas Mills on the life of “Nathan York,
Slave.” Mr. York had been insured under a previous policy, No. 447.</span></b></i></span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="349" data-total-count="3410">
Policy
No. 447 covered Nathan York, a slave who toiled in the Virginia coal
mines where the earth often collapsed on its subterranean work force.
Policy No. 1141 insured a slave known as Warwick, who fed the fiery
furnaces on a Kentucky steamboat. Policy No. 1150 covered Anthony, who
labored amid the whirling blades of a sawmill in North Carolina.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="349" data-total-count="3410">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="469" data-total-count="3879">
The
handwritten record of sales, insurance premiums and expenditures, many
described here for the first time, illuminate the inner workings of a
company born before the Civil War. That history has stirred anxiety
among some New York Life executives, who take pride in their multiracial
work force and customer base. They worry that news coverage about the
company’s ties to slavery may overshadow their efforts to provide <a href="https://www.newyorklife.com/newsroom/building-a-window-into-history/">philanthropic support</a> to the black community.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="469" data-total-count="3879">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="288" data-total-count="4167">
New York Life hired <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NN4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA207&lpg=PA207&dq=Cirilo+McSween+new+york+life&source=bl&ots=HvzBEGIP9j&sig=MowqMmXkDU_DsDCI7ZM6bPljywc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqh9TkhODQAhXHyRQKHZCPCD4Q6AEIUDAL#v=onepage&q=Cirilo%20McSween%20new%20york%20life&f=false">one of the insurance industry’s first black agents</a>
in 1957. African-Americans currently account for 13 percent of the
firm’s employees, including its senior vice president for governmental
relations, <a href="http://www.alc.edu/2012/03/nichols-receives-national-recognition/">George Nichols III</a>, who reports directly to the chief executive.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="288" data-total-count="4167">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="439" data-total-count="4606" id="story-continues-4">
The
company donates millions of dollars annually to causes and groups that
benefit African-Americans, the executives said, pointing to a <a href="http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2006/12/05/10-million-grant-from-new-york-life-to-support-expansion-of-colin-powell-center-for-policy-studies-at-ccny/">$10 million endowment</a> to the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York, sponsorship of the <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/" title="The website.">National Museum of </a><a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/" title="The website.">African </a><a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/" title="The website.">American History</a>
& Culture and other initiatives. (The company was known as Nautilus
Mutual Life Insurance; the name was changed to New York Life in 1849.)</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="439" data-total-count="4606" id="story-continues-4">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="368" data-total-count="4974">
“We
profoundly regret that in the 1840s our predecessor company, Nautilus
Insurance Company, insured the lives of slaves for a brief period of
time,” Kevin Heine, a spokesman for the company, said in a written
statement. “While we cannot change our history, our longstanding
recognition of it has helped shape our commitment to the
African-American community.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="368" data-total-count="4974">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="663" data-total-count="5637">
The
company’s connections to slavery drew attention in the early 2000s as
California and more than a dozen localities, among them Chicago,
Philadelphia and San Francisco, began to require companies to disclose
their slavery-era activities. The <a href="http://nyti.ms/2h71vwq">disclosure laws</a>
emerged in response to black activists and lawyers who pressed for
reparations and a public reckoning with history. (A lawsuit filed
against New York Life and other companies tied to slavery <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4066501/ns/us_news-life/t/slave-reparations-case-dismissed/#.WFVqpFMrJaR">was dismissed in 2004</a>
after a judge ruled that the African-American plaintiffs had
established no clear link to the businesses they sued and that the
statute of limitations had run out more than a century ago.)</div>
</div>
<div class="supplemental " data-flex-ad-adjacency="false" data-last-item-height="945" data-max-items="2" data-minimum="400" data-post-height="2064" data-pre-height="2064" data-remaining="174" id="supplemental-2">
</div>
</div>
<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
<div class="story-interrupter" id="story-continues-5">
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-jumbo-horizontal media-100000004822386 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004822386" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure5/xxslaveinsure5-superJumbo.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="The New York Life Insurance building across from Madison Square Park. The company sold 508 policies on slaves in its early days." data-mediaviewer-credit="George Etheredge for The New York Times" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure5/xxslaveinsure5-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure5/xxslaveinsure5-superJumbo.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure5/xxslaveinsure5-superJumbo.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">The New York Life Insurance building across from Madison Square Park. The company sold 508 policies on slaves in its early days.</span></b></i></span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="464" data-total-count="6101" id="story-continues-6">
New
York Life executives found the old records in a storage room that
served as an informal archive on the 16th floor of their headquarters, a
trove of fraying ledgers and yellowing documents. They turned over the
names of slaves and slaveholders as required by law and donated several
of the accounting books to the <a href="https://www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg">Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture</a>, where they are available to the public. The company stored the rest in a private corporate archive.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="464" data-total-count="6101" id="story-continues-6">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="465" data-total-count="6566">
Company
officials allowed The Times to review several ledgers from its archive,
but declined to allow a reporter to interview its archivist to
determine whether additional records related to the slave policies still
exist. The executives said that slave policies generated only about 5
percent of total revenues during the three fiscal years in which the
policies were sold. They said the policies proved to be unprofitable and
did not drive the company’s growth.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="465" data-total-count="6566">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="410" data-total-count="6976">
But
historians say the slave policies had an impact on the company’s
development. The company had two years to invest or spend much of the
revenues from the slave policies before death claims exceeded annual
premium payments, according to <a href="http://www.colgate.edu/facultysearch/facultydirectory/dbouk">Dan Bouk</a>,
a historian at Colgate University who has studied 19th- and
20th-century insurance companies, and reviewed the company’s figures at
the request of The Times.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="410" data-total-count="6976">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="287" data-total-count="7263">
The
policies helped New York Life establish an early foothold in the South,
which distinguished it from its larger competitors, said <a href="http://www.providence.edu/history/faculty/Pages/smurph13.aspx">Sharon Ann Murphy</a>,
a historian at Providence College. Its agents continued to insure white
lives in the region after the slave policies were discontinued.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="287" data-total-count="7263">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="251" data-total-count="7514">
“Slave
policies were an opportunity for them to break into the industry and
they actively promoted these policies in the early years,” said Ms.
Murphy, who is the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Life-Insurance-Antebellum-Philadelphia/dp/B00ZY8FIK0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1481825682&sr=8-3&keywords=investing+in+life+insurance+in+antebellum+america" title="Book entry on Amazon.">author </a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Life-Insurance-Antebellum-Philadelphia/dp/B00ZY8FIK0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1481825682&sr=8-3&keywords=investing+in+life+insurance+in+antebellum+america" title="Book jacket.">of a book</a> about the emergence of the insurance industry before the Civil War.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="251" data-total-count="7514">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="220" data-total-count="7734" id="story-continues-7">
“We
can be disturbed by this, but we shouldn’t be surprised by it,” she
said. “It wasn’t just Southern companies that benefited from slavery;
many Northern institutions also benefited directly or indirectly.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="220" data-total-count="7734" id="story-continues-7">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="198" data-total-count="7932">
The
advertisement appeared in the Richmond Enquirer on Jan. 29, 1846. It
described a new firm offering life insurance for slaves employed in any
“occupation where there may be danger or risque.”<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
</div>
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-large-vertical media-100000004729971" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004729971" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt-blog427-v2.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="New York Life — known as the Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance Company in the mid-1840s — placed an ad in the Richmond Enquirer in 1846, offering insurance of slaves employed in a variety of occupations." data-mediaviewer-credit="" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt-superJumbo-v2.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt-blog427-v2.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR3alt-blog427-v2.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">New York Life — known as the
Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance Company in the mid-1840s — placed an ad
in the Richmond Enquirer in 1846, offering insurance of slaves employed
in a variety of occupations.</span></b></i></span></figcaption><figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"><span class="caption-text"> </span></figcaption><figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"><span class="caption-text"><br /></span></figcaption><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="226" data-total-count="8158">
Within
four days, the customers started streaming into the office of the
insurance agent for New York Life. They owned laborers who worked in <a href="http://www.midlomines.org/historic-overview.html">the coal mines in nearby Chesterfield County</a> and they all knew something about risk.</div>
<br /><div class="story-body-supplemental">
<div class="story-body story-body-3">
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="265" data-total-count="8423">
Their
slaves dug for black ore in underground shafts that oozed deadly gases
and shuddered with explosions. Dozens of enslaved African-Americans had
died in a blast just seven years earlier, mining records show, a
catastrophic financial loss for their white owners.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="265" data-total-count="8423">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="269" data-total-count="8692">
Nicholas
Mills, who owned shares in the Midlothian Coal Mining Company, was
determined to protect himself from such a calamity. So he purchased
policies on more than 20 of his enslaved laborers, including Mr. York, a
40-year-old coal miner and the father of a baby boy.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="269" data-total-count="8692">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="256" data-total-count="8948">
The
premiums Mr. Mills paid in the spring of 1846 — about $7,000 in today’s
dollars — flowed into the New York Life office on Wall Street, where
employees began recording the names, ages, policy numbers and
occupations of the slaves who were insured.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="256" data-total-count="8948">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="224" data-total-count="9172">
Slavery
was finally abolished in New York in 1827. But the plantations in the
South continued to generate business in the city in the decades before
the Civil War, according to <a href="http://history.columbia.edu/faculty/Foner.html">Eric Foner</a>, a historian at Columbia University.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="224" data-total-count="9172">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="414" data-total-count="9586">
New
York City’s merchants helped to finance the nation’s premier export
crop, cotton, and the purchase of the land and slaves needed to grow it.
They controlled the boat companies that shipped the cotton to Europe,
leading one Southern editor to describe New York City as “almost as
dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston.” And some of these
businessmen assumed prominent positions at New York Life.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="414" data-total-count="9586">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="247" data-total-count="9833" id="story-continues-8">
Mr.
De Peyster Ogden, the company’s first president, was a cotton merchant
who grew up in a home tended by slaves. He would become a prominent
defender of slavery, describing it as an unfortunate, but inextricable
part of the nation’s economy.<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
</div>
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-large-vertical media-100000004822387" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004822387" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/politics/xxslaveinsure11/xxslaveinsure5-1481737152564-blog427.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="A depiction of James De Peyster Ogden, the first president of the Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance Company. He became a prominent defender of slavery, but would later describe it as “evil.”" data-mediaviewer-credit="" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/politics/xxslaveinsure11/xxslaveinsure5-1481737152564-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/politics/xxslaveinsure11/xxslaveinsure5-1481737152564-blog427.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/politics/xxslaveinsure11/xxslaveinsure5-1481737152564-blog427.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">A depiction of James De
Peyster Ogden, the first president of the Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance
Company. He became a prominent defender of slavery, but would later
describe it as “evil.”</span></b></i></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="419" data-total-count="10252">
Several
wealthy members of the company’s board also opposed efforts to end
slavery, including William H. Aspinwall, a builder of the trans-Panama
railroad; Schuyler Livingston, the New York representative of Lloyd’s of
London; and James Brown, a banker whose firm, Brown Brothers,
controlled several plantations in the South. (A board member, Henry W.
Hicks, on the other hand, came from a family of abolitionists.)</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="419" data-total-count="10252">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="526" data-total-count="10778">
It
was no surprise then that New York Life tried to tap into the flood of
money pouring into the city from the South. In the beginning, the
payments from slaveholders and other customers helped the company
generate interest and cover the rent of its Wall Street office ($500 for
the first year), the salary of its first president ($500), commissions
for agents (roughly 5 to 10 percent of premiums), the fees for the
medical doctors who examined the slaves ($2 per exam) and office upkeep
like painting, carpeting and postage.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="526" data-total-count="10778">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="178" data-total-count="10956">
The
clothbound ledgers, which describe New York Life’s revenues and
expenses in spidery script, also document how the company
institutionalized the nation’s racial hierarchy.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="178" data-total-count="10956">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="256" data-total-count="11212">
Officials
typically insured the lives of white customers for $1,000 to $5,000 in
the early years. Slaves, on the other hand, were considered property
under the law and were typically insured for about $400, the records
show, and some for as little as $200.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="256" data-total-count="11212">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="219" data-total-count="11431">
Payouts
from death claims usually went to the grieving relatives of white
customers. In the case of slaves, however, it was the slave owners — who
insured their laborers and paid the annual premiums — who collected.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="219" data-total-count="11431">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="158" data-total-count="11589">
Abraham
S. Wooldridge, a mining magnate and business partner of Mr. Mills,
praised the company’s swift response after two of his slaves perished on
the job.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="158" data-total-count="11589">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="208" data-total-count="11797">
“The
insurance was promptly paid,” Mr. Wooldridge said in an advertisement
published by the Richmond Whig newspaper in 1847. “I have entire
confidence in the solvency and fair dealing of the company.”<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
</div>
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-large-horizontal media-100000004729958 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004729958" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2-master675.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="An 1847 ad in the Richmond Whig newspaper contains a testimonial from Abraham S. Wooldridge, who expressed satisfaction that the insurer had paid out on two slaves who died." data-mediaviewer-credit="" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2-master675.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/10/25/us/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2/00SLAVE-INSURE-TEAR2-master675.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">An 1847 ad in the Richmond
Whig newspaper contains a testimonial from Abraham S. Wooldridge, who
expressed satisfaction that the insurer had paid out on two slaves who
died.</span></b></i></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="188" data-total-count="11985">
As
the death claims mounted, New York Life’s board voted on April 19,
1848, to discontinue the sale of slave policies. It would take about six
years for the last slave policies to lapse.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="188" data-total-count="11985">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="185" data-total-count="12170" id="story-continues-9">
But
the names of the slaves remained inscribed in accounting books that
moved from one office to the next as the company grew, handwritten clues
that would link the past to the present.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="185" data-total-count="12170" id="story-continues-9">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="294" data-total-count="12464">
Policy
No. 447 led to a red brick church in Midlothian, Va., and to Audrey
Mozelle Ross, an amateur historian who has spent years researching the
origins of the <a href="http://www.fbcm1846.org/">First Baptist Church</a>. Enslaved miners founded the congregation in 1846, gathering to pray amid the dust and dangers of the coal pits.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="294" data-total-count="12464">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="194" data-total-count="12658">
Ms.
Ross, a retired public health scientist, prayed at First Baptist just
as her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did before her. She
knew the names of the founding members by heart.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="194" data-total-count="12658">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="273" data-total-count="12931">
She
never imagined that she was connected to any of them, though, until she
received an unexpected email earlier this year. That’s when she learned
that The Times, with the help of <a href="http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/author/ccowan/">Crista Cowan</a>, a genealogist at <a href="http://home.ancestry.com/">Ancestry</a>, had unearthed a missing piece of her family tree.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="273" data-total-count="12931">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="159" data-total-count="13090">
Ms.
Ross’s great-great-grandfather was Mr. York, a founding member of her
church and one of the hundreds of slaves whose lives were insured by New
York Life.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="159" data-total-count="13090">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="172" data-total-count="13262">
“I
can’t believe it,” said Ms. Ross, who is 66 and had researched the
family histories of several church members, but not her own. “You have
just opened my eyes.”<span class="visually-hidden"></span>
</div>
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-large-horizontal media-100000004822391 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004822391" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure4/xxslaveinsure4-master675.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="Audrey Mozelle Ross, an amateur historian. She found out that her great-great-grandfather was one of the slaves ensured by what is now New York Life Insurance." data-mediaviewer-credit="Chet Strange for The New York Times" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure4/xxslaveinsure4-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure4/xxslaveinsure4-master675.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure4/xxslaveinsure4-master675.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">Audrey Mozelle Ross, an
amateur historian. She found out that her great-great-grandfather was
one of the slaves ensured by what is now New York Life Insurance.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder"></span></b></i></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="309" data-total-count="13571">
Ms.
Ross worked in New York City in the mid-1970s and never dreamed that
one of the city’s insurance companies had tried to profit from her
ancestor’s enslavement. “I think it was pathetic that they used the
labor, the hard work, blood, sweat and tears of the slaves” to help
their business, she said.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="309" data-total-count="13571">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="313" data-total-count="13884" id="story-continues-10">
Even
so, she considers herself lucky. Her great-great grandfather survived
his time as an enslaved miner. After the Civil War, Mr. York continued
digging for coal and earned enough money to buy land and cattle. He
helped to establish a school for newly freed slaves and became the
patriarch of a sprawling family.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="313" data-total-count="13884" id="story-continues-10">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="249" data-total-count="14133">
Others
were less fortunate. The stone ruins of the Grove Shaft building, the
remains of the Midlothian Coal Mining Company, are only a short drive
from Ms. Ross’s home. Whenever she visits, she prays for the enslaved
miners who never made it home.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="249" data-total-count="14133">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="114" data-total-count="14247">
Godfrey, a 50-year-old slave who was also insured by New York Life, died in a fire in Midlothian on Nov. 20, 1847.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="114" data-total-count="14247">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="81" data-total-count="14328">
“Burned to death,” reads the entry in the company’s accounting of the dead.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="81" data-total-count="14328">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="247" data-total-count="14575">
The
insurance clerks on Wall Street did not record Godfrey’s last name or
the location of his burial place. But they described what happened next:
Mr. Mills, Godfrey’s owner, filed a claim with New York Life for the
loss of his human property.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="247" data-total-count="14575">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-node-uid="1" data-para-count="60" data-total-count="14635">
Within three months, the company delivered, paying him $337.</div>
<span class="visually-hidden"></span></div>
</div>
<div class="story-interrupter" id="story-continues-11">
<figure class="media photo embedded layout-jumbo-horizontal media-100000004822382 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000004822382" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure3/xxslaveinsure3-superJumbo.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="image">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="The ruins of the Grove Shaft building, part of what was the Midlothian Coal Mining Company in Virginia. At one point, around 70 slaves working at the mine had been insured. Compensation was paid for two who died." data-mediaviewer-credit="Chet Strange for The New York Times" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure3/xxslaveinsure3-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure3/xxslaveinsure3-superJumbo.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/14/us/xxslaveinsure3/xxslaveinsure3-superJumbo.jpg" /><div class="media-action-overlay">
</div>
</div>
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b><span class="caption-text">The ruins of the Grove Shaft
building, part of what was the Midlothian Coal Mining Company in
Virginia. At one point, around 70 slaves working at the mine had been
insured. Compensation was paid for two who died.</span> </b></i></span><span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
</figure>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-23955255700861179702017-01-11T11:11:00.000-05:002017-01-11T11:18:33.362-05:00THE PRESIDENT’S ROLE IN ADVANCING CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM by Barack Obama <span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">THE PRESIDENT’S ROLE IN ADVANCING CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM </span></b></span></span><br />
by <b>Barack Obama </b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoioklta8zahMtYGfZrsAa07rnJC7ap43Sht7WTGy2IwnI_fcSfL-7FLqgGAuBjFP_P0U6KP_HUlaEtpCfKd71zrmi28czK6gsJUlKDcdzHDj4TN7qAShvumX5KbraqQ_F0VM/s1600/vice_fixing_the_system_still.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoioklta8zahMtYGfZrsAa07rnJC7ap43Sht7WTGy2IwnI_fcSfL-7FLqgGAuBjFP_P0U6KP_HUlaEtpCfKd71zrmi28czK6gsJUlKDcdzHDj4TN7qAShvumX5KbraqQ_F0VM/s640/vice_fixing_the_system_still.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;"><i><b> President Obama and Shane Smith in august 2015 with inmates at FCI, El Reno.</b></i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><i><b>A First: A Sitting president publishes a Harvard Law Review essay. As liberal as this essay may be, it is still a "teachable moment" for law students and students of political science.</b></i></span><br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="1" height="700" scrolling="yes" src="https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/8198191/obama-in-harvard-law-review2017-pdf-577k?da=y&ifr=y" width="900"></iframe>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-49147387448673455152016-12-09T13:59:00.000-05:002016-12-09T13:59:13.314-05:00Thru Black Eyes: Black Educators' Perspectives and Reflections On the Struggle for Quality Education-for-Liberation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="background-color: lime;">Through Our Eyes:</span><br /><span style="color: #0b5394;"><i>Perspectives and Reflections From Black Teachers</i></span></b></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit6pv7LDvi-YOoha8uKmfJUvN3ovS2hB5MG60qoU-YOnki0XtymlGF2iaJUV3eyGmb8rJAfmX-MwOhDcCuzxJixx8YeJTznRbGPG_AzyXhbNW4Htt2eaZ0M427nqo3dzt7jJM/s1600/black+teacher+eyes.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit6pv7LDvi-YOoha8uKmfJUvN3ovS2hB5MG60qoU-YOnki0XtymlGF2iaJUV3eyGmb8rJAfmX-MwOhDcCuzxJixx8YeJTznRbGPG_AzyXhbNW4Htt2eaZ0M427nqo3dzt7jJM/s640/black+teacher+eyes.png" width="640" /></a><br />
<br />
-----------------------<br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>THE DOCUMENT</b></span><br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="1" height="700" scrolling="yes" src="https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/8196736/2236994?da=y&ifr=y" width="900"></iframe>
-----------------------<br />
<br />
B Y <b>A S H L E Y G R I F F I N & H I L A R Y T A C K I E </b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">“The difference I would like to make is a difference that my<br />fifth-grade teacher, an African American woman, made [for]<br />me,” says an elementary teacher from Oakland, California, who<br />is also a Black woman. She credits that teacher with instilling in<br />her a love of math, but also with fostering the self-confidence<br />that would buoy her when other teachers doubted her ability.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Now, she tries to give all her students — and especially her<br />Black students — that same assurance. “I make sure I get to<br />know each and every one of my kids, and let them know that<br />they can do it.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />This teacher experienced what research has shown: Teachers<br />of color bring benefits to classrooms beyond content<br />knowledge and pedagogy. As role models, parental figures,<br />and advocates, they can build relationships with students<br />of color that help those students feel connected to their<br />schools.1 And they are more likely to be able to enhance<br />cultural understanding among white colleagues, teachers, and<br />students.2 Acting as “warm demanders,” they more frequently<br />hold high expectations for all students and use connections<br />with students to establish structured classroom discipline.3<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Furthermore, they are more likely to teach in high-need schools<br />that predominantly serve students of color and low-income<br />students.4 Black teachers especially are more likely to stay in<br />schools serving Black students.5</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />And yet, teachers of color represent only 18 percent of the<br />teaching population in the U.S. (Black teachers are 7 percent.)6<br />State and district leaders recognize the need to diversify the<br />teacher workforce and are working to recruit more Black<br />and Hispanic teachers.7 And their efforts may be paying off:<br />Research shows that the percentage of teachers of color in the<br />workforce grew at twice the rate of White teachers from 1987 to<br />2012.8 </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But while leaders have been busy trying to pour teachers<br />of color into the profession, they have not plugged the drain<br />through which too many exit. Indeed, teachers of color, are<br />exiting the profession at higher rates than other teachers.9<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Simply recruiting more teachers of color only gets them in the<br />door; we must pay equal attention to creating the conditions<br />to keep them. And while it is critical to diversify the teaching<br />force, just having a Black or Hispanic teacher in the classroom<br />isn’t enough. They must be strong teachers, so diversity and<br />excellence go hand in hand.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />Holding on to teachers of color, though, requires education<br />leaders to understand their unique experiences and<br />perspectives. And who better to learn from than the teachers<br />themselves.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-27393969237711280592016-12-07T08:15:00.003-05:002016-12-07T08:15:27.099-05:00Toni Morrison Says TRUMPISM Is About Making America White Again<span style="color: white;"><span style="background-color: black;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a class="issue-publish-date-link" href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21" title="Published in 2016-11-21">
<time class="issue" content="2016-11-14" itemprop="datePublished"></time></a><span style="background-color: #ffe599;"><span style="color: black;">Making America White Again</span></span></span></b></span></span><br />
<h2 class="dek" itemprop="alternativeHeadline">
<span style="color: #a64d79;"><i>The choices made by
white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of
black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.</i></span></h2>
<div class="byline-and-date">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h3 class="contributors">
By<span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/toni-morrison" itemprop="url" rel="author" title="Toni Morrison"><span itemprop="name">Toni Morrison</span></a></span></h3>
<div class="descender" data-wc="68">
November 21, 2016 Issue of The New Yorker </div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="68">
<br /></div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="68">
This
is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and
knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must
reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary,
subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in
Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here,
for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.</div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="68">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="62">
Under
slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in
America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction
of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are
“people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood
definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A
predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The
threat is frightening.</div>
<div data-wc="62">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="146">
In order to
limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness
to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white
Americans are sacrificing themselves. </div>
<div data-wc="146">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="146">
They have begun <em>to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing</em>,
and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and
(2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their
behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill
small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who
invite a white boy to pray. </div>
<div data-wc="146">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="146">
Embarrassing as the obvious display of
cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to </div>
<div data-wc="146">
churches, and to
start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as
such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black
children in the street.</div>
<div data-wc="146">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="103">
To keep
alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck
their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny
themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their
guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are
running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely,
shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white
strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their
(better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push
black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the
frightened would do that. Right?</div>
<div data-wc="103">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="30">
These
sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to
abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the
true horror of lost status.</div>
<div data-wc="89">
It may
be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices
in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not
easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the
conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black
people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the
mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and
pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil
cause.</div>
<div data-wc="89">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="51">
The comfort of being
“naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil
treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be
watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in
high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness,
are greedily relished.</div>
<div data-wc="51">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="48">
So scary are
the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans
have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates
violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so
much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees
tremble.</div>
<div data-wc="48">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="101">
On Election Day, how
eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well
educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The
candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not
renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether
Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone
the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The
candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The
candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.</div>
<div data-wc="101">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="51">
William
Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer.
In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class
Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that
would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness”
(once again), the family chooses murder. <span class="dingbat">♦</span></div>
<div data-wc="51">
<br /></div>
<div data-wc="20">
<em>----------<span style="color: #783f04;"><br /></span></em></div>
<span style="color: #783f04;">
</span><span style="color: #783f04;"><i>Toni Morrison</i> is the author of twelve novels, from “The Bluest
Eye” to “God Help the Child.” In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature. She lives in New York.</span><br />
<h3 class="contributors">
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</a>
<figcaption class="caption">
<span class="credit" title="Photograph by Stan Grossfeld / The Boston Globe via Getty"> Photograph by Stan Grossfeld / The Boston Globe via Getty</span> </figcaption>
</figure>
<a class="tny-page" data-total-words="0" href="https://draft.blogger.com/null" name="/1"></a><div class="descender" data-wc="68">
This
is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and
knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must
reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary,
subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in
Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here,
for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.</div>
<div data-wc="62">
Under
slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in
America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction
of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are
“people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood
definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A
predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The
threat is frightening.</div>
<div data-wc="146">
In order to
limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness
to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white
Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun <em>to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing</em>,
and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and
(2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their
behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill
small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who
invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of
cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to
start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as
such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black
children in the street.</div>
<div data-wc="103">
To keep
alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck
their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny
themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their
guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are
running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely,
shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white
strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their
(better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push
black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the
frightened would do that. Right?</div>
<div data-wc="30">
These
sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to
abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the
true horror of lost status.</div>
<div data-wc="89">
It may
be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices
in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not
easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the
conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black
people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the
mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and
pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil
cause.</div>
<div data-wc="51">
The comfort of being
“naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil
treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be
watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in
high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness,
are greedily relished.</div>
<div data-wc="48">
So scary are
the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans
have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates
violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so
much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees
tremble.</div>
<div data-wc="101">
On Election Day, how
eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well
educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The
candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not
renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether
Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone
the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The
candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The
candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.</div>
<div data-wc="51">
William
Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer.
In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class
Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that
would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness”
(once again), the family chooses murder. <span class="dingbat">♦</span></div>
<div data-wc="20">
<em>This article appears as part of a larger feature, “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america">Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America</a>,” in the November 21, 2016, issue.</em></div>
</div>
</div>
<section class="article-contributors">
<aside class="author-details" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<div class="author-details-wrap" itemprop="url" rel="me">
<div class="author-masthead has-bio">
<div class="contributor-info">
Toni Morrison is the author of twelve novels, from “The Bluest
Eye” to “God Help the Child.” In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature. She lives in New York.<br />
<ul class="author-links">
<li>
<a class="more-link" href="http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/toni-morrison" title="Toni Morrison">More</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</aside>
</section>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8365667.post-78004211860263344642016-12-04T06:51:00.000-05:002016-12-04T06:51:36.972-05:00The Coleman Report@50: Still Relevant Today<span style="color: #134f5c;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>The Coleman Report at Fifty: Its Legacy and Implications for Future Research on Equality of Opportunity</b></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidYx7nkQHPW9rcbbm-HJRZF9Ob_WeHp0XRwKprsnvyzhSNWpyetavrUN7S3e0kU-YzssNDN8FyfNVdu_QUIfx_lS7NtvR3tAcNVgRu2XJr6A0ktZuaUJSf8zDqEZcwoHSsfdo/s1600/blackachievement-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidYx7nkQHPW9rcbbm-HJRZF9Ob_WeHp0XRwKprsnvyzhSNWpyetavrUN7S3e0kU-YzssNDN8FyfNVdu_QUIfx_lS7NtvR3tAcNVgRu2XJr6A0ktZuaUJSf8zDqEZcwoHSsfdo/s640/blackachievement-web.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
by <b><i>Karl Alexander and Stephen l. Morgan</i></b><br />
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