6 April 2017 Reader: Segregation and James Baldwin

But it’s also a country where if you’re running and you’re black there is a high chance you’ll be shot in the back. Then there will be a brief and cinematic fuss but no justice. Baldwin’s beautiful and screaming incomprehension sixty years ago at such atrocities still makes too much sense [emphasis added].

Please take the rope from my throat so that I may sing, Talia Marshall

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Segregation

Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists, Erica L. Green

Howard County is the most integrated school district in the region, according to the Maryland Equity Project of the University of Maryland. Children of different races — especially those who are black and white — are more likely to sit next to each other in Howard than almost anywhere else in the state.

But within that diversity, school leaders have uncovered a de facto system of segregation.

Enrollment data obtained by The Baltimore Sun through a public records request shows that the district’s advanced classes — honors, gifted and talented, and AP — are disproportionately white, while the regular and remedial classes are disproportionately black.

How School Choice Is Increasing Racial Segregation in Public Education

Erika Frankenberg, an associate professor of education and an associate of the Population Research Institute at Penn State, was the lead author of the study. She notes that “Black and Latino students tended to move into charter schools that were more racially isolated than the public schools they left.” This is a cause for concern, according to the authors. Dr. Frankenberg states that “minority students in more diverse school settings have higher short-term and long-term academic outcomes than those who attend racially isolated minority schools.

White students in Philadelphia area schools tended to go to charter schools that had a greater percentage of White students than the public school they had attended. But in the rest of the state, White students tended to opt for charter schools that were more diverse than the public schools.

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James Baldwin

How James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time still lights the way towards equality, Steven W Thrasher

His 1962 classic The Fire Next Time was originally a letter, written by Baldwin to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the so-called emancipation of black America. In the letter’s penultimate paragraph, Baldwin writes: “This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.” It is rhythmically similar to Trump’s red-hatted mantra – but there’s a big difference between trying to make America “great again” and focusing on what it once was, rather than what it “must become”.

More than 50 years on, The Fire Next Time has been reprinted by Taschen in a beautiful new edition that pairs his text with images by the civil rights-era photographer Steve Schapiro. Baldwin was “the scribe of the movement, our illustrious griot, who knew our struggle because he lived it”, as congressman John Lewis writes in the foreword. But before mobile phone videos and Twitter allowed black Americans to directly telegraph their plight to the world, it was up to photojournalism to visualise the message, as Schapiro’s images did in Life magazine.

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Photographs by Steve Schapiro

Against Literary Nationalism, Jan Clausen

In the twenty years since [Adrienne] Rich spoke out, the injustices she pointed to have intensified. Indeed, anyone who thinks that “cynical policies” disappeared under Obama should review his remarks to the nation’s top financial executives in March 2009, when the purveyor of “hope and change” tried to reassure the fat cats: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. . . . I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.”

Those who value “justice for all” cannot look at the actually existing United States — the barbarous inequalities it fosters at home, the imperial violence it passes off as foreign policy — without concluding that “the American proposition” is bunk. This is not, of course, to give up on fighting for justice; it is merely to eschew the veneration of a history of abuses.

So why don’t today’s writers take a stand like Rich? What happened to the radical dissent embodied in figures like James Baldwin, Grace Paley, and June Jordan — or the United Kingdom’s Harold Pinter, who devoted part of his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech to delivering a scathing rebuke of America’s imperial crimes?

Under the Spell of James Baldwin, Darryl Pinckney

Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr., symbol of nonviolence, had done what no black leader had before him, which was “to carry the battle into the individual heart.” But he refused to condemn Malcolm X, King’s supposed violent alternative, because, he said, his bitterness articulated the sufferings of black people. These things could also describe Baldwin himself in his essays on race and US society. He may not have dealt with “this sociology and economics jazz,” as Harold Cruse complained of him in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), but the reconstruction of America was for him, even in his bleakest essays, firstly a moral question, a matter of conscience. And at his best he simply didn’t need the backup of statistics and dates. When it came to The Fire Next Time (1963), the evidence of his experience, the truth of American history, he could take perfect flight on his own.

Battling to Save James Baldwin’s Home in the South of France, Rachel Donadio

Baldwin, who had lived in Paris earlier in his life, first came to Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1970, at the age of 46, after a breakdown. He had been excoriated by fellow members of the civil rights movement — some called the author, who was gay, Martin Luther Queen — and believed he was under surveillance by the United States government. In France, he found the tranquillity and distance to write.

At the time of his death from cancer, he had been buying the house in installments from his landlady, Jeanne Faure, who grew up in Algeria under French colonial rule. Despite her right-wing politics, she and Baldwin had become the best of friends. (When President François Mitterrand of France made Baldwin a commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986, one of the country’s highest honors, the author brought Ms. Faure to the ceremony.)

Please take the rope from my throat so that I may sing, Talia Marshall

I read Baldwin’s gay novel Giovanni’s Room at the same time, but Another Country is my favourite because it had these women in it: white, privileged Cass with her WASP, horse-riding New England girlhood, and Black, imperious and beautiful Ida who was aloof and suspicious of her dead brother’s white friends. Cass and Ida were proof Baldwin paid some attention to the inner world of women even if he imprisoned them in their sex as equally as men.

All his writing toils with the fact and cage of the body. The black body and the white fear of its darkness, and the cultural incomprehension at the heart of American life. His paradoxical and gospel-fed vision was that the only way to solve the ‘negro problem’ was to set white people free from their prejudice, given the subjugating nature of power even for the powerful.

James Baldwin was the double negative: Black and gay, and blessed with a frog-like lovely/unlovely face and boy-preacher airs; the greedy reader who devoured every single book in the Harlem library as a child; the ear for mixing the street talk of Harlem and Brooklyn, and the Beat chatter of the Village with the heady modernism of James and Joyce. Baldwin is often accused by critics of having superfluous amounts of empathy, and at times this compassion for the human condition slips into purple, gushing sentimentality. Like Disney for the bohemian set, Baldwin’s writing can be the literary equivalent of a relentless zoom lens shot of people’s faces and all their wretched, spilling emotions.

Confronting, Finally, Obama as Centrist, Incrementalist—Never The Socialist

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972)

The Right, specifically the Republican Party, has never been too bright, but it has always depended on the ham-fisted logic of the U.S. public.

As political maneuvering, the Right maintained a persistent drumbeat throughout Obama’s presidency, painting him The Socialist.

Yet, over the past few days, that same Right has unwittingly unmasked both Obama and themselves by noting the similarities between past comments by Obama and recent controversial claims by Ben Carson (slaves as immigrants) and Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz (iPhones and healthcare).

First, let’s be clear that calling enslaved people “immigrants” and demonizing people trapped in poverty are categorically wrong—regardless of who makes the claims.

And let’s also clarify that although the ends do not justify the means, Obama’s calloused comments were in the context of quite different goals than similar comments made from Republicans: Obama seeking equity and expanding healthcare by working within the system and long-held but false American Myths versus Republicans denying racial inequity (Carson) and working to cast impoverished and working citizens out of the guarantees of publicly funded healthcare and into the dog-eat-dog world of the free market.

But, second, and possibly more importantly, Obama has been unmasked as a centrist, an incrementalist—what we may admit is Ben Carson-light in rhetoric, but not political goals—by the very Right who falsely portrayed him as The Socialist.

As I have detailed in the Big Lie about the Left in the U.S., there simply is no viable or influential Left in this country, not in our two major political parties and not even on our university campuses; the leftwing professor cartoon is just as false as Obama The Socialist.

The Democratic Party in the U.S. is a centrist, leaning right, party; college professors are moderate progressives, comfortable members of the leisure class who are in no way dedicated to upsetting the status quo.

And everyone in power—even Bill Clinton and including Obama—remains trapped in narratives about race and social class that are both enduring and provably false.

Political leadership in the U.S. on both sides of the aisle speak to and perpetuate “get tough on crimes” rhetoric, despite decades of dropping crime rates; “fearing foreigners,” despite ample evidence that homegrown terrorism is far more dangerous; and “lazy minorities” as well as “lazy poor” characterizations beneath bootstrap language, although the bootstrap myth is a lie and systemic inequity remains powerful (racism, classism, sexism) on the lives of many Americas.

We don’t need the Right to pick through Obama’s legacy to highlight that he was never The Socialist, but it certainly would go a long way toward an equitable nation if we all would confront the moral vacuum that exists in U.S. politics because we have no political Left.

Publicly funded—universal healthcare, public education, roads and highways, judicial system and police force, military—is not about giving things to lazy people for free; publicly funded is about the collective will of a people determined to provide everyone access life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Equity is the political goal of the Left; forced equality is the cartoon version of “communism” that is in fact totalitarianism, fascism. The former is a moral imperative, the latter is heinous and immoral.

The U.S. is an amoral country that claims “democracy” but worships capitalism.

And thus, in typical confrontational and uncomfortable style, James Baldwin wrote in 1967:

It is true that two wrongs don’t make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn’t make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn’t. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

There is much to unpack there in 2017.

Obama and Carson, separately and together, are wrong to blur the horror of people enslaved with immigration.

Obama and Chaffetz, separately and together, are wrong to trivialize the basic human right of healthcare by playing to a false stereotype of people trapped in poverty.

But the real problem, the one crystal clear to Baldwin, is the collective work of the Oppressor, the U.S. public that not only allows these wrongs, but creates them.

As Stephen Pimpare notes, the largest block of people living in poverty are children, with no political or economic power.

People in poverty are mostly those children, the elderly, the disabled, students, the working poor, and those proving care for others.

Across the U.S., we’d rather play gotcha partisan politics than give a good damn about fulfilling our promises as a people committed to human dignity and equity for all.

Finger pointing across the aisle keeps everyone from the mirror that would require us to admit who we truly are.

And so …

Artwork by Molly Crabapple

“Every white person in this country…knows one thing,” James Baldwin (1979)

On Language, Race and the Black Writer, James Baldwin (Los Angeles Times, 1979)

Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, “what I want,’ but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

What Can a Sincere White Person Do? Malcolm X

A Portrait of the Artist as Activist: “in the sunlit prison of the American dream”

Standing in Starbucks a few days ago, just a couple weeks after I discovered honey in the sweetener and creamer station, I was peeling open a packet of honey when three lines came to me:

we rape the bees
because they are sweet

because we can

My poet-self writes this way; lines come to me, and I usually type them into Notes on my iPhone and email that to myself to work on when I have time.

Driving to my university office, I rehearsed those lines over and over, priming myself for the rest of the poem to appear—to reveal itself to me.

As a poet, I am often asking myself and the lines that come: What is this about?

I have preferred honey over processed sugar as a sweetener for about three decades, but over the last year, I discovered that among vegans, eating honey is a serious debate; many vegans do not eat honey.

It is a matter of consent.

And while some find veganism an easy target of ridicule, I see such commitments as powerful contexts of living one’s ethical and political beliefs.

Bees and honey, then, were buzzing in my unconsciousness as a political and ethical dilemma—one further complicated by my own sense that I wanted to write about worker bees as a metaphor for workers in the time of Trump.

The tension, however, became how to write a poem that remained a poem while it seemed to call out to be a political statement.

My foundational poetic muse is e.e. cummings, but my single poetic standard is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” a magical diamond of a poem. Concision and precision, undeniable as a paper cut (like William Carlos Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just To Say”).

The final version of we rape the bees (because we can), I hope, fulfilled that goal by focusing on sound (I chose the soft “s” as a whisper to the hard “z” associated with bees), wordplay (“trump,” “unjust desserts”), essential but vivid images (“golden lips and sticky fingers”), and the briefest of allusions ( only “enslaved” as I resisted how to pack the poem with both slavery and the Japanese Internment).

A good poem, I think, even if it demands to be a political poem, becomes good by all that the poet chooses to leave out as the poet strips the billowing ideas down to the least possible words.

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“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” wrote James Baldwin in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.”

Baldwin engages in this essays that tension between art and politics/activism, arguing, “It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.”

Choosing fidelity to art over politics and activism, Baldwin rejects the protest novel:

But unless one’s ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novels the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream.

The missionary zeal of activism erases both the core values of the artist and the intent of that zeal—and then Baldwin reminds us:

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.

Turning at the end to Richard Wright’s Native Son, Baldwin concludes:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.

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“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know'” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats)

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“In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures,” explains Margaret Atwood, whose The Handmaid’s Tale has been rejuvenated with the rise of Trump.

While strongly associated with George Orwell, see her essays on “Writing Utopia” and “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections,” Atwood turns from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to another classic dystopian work:

The other was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism – one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.

Then adds, “Which template would win, we wondered?…Would it be possible for both of these futures – the hard and the soft – to exist at the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like?”

Unlike the protest novel, could we find in dystopian science fiction a satisfying merging of art and politics/activism?

While Milan Kundera’s novels, notably The Unbearable Lightness of Being, seek to dramatize the philosophical and the political, Atwood’s dystopian works—from The Handmaid’s Tale to her MaddAddam Trilogy—are grounded in, as Atwood explains, history, not what she fabricates but what has already happened.

Atwood’s fiction is fiction in that she reconstructs human behavior while also infusing her dystopias with speculation, the logical extrapolations of actual human behavior.

“It was Huxley’s genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity,” Atwood understands: “Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.”

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The artist is a human driven to create, that urge welling up inside like a fresh batch of honey never aware of any intensions toward sweetness.

This, I think, we must not deny, for if we do, we deny ourselves.

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See Also

Ahmed Naji: ‘Prison made me believe in literature more’

The Bootstrap Lie and the Politics of Privilege

This is going to be difficult and uncomfortable.

I invite you, then, to be patient while I start with something slightly less uncomfortable but just as difficult.

The tragic but real story of Pat Tillman is many things—one of which is a complete unmasking of how powerful and dangerous cultural mythologies are and how often our cultural mythologies prove to be both false and serving the interests of privilege (primarily white, male, and wealth privilege).

Tillman believed in the sacred duty of a person to serve his country, and then, in that service, Tillman not only lost his life, but also had his death story fabricated to perpetuate the very false myth that failed him.

Those with power sullied Tillman’s legacy to reinforce that the false myth of patriotism could be preserved in the service of their power — and were willing to sacrifice anyone buying the myth.

Again, that is a very hard discussion, a nearly impossible reality to recognize and digest.

But this is even more difficult because it entails race and racism as well as the very ugly stereotypes the U.S. perpetuates and embraces about people in poverty.

And as a very privileged and successful white man, I am walking onto very thin ice by confronting and naming black leaders who, as I will outline, represent a tragedy similar to Tillman’s.

Next, before I become more pointed, my caveat here is that I offer this as a witness in the tradition of James Baldwin, to whom I will return at the end. These are critical views of the world that I have learned by listening carefully, by setting aside my own urge to mansplain, whitesplain—to be the authority.

I am not the authority, but I am a diligent student.

To be considered:

Lawyer Michelle Alexander has detailed a disturbing dynamic: many black communities have advocated against their own best interests by embracing the “get tough on crime” myth perpetuated in the service of privilege. Alexander’s best example, I think, is that police often sweep black neighborhoods (are often invited to do so by blacks themselves), but choose not to do similar sweeps in white and affluent areas such as college campuses—although both are likely to have recreational drugs being used and sold.

Critical educator Chris Emdin, writing on his Instagram page, confronts a parallel paradox in education: “Black teachers with white supremacist ideologies [are] just as dangerous as white folks who don’t understand culture.” From Geoffrey Canada to Steve Perry to Joe Clark—many black educators have embraced the essentially racist “no excuses” ideologies that target black, brown, and poor children while perpetuating that the problems with educating these children lies in deficits of the children, and not any systemic forces. Education designed to correct, “fix,” fundamentally broken children (racial minorities, impoverished children) is inherently racist and classist.

Scholar Stacey Patton advocates against corporal punishment, specifically addressing how many blacks have internalized racist demands that the black body be punished, reaching back to U.S. slavery. As Patton explains:

Dr. Stacey Patton: People think that hitting a child is a form of teaching. We think it will protect them.  And people grow up to invert the violence they experience as children as something that was good, particularly in African-American culture.  As a people, we attribute our success to having had our bodies processed through violence and quite frankly what it does is confirm a long-standing racist narrative about Black bodies. The only way to control us, the only way to make us “good,” law-abiding, moral people is with a good whupping. It seems that we unconsciously agree with that narrative.

Alexander, Emdin, and Patton represent a much larger body of work that recognizes how often privilege recruits outliers of marginalized groups in order to distort those outliers as proof of false myths, specifically pointing to any successful black person as proof that the bootstrap myth is real, that we have achieved a meritocracy.

Popular culture is filled with examples—O.J. Simpson, Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby, just to name a few who have become spokespersons in the service of privilege, who, as Emdin notes, are “just as dangerous.”

So here is the very hardest and most uncomfortable part, forced by the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, an ideologue billionaire hell-bent on perpetuating the choice myth that serves only people like her at the expense of marginalized people, especially children who should not have to wait for the Invisible Hand and who should be served immediately by leaders of the wealthiest country in human history.

Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) has eagerly supported DeVos within his own unwavering advocacy for choice, often invoking that poor and minority families and children deserve the same choices as white and wealthy families and children.

Scott has sold his political soul (much like Clarence Thomas) to an ugly and harmful bootstrap myth, as expressed on his biography page:

An unbridled optimist, Senator Scott believes that despite our current challenges, our nation’s brightest days are ahead of us. As a teenager, Tim had the fortune of meeting a strong, conservative mentor, John Moniz. Moniz helped instill in Tim the notion that you can think your way out of poverty, and that the golden opportunity is always right around the corner. The American Dream is alive and well, and Tim’s story is a concrete example of that.

Scott is an outlier, and his story of success is commendable—except it is an ugly thing to hang one’s success over the heads of others, demanding that their not reaching a similar success is simply due to not “think[ing] [their] way out of poverty.”

No, the American Dream is not alive and well:

At the same levels of effort, women and racial minorities remain disadvantaged by systemic forces that work against them; these inequities are not the result of the ugly “laziness” myth about black, brown, and poor people that lies underneath the bootstrap myth, the rugged individual myth, the meritocracy myth.

The free market and all sorts of choice are crap shoots, and they are in no way mechanisms for equity, for justice.

Scott’s “notion that you can think your way out of poverty” is a slap in the face of adults and children who are already working and trying as hard as they can, and worst of all, this bootstrap mantra maintains the very systemic forces it refuses to recognize.

Billionaires from Trump to DeVos are spreading cultural lies, and they depend along the way on recruits into these narratives, recruits—as Alexander, Emdin, and Patton reveal—who may even look just like the people being cheated.

And so I will end by coming back to Baldwin, whose legacy is being renewed, and whose message still resonates as Rich Blint concludes:

As the latest entry of the brilliance of James Baldwin on film, I Am Not Your Negro (along with Baldwin’s scathing account of American film-making, The Devil Finds Work) lays bare the rhetorical and imagistic sleight of hand that enables the fiction and terror of race in American life to persist with such a renewed and deadly power. As he suggests, the extent to which we truly wrestle with our psychic need for the myth of the “nigger,” will determine the future of the country. It is still the only song left to sing.

To Kill a Mockingbird, White Saviors, and the Paradox of Obama and Race

White progressives, academics, and book lovers were all atwitter on social media because in his farewell address, Barack Obama quoted from literature:

Similar to my concern about Michelle Obama’s recent comments on education and teachers, my response to this excitement was tempered:

Obama quoting Finch/TKAM (white savior “race” novel) proves he remains anchored to appeals to white privilege, not dismantling it

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) January 11, 2017

 

During the praise tour for the Obamas, I have taken this stance on social media:

Praise for Michelle and Barack Obama has begun as Obama’s presidency comes to an end. That praise poses a few problems:

Praise is warranted, must be supported against the inherent racism that demands perfection from minorities and not from white males.

However Michelle and Barack have allowed, supported policies that contradict the often wonderful rhetoric, notably about education.

Michelle’s recent praise of teachers and the power of education is hard to let lie since Obama’s 8 years have been horrible for education.

The policies and rhetoric from the DOE/SOE have been horrible for black, brown, poor students since they have fed deficit ideology.

Let us be careful to honor but not idealize, not gloss over the failure of policy beneath the veneer of rhetoric.

Here, I want to deal directly with the paradox of race surrounding Obama’s presidency as that is reflected in Obama’s choice to quote Atticus Finch and not, for example, the essays of James Baldwin or the literature and public commentary of Toni Morrison.

This is offered specifically to white people, in the context of my awareness and rejecting of whitesplaining, and as an ally to all people seeking racial equity in a country that denies its racism daily.

Also this is informed by the wide spectrum of reactions to Obama and his role in confronting racism in the U.S. Black academics and intellectuals are not uniform in how to assess Obama, not uniform in either praise or criticism of Obama.

A powerful touchstone for Obama and race/racism in the U.S. has been Ta-Nehisi Coates’s My President Was Black.

Tressie McMillan Cottom and William A. Darity Jr. have challenged both Coates and Obama.

Cottom offers a wonderful and nuanced response, but concludes:

The essay is also infuriating. It attributes so much of Obama’s improbable presidency to his inimitable faith in white Americans’ higher self, something I can only describe as Obama’s painful rejection of black folks’ agency. The theory that Obama could be elected president because his white family had imbued him with an authentic love for and faith in white people that the typical black American does not have is intuitive but wrong. I suspect, given Obama’s own words over hours of conversations with Coates, that he believes he really does have some special insight into white people’s better angels. Nothing is more emblematic of the problem with this theory than Obama’s assessment of Donald Trump’s election chances to Coates: “He couldn’t win.” Obama’s faith in white Americans is not better insight into their soul where, presumably the mythical “racist bones” can be found. Obama’s faith, like the theory that it made Obama’s presidency possible, misunderstands race as something black folks can choose without white folks’ assent. White voters allowed Barack Obama because they allowed him to exist as a projection of themselves. It is seductive to believe Obama could shape that in some way, much less control and direct it. But, as Coates details in painful case after case of political obstructionism among Democrats and Republicans during the first black president’s terms, Obama never had the ability to shape white people’s attitudes. White people’s attitudes, the contradictions of their racial identities and class consciousness, made Obama. Obama did not make them.

But Darity is more pointed:

I had a queasy feeling about Barack Obama’s candidacy from the moment I heard his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that lifted him into national prominence, a speech that Coates summarizes in the profile. Toward the end of the speech Obama observed that black families in urban centers realized “that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn … that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” “The acting white” libel—a myth that will not die—argues that low school performance for black students is a product of a culturally based black opposition to high academic achievement.

Among these many diverse and brilliant voices—and the rhetorical legacy of Obama—I feel both nervous about expressing and compelled to address how Obama choosing Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird to quote offers yet another reason to believe Cottom’s “White people’s attitudes, the contradictions of their racial identities and class consciousness, made Obama. Obama did not make them.”

My short response is Obama has been successful and effective (admitting reasonable people may disagree about what “effective” means) because he is the type of person who knows to quote TKAM when trying to persuade whites about the need to overcome racism.

My longer response must address why white people are so enamored with Finch and TKAM: Like Obama, it is a middle-class and respectable way to confront something very ugly and likely not to be changed by that politeness.

With the controversial posthumous publishing of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, most people fell prey to the debate about Finch as a racist in that pre-quel and ignored the long critical examination of TKAM and Finch as a failed work on race and racism that is enduring because white privilege loves the white savior narrative, which is the foundational element of TKAM (see Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s Walking in Another’s Skin: Failure of Empathy in To Kill a Mockingbird).

“In many ways, Atticus’s subtle racism in Mockingbird is the story’s brilliance,” explains Catherine Nicols.

That “subtle racism,” notes Jennifer Polish, appeals to the Left:

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is widely valorized as a “progressive” book. And this is the larger problem with the book and with Atticus’s character and racism—Atticus was always positioned as a white savior.

And Osamudia R. James adds the need to re-consider TKAM (a call that may be equally relevant to how we praise and critique Obama):

Atticus Finch presented an enduring model to which many white liberals still cling. But besides being a fictional character, Atticus Finch is a myth. And a dangerous myth because he keeps good white liberals from reconsidering the fact that they live in white neighborhoods; from challenging administrators about the racial segregation of their children’s schools or white supremacy advanced in the curriculum; or from acknowledging how they benefit from a system that keeps people of color laboring in their homes but excluded from their social and professional spaces. Like Finch, it is sufficient that they simply “do their best to love everybody.”

James concludes then:

It would be easier to ignore “Watchman” and stick to white saviors and the triumph of individual values over structural oppression. But if we choose this account, racism is not overcome, black children still encounter anti-blackness at their schools, and whites – despite their individual goodness – remain complicit in it all.

Ironically, I guess, the debate around Lee’s Watchmen failed to prompt either an impactful reconsideration of TKAM or race/racism/white privilege (see here and here also).

It now seems unlikely that Obama’s presidency (at least a significant symbolic moment in race for the U.S.) or the rise of Trump and the concurrent normalization of white supremacy will prompt an impactful reconsideration of race/racism in the country either.

In fact, it seems that the circumstances have been reduced so that we must cling with glee in some way to Obama’s anemic confrontation of race tempered by the conventional expectations of respectability governed by white privilege.

Just as the white savior myth needs to be retired from literature and pop culture, the role of white privilege must be eradicated, allowing the equity of all spaces for everyone.

I am skeptical that appeasing white privilege is the course needed for that to occur.

I am nervous about incrementalism—the belief that Obama is a necessity along the path to racial equity.

I am fearful that Obama’s symbolic and rhetorical moment in history has spawned the worst sort of backlash, one we could not have imagined—or one that whites were unable to imagine while mired in the white savior myth, the lie of post-racial America, and the delusion that systemic racism is not fed by virtually every single white person.

Despite the good that Michelle and Barack Obama have fostered for this country, today we are still being asked to tip-toe around the sensibilities of racists—not to call racism “racism,” racists “racists.

This I am certain is not progress.

 

“How can anybody know/How they got to be this way?”

How can anybody know
How they got to be this way?

“Daughters of the Soho Riots,” The National

It’s 7 January 2017, Zore Neale Hurston‘s birth day; Hurston passed away 28 January 1960, a couple days short of one year before my birth 26 January 1961.

So my 56th birth day looms fewer than 3 weeks away.

Today, the world looks unusual for us in South Carolina:

Skylar contemplates the necessity of pants for her snow adventure at the new home.

The view from my back door for Flurrypocalypse 2017. Throughout the area, grocery stores have no bread or milk.

New years are arbitrary measures of time, and we humans seek any ways possible to understand and control the human condition. The calendar and holidays are some ways we have manufactured to name, organize, and maintain our grip.

As I have detailed lately, today also marks two weeks since I and several other cyclists were struck by a motorist. Writing this now, I notice in just a few minutes, the time will be about exactly when that happened on the morning of Christmas Eve 2016.

I have also confessed that my life has changed. Over the past week, I must admit that it has changed even more than I thought.

Without cycling, I have way too much time, but I also have found it difficult to commit to things the same way I have before. Pain is a problem—distracting and the most potent fertilizer possible for my chronic anxiety and occasional depression.

Yesterday, I finally had a visit with the orthopedist who viewed my x-rays at the emergency room, and almost immediately, I felt better just knowing more from someone with the sort of expertise I do not have.

My medication ran out a few days before this appointment, and along with the increased pain, my fretting was nearly debilitating.

It is embarrassing, but when the anxiety increases, my life is significantly reduced. I worry, and worrying is a very deep well I have trouble climbing out, a very deep well from which I fear I can never climb out.

I have confronted that my life as a road cyclist is likely over; a decision made for me, and a consequence of the accident about which I may be the most viscerally angry.

Anxiety for me is also fed by not knowing—the lowest pit of hell. And I am now swamped by not knowing how the insurance will work out (except to know this is going to be problematic), and not really knowing how soon I will be physically 100% again (I mean as 100% as a 56-year-old man can be).

Just normal aging has always terrified me in terms of the specter of knowing that human behaviors of many kinds will end, and likely without warning. Many things I love to do will no longer be possible just because that is one fact of the human condition.

I have a plan—a way to be hopeful: climbing on the dreaded cycling trainer by week 3 or 4 of the recovery, and as my orthopedist offered without me having to ask, being back on the MTB in 6 weeks or less.

Being mostly immobile and mostly inside has not helped any of this. A huge part of my cycling addiction is connected to constant and extended movement while being outside in the sunshine.

Most bicycle rides are 1.5 hours to 3-4 hours—even once a year, 11-12 hours of riding over 220 miles.

In 2016, I did 246 rides in 365 days, basically riding 2 of every 3 days. There simply is no physical activity possible to replace that.

For two weeks now, I have ridden only the couch.

radical eyes for equity: “Reality bites”

This has been a long build up to explaining why I renamed and chose a different template for this blog.

Blogging, I have discovered, is a powerful way for a writer to gain some of that understanding and control at the center of the human urge.

I started blogging at established but open sites many years ago, and then committed to this WordPress blog four years ago—completely unsure if or why anyone would read my work.

At the beginning, I already had come to terms with rejecting the liberal (versus conservative) tag too strongly anchored in partisan politics, and fully embraced Howard Zinn’s reclaiming the term “radical.” [1]

Naming my blog “the becoming radical” sought to acknowledge being a writer and being a critical educator were always a journey, not a destination, not static—again speaking to Zinn’s “moving train” metaphor.

Especially after working on a volume about James Baldwin in 2014, my focus, my refrain has shifted strongly toward Baldwin:

As I noted in the prolonged opening, naming and organizing are efforts to understand and control; therefore, as I have changed—and as some of that has been against my will, not of my design—this new year and the horror of Trump before us (just when you think things cannot be worse) have converged with my personal development and my evolution as a writer/thinker/educator.

First, the new template.

I have always wanted a blog that doesn’t look like the stereotype of a blog as something not serious or possibly scholarly (since many people, especially in the academy, don’t value blogging), and I have distinct color and font proclivities.

Immobile and in pain (a dear friend quipped, “You have too much time on your hands”), I searched the free WordPress templates and found what you see now. The green, lower-case lettering of the header, font choices, and ability to control a sidebar all clicked with me. This seems relatively clean and accessible.

I hope my blog readers agree.

But all of that is cosmetic. The main shift has been the new title—radical eyes for equity—which incorporates word play (“radical eyes” = “radicalize”), an allusion to Baldwin’s “rigid refusal to look at ourselves,” and a more clear statement about my grounding in the pursuit of equity—race, class, gender, and sexuality equity.

I cannot explain how I got here, or even fully who I am or what “here” is, but I am here, and this is now, and this is all I can do.

I sit here ending this blog and the sun is shining while it continues to snow in South Carolina, where the temperature is still below freezing.

“What the hell” seems to have become my standard response to this world, but there is work to be done, living to be lived.

I hope you reading and even more will be willing, even eager, to join me here as I try my best to understand and control this thing called the human condition with radical eyes for equity.

And if you join this adventure, I think this from Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart deserves our attention, and it weighs particularly heavy on me now:

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[1] From You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn (1994):

When I became a teacher I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences. . . .Does not the very fact of that concealment teach something terrible—that you can separate the study of literature, history, philosophy, politics, the arts, from your own life, your deepest convictions about right and wrong?. . .In my teaching I never concealed my political views. . . .I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or the Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth. . . .From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. (pp. 7, 173)