American Racism: “Same As It Ever Was”

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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"Once In A Lifetime" (1983), Beatings, Ben Fields, Booker T. Washington, Central Park, Death, Ida B. Wells, Institutional Racism, James Blake, James Frascatore, Morning Oregon, NYPD, Police Brutality, Racial Harassment, Racial Incidents, Racism, Spring Valley High School, Talking Heads, University of Missouri, White Vigilantism, Yale University

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, age 32, photographed by Mary Garrity, c. 1893, cropped and restored, September 8, 2013. (Adam Cuerden via Wikipedia). In public domain.

A young African American woman refuses to leave her seat. Authority figures arrive to demand that she leaves. She refuses again. One authority charged with “upholding the law” then picks the young woman up and drags her from her seat. But this isn’t Spring Valley High School near Columbia, South Carolina. Nor is it 2015. This incident involved the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells, who sat in a first-class ladies car on the segregated Memphis and Charleston Railroad train rolling through Tennessee. It occurred on May 4, 1884. Except it was three White men, who dragged and threw the then not-quite-twenty-two year-old off the train for refusing to give up a seat she paid for.

Just like with the Black teenager whom Ben Fields assaulted in the name of the law, I’m sure one of the things Wells might have thought was, “This is 1884. Why is this still happening?” The circumstances that led to both incidents were obviously different, but the racism that led to these violent responses was not.

With all that has occurred to break the illusion that Americans live in a twenty-first-century, post-racial utopia, Americans still bring up the times in which we live whenever racism rears its ugly head. Whether it’s the NYPD tackling ex-tennis star James Blake in September, the Black teenager at Spring Valley HS in October, or the responses to Black students at the University of Missouri or Yale in the past week, the need for temporal incredulousness is often present in the midst of these racist incidents. “You would think at some point they would get the memo that this isn’t okay, but it seems that there’s no stopping it,” Blake said after the incident with Officer James Frascatore.

At what point or time? As if saying “Why is this happening in 2015?” has anything to do with bringing systemic, institutional, individual, and internalized racism to an end. If there had been truth and reconciliation commissions at the end of Jim Crow in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, maybe then Americans can quote the year as evidence of irrational racial dissonance. If the federal government had provided reparations after Emancipation in 1865 or after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps then what year this is would matter. Racism and racists have never cared about the year or the supposedly multicultural, progressive times in which Americans lived.

Harris & Ewing photo of Booker T. Washington, circa 1905-1915, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, January 18, 2010. (Cantheasswonder via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Before his death in 1915, Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington experienced something all too many Americans of color face year after year. Washington delivered two speeches at churches in Manhattan on Sunday, March 19, 1911. That same evening, Washington went to an apartment building on West 63rd Street near Central Park, allegedly to meet up with a friend of his accountant on business. After attempting to find this mystery person at the building twice, Henry Ulrich, a 40-year-old White male, confronted Washington and punched him in the head. A White bystander handed Ulrich a walking stick and together, the two men chased Washington toward Central Park, hitting him with the stick on his head and face at least a dozen times. It wasn’t until Washington fell into the arms of NYPD Officer Chester Hagan, at a southwest entrance to Central Park, that the attack came to an end. After his initial arrest, Washington produced his identification papers. Only then was he released, allowed to press charges against Ulrich, and taken to a hospital to get 16 stitches and recover from his head bashing.

Morning Oregon headline on Booker T. Washington trial, November 7, 1911.

Despite having the support of Andrew Carnegie, former New York City mayor Seth Low and President William Taft, Washington’s assault charge was destined to fail. The New York and national press — yellow journalism at its best in 1911 — tried Washington on their front pages from March 20 on. Laura Alverez did a wonderful job in misrepresenting herself as “Mrs. Ulrich” in defense of her paramour at the trial. Alverez accused Washington of saying, “Hello, Sweetheart” to her — a dog whistle back then for the ultimate taboo of interracial sex — when Washington was outside the apartment building. Two of the three judges voted on Monday, November 6, 1911, to acquit Ulrich of the assault charge, news the national press gleefully reported. Among them was the Morning Oregonian, which had “‘Beating Up’ Darky Brings No Punishment to Man” as part of its headline.

All this took its toll on an already sick 55-year-old Washington, a man already suffering from hypertension and high-blood pressure. The result was a physically and emotionally diminished Washington after 1911. Booker T. Washington died on November 16, 1915. The power Washington had exercised as an advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft and as a racial accommodationist (some would say, an apologist) who befriended White philanthropists, it didn’t matter. His poor health may have been the symptom, but racism in all its forms was the ultimate cause.

It does not matter what year it is. Racists don’t care. It doesn’t matter if African Americans and White progressives hold die-ins in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York. Blacks and other people of color don’t have the same right to breathe without a racist’s say-so. It doesn’t matter if respectable Blacks wear nice suits and ties, attend Harvard, establish a university, or serve as President of the United States. Americans of color are all criminals and playthings in the eyes of racists, and the power structures for which they work have been set up to preserve racial inequality for centuries. And it doesn’t matter if liberals Black, White and Brown call for healing. Racists don’t want healing, and calling for it without acknowledging a flesh-eating, bacterial-infested wound like racism doesn’t do Americans any good. Booker T. Washington learned that lesson in 1911, and Ida B. Wells learned it in 1884. Millions of other Americans of color have learned that lesson all too well today.

We Have Syllogisms, But I Have Silly-isms

20 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Once In A Lifetime" (1983), Anita Baker, Authors, Book Titles, Books, Chicago, Chicago 17, Christine Stansell, Derrick Bell, Graduate School, Leon Litwack, Memory, Otis Redding, Patricia Cooper, Sean Wilentz, Silly-isms, Syllogisms, The Commodores, The Police, Writing Craft

Bad Math (2+2=5) picture, July 20, 2013. (http://www.scenicreflections.com).

I’m far from done discussing issues of race, racism, civil rights and education this summer. Not by a long shot. Especially with the half-century anniversary of the March on Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois’ death just over five weeks away. But a one or two blog break is needed, if only because I need it today.

When it comes to so many things in my life, my memory is better than IBM’s Watson. You give me a date anytime in the previous seventy years, I can tell you within a day what day of the week it falls on. I can tell you what I had for dinner on many a given day twenty or thirty years ago, what 616 smelled like in the middle of a July heat wave in ’82, and which of my former Humanities classmates were dating in the summer of ’85. Yeah, and where I walked to clear my head on any given Saturday or Sunday between July ’85 and August ’87.

But I frequently forget people’s names, but never their faces. I forget to bring reuseable bags with me to the grocery store, but recall physics facts and figures I haven’t looked at since AP Physics my senior year of high school. And — most importantly for today’s post — I often forget book titles. But I almost always remember the book’s content, context, audience, writing tone and style, where it fits in the historical literature or in its genre (and even whether it gave me a headache or inspired me), or whether it forced me to truly change the way I thought about a given issue or topic.

When I was a grad student at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, reading books the way Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi suck down hot dogs, I couldn’t keep the book titles in my head when I referred to them in seminars or in my papers. I just couldn’t. Maybe it was because the titles were boring, or because the books themselves were regurgitative snore-fests. Whatever the case, by the middle of my second year of grad school in late ’92, I needed a way to find a way back to a title and an author’s name, especially when in class refuting another student’s argument, in delivering a paper at a conference, or in answering questions from my professors about multiculturalism.

Otis Redding, The Dock of The Bay (posthumous album – 1968), July 20, 2013. (http://vibe.com; Atlantic Records).

That’s when I inadvertently took my penchant for pop cultural references and began applying them liberally to the task of keeping book titles and authors’ names straight in my head. (I would’ve tried to memorize them otherwise). It started with the late Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), which somehow bounced around a few neurons to conjure Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay” (1966). I didn’t need Redding to remind me of Bell or the title of his best-selling allegorical book. What it did, though, was free my mind to think of my massive amounts of reading on two levels, one scholarly, and one as reminders of my life and the lives of those suffering from inequality on the basis of race, class, gender and education.

So, when more boring book titles and/or books would come along, my mind would automatically go there. I turned David Tyack’s One Best System (1974) — a book about America’s K-12 system as a sorting out machine for the majority of the nation’s students — into Paul Carrick’s “One Good Reason,” a minor pop hit from ’88. My mind translated Patricia Cooper’s Once a Cigar Maker — all about gender and working-class issues in industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century — into Chicago’s “Once In A Lifetime” (not a hit, but on the Chicago 17 album). Or, even more often, I’d go, “You’re once, twiiiceee, three times a cigar maker, and I looooathe you” — a nod to Lionel Richie and The Commodores.

Anita Baker’s Rapture (1986) album cover, July 20, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

I went further — and sillier — as I transferred from the University of Pittsburgh to CMU. Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984) became Sean Wilentz “and the Pirates of Penzance” because of the rhyme scheme between “Wilentz” and “Chants.” Historian Christine Stansell was “don’t stand, don’t stand so, don’t Stansell close to me,” my homage to The Police. Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long (1979) became Anita Baker’s “Been So Long” (1986) from her Rapture album, while Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (1989) for me morphed into “Under The Poorhouse,” set to the tune of The Drifters’ “Under The Boardwalk” (1964).

It’s been nearly two decades since my last graduate seminar, yet I still find myself setting my book titles and authors to tunes and cinema. It makes reading an adventure for me, even as it helps me remember who wrote what. Silly, yes, it’s true. But don’t tell me I’m the only one who does this!