Tag Archives: Slavery

The “Anti-American” Trope and Being a Black Writer

04 Thursday Jul 2019

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Malcolm X quote from his “By Any Means Necessary Speech,” Organization of Afro-American Unity, New York, June 28, 1964. (https://azquotes.com).

This week, I published yet another article article in Al Jazeera English, this one titled “How US history is whitewashed in high school exams.” It’s about my experiences scoring AP US History and AP World History exams for the College Board through Educational Testing Service as a contingent faculty member. It was also about how the two organizations consistently present a sanitized version of both histories, excluding and marginalizing those of African, of Latinx, and of indigenous descent in the process. My biggest concern was that folks would find my treatment of the work of the College Board and ETS unfair. Or, that readers would disagree with me personally, attacking my intellect and my race purely out of racism and jingoism.

On the second concern, I was mostly right, but not quite in the way I expected. At least three trolls accused me of being “anti-American” and “anti-patriotic.” Really? So, no critique of American education or of two education organizations can stand without it being a referendum on whether I am a patriot for America as it is instead of what I’d like it to be? The narcissism I see out of the mostly male, nearly all White set in the US — it must reside in a bottomless pit. Or in the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Is calling out folks who believe themselves to be educators because they favored Japanese internment during World War II as an example of state-sponsored mass violence over slavery in colonial America/US really anti-American? Is pointing out the flaws in the politics around K-12 and college education in the field of history an example of my anti-patriotism? Should I be subjected to jingoistic scorn because I dare say that “[c]hattel slavery will always serve as a complicating counternarrative to The College Board’s trope of the West’s continual social and political progress?” If this is anti-American, then so is racism, misogyny, anti-Latino and anti-Arab xenophobia, and rolling tanks into DC on the 4th of July.

But, there was more. At least two trolls tweeted and messaged me about Al Jazeera publishing my article this week. One called me a “fool” because they saw me as a mere tool for their otherwise anti-Black stances and tropes in their coverage. Another tweeted twice, “QATAR LAW: Since 2004, Article 296 of the current Penal Code (Law 11/2004) stipulates imprisonment between 1 and 3 years for sodomy between men.” This because Al Jazeera is partially owned by the Qatari government. Last I checked, the British government partially owns the BBC. The US has repugnant laws and policies in place toward Blacks, Latinxs, Native Americans, women, LGBTQIA folx, and the millions living with poverty. Yet I’m supposed to not publish a piece with one of the largest news outlets in the world because it might make me a tool of the Qatari, and therefore somehow anti-American? Give me a break!

Ultimately, I published with Al Jazeera this time around because they allowed me the most space to air my first-hand account and analysis, without delay and without editing out my direct experience. As a freelance writer and someone with an affinity for the journalistic, that’s really all any professional can ask for.

What I cannot nor will not do, though, is back down or renegotiate my critiques about the US, as is my right as an American citizen. Nor will I attempt to tailor what I write for folks who otherwise stand in opposition to a curriculum that holds fast to Western sacred cows and American mythologies.

At a job interview I did a couple of weeks ago in New Jersey, a search committee member asked me this. “What will you do to reach those people on campus who don’t just have concerns” about my work and the work of the department I could’ve represented, “but are in opposition to your work” and the department’s very existence? “Ultimately, I don’t believe it’s my job to reach folks who stand in opposition to equality, to my insistence that I am equally human. Why would I want to spend time and energy trying to reach those people? We’ve tried that already. With respectability politics, with assimilation. It hasn’t worked,” was my response.

The same goes for the trolls on the Internet, who’ve never seen an idea from a Black man or a Black woman that they’ve respected, who will find anything short of an endorsement from 45 anti-American. I am not writing for you. I am writing for everyone else but you.

Colson Whitehead’s a Genius, But What’s Slavery to Me?

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh

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Colson Whitehead is a genius. I am absolutely convinced of this truth. I’ve read other things by him. But his novel The Underground Railroad is one part Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and two parts Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man mixed with the macabre and mystical in Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison. Every sentence in Underground Railroad was written with precision, especially the first 120 pages. It was as if Whitehead put every word through a metal acid bath, every phrase was pored over with an electron microscope. I was hooked by page 24, and didn’t stop to put the book down again until page 160. I finished the book in eight hours over two days, not a record, but pretty close.

The Underground Railroad is all about escape, of course, but not just the obvious, physical escape from slavery’s asphyxiating grasp. It was a need to escape the post-traumatic stress of having been a slave. It was finding ways to use the mind and spirit to cope with torture, whippings, rapes, mangled bodies, demonic rhythms of an existence in which humans are little more than broken toys. It was escaping inhumanity to find humanity and the divine, even in the most minuscule of proportions.

I loved the main character Cora. That Whitehead made his main character female, a third-generation slave from a plantation in Georgia during the antebellum period wasn’t lost on me. As with all of his characters, Whitehead developed Cora with a full sense of imperfection, making her a nearly perfect lens for me to view the novel. She and Mabel and Ajarry fully embodied kidnapping and slavery in all its horror. Folks, if you want anyone to come close to the actual experience of what slavery was for Africans in America, Whitehead got as close as any writer I’ve read in my lifetime.

I could nitpick about Whitehead a bit, too. That Cora’s femaleness wasn’t fully explored, with everything from not having periods to how she may have experienced her development as a woman prior to her first escapes or her one almost romantic moment. Or about the mystical mashup of the last twenty to thirty pages. Or about the railroad going on to infinity, in this case, Missouri, as Cora never really escapes.

My biggest criticism, though, isn’t really a criticism at all. It’s an admission. I really didn’t want to read The Underground Railroad. I made no plans to buy it or to check it out from a library. I would’ve been content in life to have never read this masterpiece.

Why? I’m sick and tired of talking about slavery, about the physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual torture of millions of Africans so that a few Whites could profit financially and many more could profit psychologically. It feels like I’ve been talking about slavery my whole life, even though I’ve only been aware of it since Roots and its television debut in February 1977, or for 41 of my forty-eight years.

I studied slavery with deliberate disembodiment in my teens and twenties. It might’ve been through reading books by Alice Walker or Morrison. But by the Fall Semester 1989 at Pitt, I was reading and writing about slavery and American racism in earnest. I wrote my undergraduate readings paper about the slavery studies literature for my professor Larry Glasco’s class. The next semester, I took a grad course in Comparative Slavery, reading about the differences between slave systems in Brazil, Cuba, the US, and for my 34-page paper, slavery in South Africa before 1838.

Having done that, nearly every course I took through my master’s program in 1991-92 had a slavery studies component. So I read White paternalists like Ulrich B. Phillips. Racist historians like him contended that Blacks in the US should be on their knees and thankful that Whites stole them, sold them, and slaughtered their ancestors during slavery, such was the civilizing effect. I read slavery studies by not-so-obscure authors like Sterling Stuckey and John Blassingame, who made the living hell that was slavery come alive in stories and statistics. I also read White apologists like Fogel and Engerman in their Time on the Cross. I remember saying in my US history grad seminar in 1991, “so they’re saying that slavery wasn’t so harsh because the average slave received 21 lashes per year versus the standard 39?.” It was my translation of their multiple regression analysis.

By the time I started my PhD work in September 1992, I was through with studying slavery. It was too painful to be in class with White students who at their best could never really understand slavery beyond statistics and ideology. Even if it was in their DNA via an unknown African ancestor (some estimate that as many as one in eight Southern Whites carry recent African DNA, and about four percent of Whites in the US overall). That any person could and did regularly argue that slavery was a “necessary evil” or “saved” Africans in the US from “savagery” helped me move into twentieth-century US and African American history as a field of study. Still brutal, still mind-destroying, but not the complete horror show of slavery.

Whenever I touch the subject of slavery in the courses I teach these days, I still get that sense of outrage and indignation when I see students unable to deal with the bitter, devastating truth. “C’mon, slavery wasn’t that bad. They were fed and clothed. And wasn’t there White slavery for the Irish, too?” That’s what one of my White students said in a world history course I taught a couple of years ago, in response to a discussion of the differences between the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. The latter was the first fully successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, leading to the founding of Haiti as an independent nation in 1804.

I don’t know how Whitehead could write this novel and not go through hours of emotional torment at the end of each day. In my own experience, writing about any trauma has left me dazed for minutes or even an hour or two at a time, unable to sleep, and wondering why I’ve never smoked weed. I’m thankful Whitehead did, and I hope that he’s healing.

I was so uncomfortable reading Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad because I knew that the horror and pain of slavery was literally encoded in my DNA. I was uncomfortable because I knew that people like this one UMUC student would never get it, even if he did read the novel. Whitehead didn’t write the novel for him, though. I think he wrote it for me, freeing me from my discomfort with the horrible.

The Student-Athlete System and the Exploitation Lens

01 Friday Apr 2016

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NCAA logo, September 4, 2014. (Getty Images/SportingNews.com).

NCAA logo, September 4, 2014. (Getty Images/SportingNews.com).

In July, US District Judge Claudia Wilken gave final approval to a combined $60 million in settlements of former and current college athletes’ claims against the NCAA and EA Sports. The deal granted as many as 93,000 claims of up to $7,000 for the use of college athletes’ images and likenesses in video games between 2003 and 2014. The groundbreaking decision provides student-athletes payments for the fruits of their labor for the first time. But these combined settlements are separate from the O’Bannon v. NCAA case. This main lawsuit against the NCAA’s use of unpaid college athletes remains in limbo. The NCAA asked for and the courts granted a stay, delaying a process that would make every college athlete eligible for some compensation in exchange for universities using their labor.

Beyond the response that often compares the NCAA student-athlete labor system to slavery, few have discussed the ways in which the NCAA’s defenders construct their arguments for the status quo. In many ways, the NCAA system isn’t much different from sharecropping. It was an agricultural economic system mostly located in the American South that took advantage of impoverished Whites and Blacks between 1870 and 1980. Both provided meager benefits like room, board, and clothing at an exorbitant cost while reaping huge profits from its workers. One system kept sharecroppers deeply in debt while the other has kept college athletes from profiting off of their work. The carrot in sharecropping was access to land to grow cotton and other crops for a profit at the end of a harvest season, minus landownership and all the necessary tools, seeds, and other necessities for producing those crops. The incentive in the NCAA’s system has been a year-to-year scholarship to cover the cost of a four-year degree, with the remote possibility in a handful of sports to earn enough recognition to become a professional athlete. Minus, until last fall, coverage for books, clothing, food outside of sporting events and practices, and the hours necessary to take advantage of an athletic scholarship. Defenders of both systems fought tooth-and-nail to keep sharecroppers and college athletes from organizing themselves into unions.

Unlike in slavery, the majority of sharecroppers were White, although more than a third were African American. All entered into sharecropping under contract, though the poor economic conditions of the South after the Civil War and the terror of White supremacist groups left poor Whites and Blacks few options. Likewise, NCAA’s college athletes also sign contracts and waivers that left them with few options in pursuing their athletic craft or in completing a college degree a year earlier than the average college student. And at least three different ways, the people defending the NCAA’s student-athlete system match sharecropping’s defenders with the language of exploitation. Though neither system is slavery, both are still closely related forms of exploitation, with a brutality that provides few good options for those engaged in doing the actual work.

George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess, with "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" (1935), oft sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong (among others), April 1, 2016. (cropped and combined).

George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess, with “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin'” (1935), oft sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong (among others), April 1, 2016. (cropped and combined).

1. The circular reasoning argument. This one is where defenders use the very label of their system — whether “sharecroppers” or “student-athletes” — to justify the existence and need for their system. Historian Chris Myers Asch documented numerous examples of this in his 2008 book The Senator and the Sharecropper. Asch included in his book a 1936 interview with psychologist John Dollard, one in which Mississippi planter William Alexander Percy said, “To live among a people whom, because of their needs, one must in common decency protect and defend is a sore burden in a world where one’s own troubles are about all any life can shoulder” (p. 70). Especially since many elites like Edward Everett Davis — dean of North Texas Agricultural College (now University of Texas at Arlington) from 1925 to 1946 — saw sharecroppers as “the most serious rural problem in the South.” In his The White Scourge (1940), Davis wrote that sharecroppers were “those biologically impoverished tribes of marginal humanity — black, white, and Mexican — subsisting on cotton” (p. ix).

Compare this line of reasoning with NCAA President Mark Emmert’s on why universities should not pay college athletes. On the 2011 Frontline episode “Money and March Madness,” Emmert said, “fact is, they’re not employees, they’re student-athletes.” In another interview, for the upcoming documentary The Business of Amateurs (release date TBD), Emmert said, “there’s not even a salary to debate. They’re not employees, they’re students.” For Emmert and the portions of the public who support his stance, the label “student-athlete” by itself justifies not paying college athletes, just like the label “sharecropper” did for planters who frequently cheated their workers out of profits. The idea for both has been they are but children that institutions need to care for, albeit under contract.

Black and White sharecroppers in Randolph County, Georgia, 1910. (Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection)

Black and White sharecroppers in Randolph County, Georgia, 1910. (Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection)

2. The low or no profit-margin argument. This has been a popular idea, to claim that despite the wealth generated under sharecropping, landowners made few, if any, profits. As shown by historian Lawrence J. Nelson in his 1999 book King Cotton’s Advocate, Oscar G. Johnston, head of the financial division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (a New Deal program), wrote in a 1937 memo, “any person familiar with the operation realizes that the sharecropper system is more favorable to the tenant than the cash wage system [paying hourly wages].” According to Johnston, any “criticisms” of sharecropping as an exploitative economic system came “from persons wholly ignorant of the system or the economic situation” (p. 88).

Syracuse University men’s basketball coach Jim Boeheim claimed that there are few to no profits in college athletics in his 2013 New York State Associated Press symposium speech. “I’m not against kids getting money. But the problem is, you give the 12 basketball players $150, now you gotta give the field hockey players. So now you’re talking 150 athletes. One-hundred fifty times $150 times eight. That’s a lot of money,” Boeheim said. In pleading for a stay in the O’Bannon case last year, the NCAA’s lawyers said that it and “many schools and students” would be “irreparably harmed” if the court allowed the injunction to go into effect. Yet the NCAA’s $11-billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and $500-million-per-year contract with ESPN for the college football playoffs contradicts the notion of irreparable harm.

3. The fringe-benefits argument. This is the assertion that a person’s status in this system produces material and intangible benefits, even despite the potential pitfalls and vulnerabilities. Asch wrote of another 1936 interview John Dollard conducted, in which one farmer said, “when times are bad he has to take care of the Negroes first, whether they make anything or not.” Another farmer said that sharecroppers only worked about three months out of the year, and used the rest of their time to “fish, fool around, attend revivals, and follow other trivial pursuits” (p. 71). Despite the evidence of poverty for the vast majority, planters consistently painted sharecroppers’ lives as ones with benefits than ones full of rampant exploitation.

Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops' 17,000 square-foot home on lakefront property, Norman, OK, November 25, 2015. (http://sportshoop.la/).

Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops’ 17,000 square-foot home on lakefront property, Norman, OK, November 25, 2015. (http://sportshoop.la/).

The common refrain in college athletics is likewise about benefits that outweigh injuries, long-term disabilities, the pressures of athletic and academic performance, and the loss of material benefits. University of Oklahoma head football coach Bob Stoops put it this way in a 2013 Sporting News interview: “I don’t see why people say these guys don’t get paid. It’s simple, they are paid quite often, quite a bit and quite handsomely.” They also “get room and board…the best nutritionist, the best strength coach to develop you, the best tutors to help you academically, and coaches to teach you and help you develop. How much do you think it would cost to hire a personal trainer and tutor for four to five years?,” Stoops said. The athletic scholarship, a non-guaranteed, year-by-year deal, is the only fringe benefit that matters in the case of college athletes.

Like Oscar Johnston’s defense of the sharecropping system in the 1930s, the NCAA’s defense fits the pattern of “it’s a terrible system, but it could be much worse.” During his Real Sports conversation last March, Kansas State University president and NCAA Board of Governors member Kirk Schulz said, “Well, a scholarship at Kansas State, a four-year scholarship, is about $180,000, and our average debt load of all of our students is about $26, $27,000.”

—————————————–

Apparently, the system is fair precisely because naked exploitation is better than the illusion of choices given to the typical college student. These arguments in support of student-athlete system dovetail almost perfectly with the arguments that supported sharecropping as a necessary evil in the 1930s. The justifications are paternalistic and elitist, with a mix of class and racial imagery to boot. To the point where any NCAA executive, college or university coach or athletic director, university president or journalist in support of not paying these athletes should be beyond embarrassed.

This Is NOT Sparta!

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

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"If you live in a free country, thank a veteran" poster slogan, November 10, 2015. (http://facebook.com).

“If you live in a free country, thank a veteran” poster slogan, November 10, 2015. (http://facebook.com).

Just like with Memorial Day and with Independence Day, I often find myself conflicted about Veterans Day. Not because I think individual members of the military deserve praise or scorn. As usual, the vast majority of Americans think too simplistically about their country, its people, its intentions and history, even its holidays. Too many of us go along to get along. It’s as if we expect the contradictions and tensions that make up our times and days like today to simply melt away in some high-pitched display of blind patriotism. I have not — and likely will never be — that American, pumped up with pride and affection, shouting slogans as gospel truth, thanking every member of the military for every single breath of American air that I breathe. And that is because the narrative for days like today has never worked for me.

In some respects, the blind march of Veterans Day is with Americans every single day. The media covers the military and individual military members as if all of them have spent weeks on the front lines, as if all of them are patriots above reproach. Almost all of us have known someone who’s served, and we know that service for most was never as simple as wrapping the American flag around themselves in defense of American freedoms halfway around the world (or at a base a few miles from home). In recent months, we’ve learned that much of the constant drumbeat of military-fueled patriotism the military itself has bought and paid for, at NFL and college football and baseball games. Reinforcing one of America’s main values — profit.

Army National Guardsmen about to run on field with American flags with the New England Patriots, Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, AZ, February 1, 2015. (http://latimes.com; Getty Images).

Army National Guardsmen about to run on field with American flags with the New England Patriots, Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, AZ, February 1, 2015. (http://latimes.com; Getty Images).

Today is Veterans Day, created seventy-seven years ago in the aftermath of the Great War, the “War to End All Wars,” World War I. It was a terrible war, after all. Ten million soldiers and sailors on all sides died, twenty million found themselves ripped and torn apart, and eight million civilians died. But not for or in the US, where 120,000 soldiers and sailors died, a few hundred thousand were wounded, and few hundred civilians died. The US didn’t enter the war until April 1917, nearly three years into the raging Eurasian conflict. American weapons manufacturers and merchants profited greatly from the war even before the US declared war on Germany, selling arms and food to both sides.

War is never simple. Neither should be what we think of those who served or are serving. Veterans Day is about respecting those who have served or are serving. Like my youngest brother Eri, or my Uncle Felton, or my sister-in-law or my late uncle-in-laws. Thanking or respecting them, though, shouldn’t be tied directly to the idea that I “live in a free country.” I don’t believe that the US is a free country, not for me and for millions of others like me. Nor do I believe that the US military has played a role in preserving my individual freedoms and liberties historically. I am a Black man living in a society built in part on systemic racism, often maintained or reinforced by the US military. Except for some elements of the Union Army during the Civil War, the US military has played a very small role in making sure that I or anyone who looks like me — male, female or transgender — lives in a free country.

Not to mention, the US hasn’t been invaded in over 200 years (I don’t want to hear about Pancho Villa — that wasn’t an invasion). Since when does fighting North Koreans, the Viet Cong, or even Nazis equate to me and others and our “freedoms?” Seriously, every time someone says this, it’s as if you’re attempting to erase long civilian fights for civil rights, for the most basic of freedoms that the US purports to grant to every citizen. Folks who say that we should be grateful to the military for living in a free country completely make invisible Native Americans. The US military was what guaranteed their near annihilation, deculturalization and unyielding poverty, especially from 1865 on.

"This is madness!" with actor Peter Mensah, screen shot from 300 (2007), November 11, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

“This is madness!” with actor Peter Mensah, screen shot from 300 (2007), November 11, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

Yes, some of you will note that I can write my post without fear of retribution from the government. Then I will say in response, “How does serving overseas guarantee my rights?” It doesn’t. A lot went into putting me in a better position in my life. Black migration, the Civil Rights Movement (flaws and all), the sacrifices of Black and White civilian leadership (including their deaths). I am one generation removed from sharecropping and tenant farming in Georgia and Arkansas, one generation removed from the last years of the Jim Crow era. But somehow, the US military is responsible for me living “in a free country.” Sorry, but that’s a narrative I cannot get behind.

So, we should all thank individual veterans for their service. We should honor the dead and the broken among them. For whether they came to serve out of a deep sense of patriotism, because of the draft (prior to 1973), because there weren’t any jobs in their communities, or because they wanted a chance at today’s version of the GI bill, some of them have paid dearly in their service. But since we do not live in a military junta or in a totalitarian society, I dare say that I don’t have to go along with the narrative that without the military, I would be a slave. History contradicts every aspect of this false narrative.

This isn’t Sparta (Sparta wasn’t even Sparta). Nor should the US ever be Sparta.

Can There Ever Be Too Much Race In A US History Course?

05 Monday Jan 2015

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ODing on chocolate via a hypodermic needle, January 5, 2015. (http://buzzfeed.com).

ODing on chocolate via a hypodermic needle, January 5, 2015. (http://buzzfeed.com).

For nearly every semester in which I have taught a US history course — and I’ve been teaching them on and off since ’92 — one or two students have complained in their course evaluations that we “spent too much time on race.” Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington, UMUC, the refrain from this small but vocal minority has been the same. It was no different this past semester, as two students complained that there was too much about race in the course. But over the years, I’ve never seen any of these students ask themselves the question, “How do you define ‘too much race’ in a US history course?”

I guess I could look at it this way. That a small minority of my students like their US history the way most Americans like their churches — segregated and unequal. US history for them is supposed to be about the building of the greatest nation on Earth/in the history of humanity, preordained by God to dominate the world with its military, its capitalism and its brand of democracy. US history for them is the history of how Europeans escaped political persecution and religious oppression for the pristine wilderness of the New World, broke free of the chains of absolute monarchy and tyranny, and built this great country from the basement up.

John Gast's Spirit of the Frontier (aka American Progress), with American personified by Columbia in a toga, 1872. (Jeff G. via Wikipedia). In public domain.

John Gast’s Spirit of the Frontier (aka American Progress), with American personified by Columbia in a toga, 1872. (Jeff G. via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I guess I could teach a US history like this. A course that completely ignores the existence of Native Americans, numbering in the neighborhood of 10-15 million in what would become British North America (now the US and Canada) at the time of Jamestown settlement in 1607. A class that could gloss over the diseases, wars, starvation and constant encroachments that reduced this population by ninety percent within a century of the real British invasion. I could skip over the economic imperatives — really greed — that led to the use of White indentured servants and West Africans as indentured servants and slaves to make the colonies profitable through growing tobacco, rice and indigo. I could obfuscate the eventual creation of an institution that made permanent the connections between African skin and slavery in what would become the US, codified in law and in the US Constitution (albeit indirectly).

I guess this US history course could focus mostly on the genius of the great White men that made this a great nation, slave owners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. I could then focus less on the crucial reliance of the US economy on the profits and products of slavery that made industrialization possible. A system that supplied the US and the UK with the cotton that would make modern capitalism — with its multinational banks, international commerce and movements of large numbers of people to cities for work — a reality. A system that so contradicted American ideals that it led to a civil war that killed and maimed nearly 1.2 million people.

Original Trivial Pursuit, Master Game, Genus Edition, 1981, January 5, 2015. (http://epicrapbattlesofhistory.wikia.com/).

Original Trivial Pursuit, Master Game, Genus Edition, 1981, January 5, 2015. (http://epicrapbattlesofhistory.wikia.com/).

And all this only gets us to 1865. There’s also Indian removal, Mexican-turned-Americans in the Southwest, Southern and Eastern European immigrants and Social Darwinism, Jim Crow segregation and lynchings, race riots, Black migration, Mexican migration, Whiteness and the assimilation of White ethnics, the early Civil Rights Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the post-Civil Rights era. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the topics that are key ones in any US history course.

So short of deciding to only teach a US history that only focuses on great, rich White males, I have to discuss race. If only to teach this history properly and well enough to give all of my students food for thought and thought for food. Otherwise, I might as well be teaching Trivial Pursuit or change my name to Alex Trebek.

Talking Tocqueville Too Much

05 Saturday Jul 2014

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Alexis Tocqueville caricature (1849), by Honoré Daumier, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

Alexis Tocqueville caricature (1849), by Honoré Daumier, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

Every year for at least the past thirty years, without fail, I’ve read at least one article, seen or read at least one book, or watched at least one commentary about the great Alexis de Tocqueville. These are almost always about the French political theorist’s grand tour of America in the early 1830s and his affirmation of America’s exceptional democracy, egalitarianism and lack of permanent social classes. Over the years, I’ve found these all too frequent comments and examinations of a long-dead tourist vomit-inducing.

Tocqueville may have gotten it right, that America and its democracy was in a unique position in 1833 to take off and become a powerful nation, if given the time. But he didn’t understand America at all, at least, not really. Tocqueville didn’t understand how central inequality was to the development of America’s unique and exceptional democracy. He assumed, quite wrongly, that any issues of inequality in our then young nation were limited to the American South, where cotton was king and slavery was the backbone of the economy. Tocqueville only saw slavery as a moral dilemma of debasing humanity — slave owner and slave — and not as a political or economic one. So what if he predicted the rise of the US and Russia as world powers if he didn’t predict the American Civil War?

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist (due out September 9, 2014 -- there's always Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery [1944]), July 5, 2014. (http://bn.com).

The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward E. Baptist (due out September 9, 2014 – there’s always Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery [1944]), July 5, 2014. (http://bn.com).

Tocqueville looked at America outside of the South and saw an egalitarian and agrarian society, one unconnected to the slavery located south of the Mason-Dixon line and spreading southwest across the Mississippi River. Where did he think the money came from to finance plantations, to ship the raw materials of these plantations overseas and to buy more slaves? How did Tocqueville think these plantation owners could turn cotton into cloth and tobacco into cigarettes and cigars? Much of it came from bankers and merchants in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and from the factories of New England and New York. Slavery was the backbone of the rise of the American economic system, and was America’s industrialized foundation. Period.

Tocqueville argued that America was unique because of its lack of a permanent class system, particularly an aristocracy. Our country’s democracy, in fact, guaranteed the constant churning of social mobility. Tocqueville must’ve been high on the tobacco leaves he sniffed in his tour of Virginia! While the nation had shed most of the obvious symbolism that came with wealth in Europe, Tocqueville had completely ignored that for the first half-century of US, only rich, land-owning White males could vote (and in many cases, hold office). Only in the five or ten years before his tour of the US did non-propertied White males gain the right to vote.

On top of this, though most Americans were farmers in the 1831-33 period, American urbanization had already begun. American cities didn’t have the age or splendor of European ones, to be sure. But what Tocqueville didn’t recognize was that wealth was already beginning to be concentrated in cities like Philadelphia, Boston and New York, in the form of commerce, in banking, and in the beginnings of modern industries. And though large-scale exploitation of poor and uneducated Irish immigrations wouldn’t begin for another fifteen years, the exploitation of poor, native White (and frequently, female and child) labor was already well underway, pulling Whites from countryside to cities in the process.

"World's Highest Standard of Living" poster with Black flood victims in bread line, Louisville, Kentucky, by Margaret Bourke White, February 15, 1937. (ThunderPeel2001 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws -- low resolution.

“World’s Highest Standard of Living” poster with Black flood victims in bread line, Louisville, Kentucky, by Margaret Bourke-White, February 15, 1937. (Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws — low resolution.

And this is the man who so many of my historian and political scientist colleagues like to cite and quote? Especially around Independence Day! Sorry, but if I did a two-year tour of, say, South Africa right now, and predicted their eventual greatness because of their unique racial democracy and rapid economic development, who’d take me seriously by 2200 CE? Maybe MSNBC host Chris Matthews‘ great-great-great-great grandson, who would then claim South African exceptionalism based on my predictive power from 180 years before.

 

Why I Waited 9 Months to Watch 12 Years A Slave

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave (2013) screen shot, January 17, 2014. (http://blog.sfgate.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws -- it illustrates subject of piece.

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave (2013) screen shot, January 17, 2014. (http://blog.sfgate.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — it illustrates subject of piece.

I’m usually late to the game. That’s been a running theme in my life since the early ’80s, when, as a result of my Hebrew-Israelite years, I found myself often years behind on pop culture trends. New books, new music, new dance moves, new colloquialisms, new movies. I might as well declared myself as an adult in April ’81, at least as far as the ’80s were concerned. Yet I did catch up, sometimes taking as long as a decade to get a punchline to a joke that my nemesis and classmate Alex made in seventh grade.

But not following the herd has its benefits, too. For one, I’ve gotten to look at things from a fresh perspective (some would even say as an outsider — that’s accurate as well), without succumbing to hype or groupthink about a piece of culture. Waiting also has meant that I’ve often read reviews of movies but managed to miss content-based details and that I’ve read books without forming an opinion based on its popularity ahead of my read (it’s also true about my path to Christianity). Being forced by circumstance to wait has meant that I am less apt to make sweeping declarations like “I grew up on hip-hop” when I in fact grew up with it, not on it like a drug.

Kunta Kinte being whipped, Roots (1977) screenshot, July 6, 2012. (http://irvine.wikis.gdc.georgetown.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of screenshot's low resolution.

Kunta Kinte being whipped, Roots (1977) screenshot, July 6, 2012. (http://irvine.wikis.gdc.georgetown.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of screenshot’s low resolution.

With 12 Years A Slave (2013), though, I wanted to see it even before it came out here in the DC area in August. I’d heard about this film for months even before it was out in “select cities” in the US. Between Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender — two supreme British actors — I knew the film would be good. And depressing. And sad. And anger-inducing. And stomach churning. It would be an emotional roller-coaster-ride akin to my introduction to Roots on ABC in February ’77, when I was only seven years old.

So what stopped me from seeing it? My ten-year-old son. I wanted him to see the film with me. But I also knew that he would have a lot of questions. Outside of family and his visits to watch me teach my American and World History classes, my son has had little exposure to race in popular culture in an obvious sense. Most of his friends in our suburban, middle-class Silver-Spring-world are White, and his other Black friends have even less exposure to race than our deliberate injections (or inoculations) for our son.

I decided not to take him to see 12 Years A Slave because it would’ve been two hours of questions in a crowded theater, with those sitting around us ready to strangle us for ruining their watching experience. But I did queue it via Netflix weeks before it came out on DVD, with the expectation that we would watch it during his Spring Break, Easter Week.

As soon as I told my son that we were watching 12 Years A Slave last week, he became whiny and upset. Whiny because his time away from anime and Disney shows would be interrupted with parenting. Upset because of the movie title and its implications. As my son said to me when he was upset, “You made me watch Roots last year!” Well, we watched three hours of it, enough for him to see the sequence of kidnapping, the Middle Passage, slave auctions, running away, rape, whippings, and Kunta Kinte’s foot cut off. I guess the message of slavery and history really did stick with him!

Noah trying to look cool at The Gap store, Chevy Chase, MD, March 28, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

Noah trying to look cool at The Gap store, Chevy Chase, MD, March 28, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

We finally sat down and watched 12 Years A Slave Thursday evening. And yes, Noah did have a ton of questions, about Solomon Northrup, about free Blacks, kidnapping, mistreatment and the concept of property, about race, sexual attraction and rape, and about the rule of law. But I was more surprised about two things. One, my son sat through most of the two-and-a-quarter hour film, and only got up twice. Two, he paid serious attention in a way that he hadn’t appeared to in watching serious films before.

Still, my son was more than happy to return to his Nintendo 3DS and the land of Disney shows before bedtime that evening. The fact that he fell asleep right after bedtime, though, made it obvious, at least to me, that we’d given him more thought for food about history, race, and his own heritage.

And though I don’t think the movie was as epic as the hype-meisters have presented it to be, it was a great film, with great acting — I’m not sure if todays American actors could’ve pulled off Ejiofor’s, Fassbender’s or Lupita Nyong’o’s roles. 12 Years A Slave is also an important film, at least in terms of interrogating the meaning of race and inhumanity in this world. I just hope that those messages made it into my son’s conscious thinking. Time will tell, but enlightenment is a journey, not a race.