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Freedom From vs Freedom To

Bullypulpit here. Essential reading. Sweetened by the sweetest birds, I believe Wilson warblers, photographed from my window during their fleeting, skipping, hopping, fluttering visit on Saturday. Tired of birds yet? Tired of politics of racism? Granting the former, but we don’t have the luxury of fatigue for the latter. As I said, bullypulpit today.

In a friendlier, pleading voice: please read this short essay by Ibram X. Kendi. It is enlightening, non-belligerent, and so, so timely. (Alternatively, I put the key paragraphs below to get the message in plain view.)

In a nutshell he argues that we see parallels between the American history of slaveholding mentality and the division in approaches to containing the Covid-19 pandemic today. Embedded in some plain teaching about historical facts of our founding fathers and the Civil War is this core insight:

Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect.

Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection.  

From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche. The history of the United States, the history of Americans, is the history of reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom. There is no way to reconcile the enduring psyche of the slaveholder with the enduring psyche of the enslaved.

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Much has been written about the origins of individualism, the settler mentality, the connection to the belief in the doctrine of exceptionalism and the fact that it is a specifically Western value, so different from the rest of the world which cherishes communal values.

Here is another take that I found quite interesting. New research published six months ago explores a connection between the teachings of the Catholic Church and the rise of individualism, including its specific beliefs in independence, agency and autonomy, starting in the 6th century. In essence there was a church directive to cease intrafamily marriages – to stop marrying your cousins, eventually up to the 6th degree (so not just an incest taboo,) or their widows or adopt their orphans, which changed the traits shared by most people in the world to something different, individualistic, specifically Western.

The research used an enormous range of data to look at correlations between time and intensity spent under the directions of the church, and development of these Western values, including comparisons within one and the same country (Italy) that provided two parts differentially dependent on the church, the industrial North and the poor South. The data “included historical records of church exposure in every nation on Earth, beginning in the first century and ending in 1500 C.E., when European society had become nearly fully Christianized. They also looked at they consulted anthropological data to assign a kinship intensity score to each of the world’s major ethnolinguistic groups. This score was based on historical rates of cousin marriage, polygamy, and other factors. Finally, they drew on dozens of studies that used established psychological measures such as the World Values Survey to determine modern population-level scores for traits such as individualism, creativity, nonconformity, obedience, and ingroup/outgroup trust.”

The large family clans that had been constituted by these family connections guaranteed survival. Growing crops and protecting land required cooperation, and marrying cousins was an easy way to get it. When these kinship systems were broken apart it had enormous consequences, not all good. On the one hand, less dependency and obedience to clans, elders, community did lead to more freedom of choice for the individual, less forced obedience and conformity. Individualistic people working together across family boundaries (and thus with less in-group conformity) formed a precursor civic society that eventually enabled democracy.

The disruption of extended family systems in favor of a nuclear family, however, also meant less security in case of emergencies, famine, disease, with no familial system to fall back on. This is where the church jumped in, corralling the poor in their alms/work houses. Depriving folks of the leadership of their elders left space for the church to take over as authority, requiring obedience, extending influence. The disruption of family ties also led to less land consolidation among the intermarried, from which the church benefited by snatching it up for itself. This was particularly the case during the demise of entire family branches when the lack of succession through adoption was blocked and the estates fell by default to the church.

And, of course, the prime value that we eventually put on individualism weakened the values attached to communal existence.

The interconnection between human psychology, religion, economy and politics never ceases to amaze me. As does our willingness to ignore history and look away from causal factors – like the ongoing effects of slavery or the disadvantages of individualistic societal structuring – when we try to move towards solutions in crises. The worst thing, though, is the fact that so often the price for acting in our self-interest is paid by others, the masses who are granted neither: the freedom for or the freedom from.

And here is freedom-related music – in an old but still unmatched version by Otto Klemperer:

And here is to someone who saw it all early and clearly: Happy 202nd birthday, dear Karl.

TRIER, GERMANY – MAY 05: Some of the 500, one meter tall statues of German political thinker Karl Marx on display on May 5, 2013 in Trier, Germany. The statues, created by artist Ottmar Hoerl, are part of an exhibition at the Museum Simeonstift Trier commemorating the 130th anniversary of the death of Marx in 1883. Marx, who was born in Trier, is the author of The Communist Manifesto, and his ideas on the relationship between labour, industry and capital created the ideological foundation for socialist and communist movements across the globe. (Photo by Hannelore Foerster/Getty Images)

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Liberation Day

Last Saturday, April 25, 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of Italy’s Liberation from the Italian Fascists and Nazi occupation of World War II. Lots of remembrances, celebration and photographs of members of the Italian resistance in the news, often accompanied by renditions of Bella Ciao, the communist partisan song used by the Resistance (before the music got ridiculously usurped by Money Heist, the movie.)

Risiera di San Sabba, Trieste, Italy
Archival photograph

By chance I came across some remarks by Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian – American writer, Fulbright scholar and social justice activist. Mengiste published her second novel, The Shadow King, last year to rave reviews. I have not yet read it, but have moved it up on my to-be-read-list when I encountered Mengiste’s thoughts around Liberation Day.

The book is set in 1935 during the Italo-Ethiopian war with Mussolini invading Addis-Abbeba, the precursor to World War II. It focusses on the role of women in war, their ability to fight while being subjected to various forms of oppression. The shadow king of the title is a look-alike of Haile Selassi, who is shown from afar to the Ethiopian soldiers to give them courage and remind them of their duty to sacrifice. All this while the real king sits in exile in Bath, England, running out of money and existing on charity for himself and his entourage.

At its core, say the reviews, is the role memory plays in our understanding and interpretation of history. The way we want to or do remember, just as much as the way we intend to forget those aspects of history that don’t fit into our narrative (be that the narrative of victims, or heroes.) (All this sounds dry, but it was one of Times books of the year….and people say you can’t put it down once you start it.)

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The complexity of memory culture was only part of the remarks that I picked up by Mengiste on Sunday. A lot of her research in preparation for the book concerned the relationship between the racial segregation laws that were established in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya, and Italy’s anti-semitic laws that took effect a year later, in 1938. Mengiste considers bigotry as the shared source for the scourges of colonialism and anti-Semitism. And she celebrated the commemoration of the acts of those courageous resistance fighters who put an end to Mussolini’s reign. As one should.

What resonated was her description of the Italian concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba where some of the Jewish soldiers who had fought as Italians and massacred Ethiopeans during the invasion of Ethiopia, and their families, were imprisoned only a few years later before being sent off to Auschwitz. It was the only camp in Italy where people were killed and then cremated, most of those political prisoners. (Photos today from the memorial.)

“I felt in the presence of ghosts,”Mengiste reports. So did I. A short account of my visit two years ago can be found here.

After reading up on the history the Risiera it became clear that the Italians have some of the same problems around public memory of political darkness as do Germans, independent of the formers’ dedicated resistance. Risiera di San Sabba began its life as a contested site of memory almost immediately after the war’s end, in 1945, when the Communist Counsel on the Liberation of Trieste organized a ceremony at the Risiera that established it as “an icon of the Communist resistant.” In 1965, when the site became a national monument, it was reframed as a site of memory for the anti-Communist wartime resistance. In 1975, the ceremonies accompanying the resurrection of the Risiera memorial emphasized the sacrifice of all victims, describing all as war heroes. The ahistorical nature of these narratives meant that there was no differentiation between victims of racial persecution and political persecution (The carnage done to Yugoslav partisans was omitted.)

After the 1976 war crimes trial in Trieste, the site of the Risiera was used to perpetuate an anti-Communist narrative that emphasized the deportation of Jewish prisoners to death camps in Germany and Poland and portrayed Yugoslav partisans as “non-innocent” victims. In other words, the trial contributed to the image of Italians as contributing only minimally to the maintenance of the camp and to the atrocities committed there. (I learned all this here.)

What I really want to say: it is not all black and white, good and bad, perpetrators and victims. Decisions about who is victim and deserves remembrance and who is not emerge when nations try to justify their actions. The fact of resistance by some also does not wipe out the fact of collaboration by many others. Which is of course a lesson some Germans are still trying to figure out while others are attempting to whitewash much that has occurred. In the meantime all power to those who resisted fascism! May they be remembered forever.

And why Aida as today’s musical choice? Haile Selassi is said to have listened to Aida in the years of exile in Bath. And I’m a sucker for Verdi, in any event.

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Fashion History

On my walks I often encounter jays. They pop up left and right, strutting about, flitting in and out, curious, loud and full of themselves. Not quite peacocks, but almost. Vain.

So it was last week. Thoughts turned to vanity displayed in other species, Homo sapiens among them, regardless of gender. That in turn, reminded me of a recent article that had me amused, discussing Egregious Renaissance maleness, from the inside out. (His title, not my words, alas…)

Voilà, the history of the codpiece. A fashion accessory that came into being as a functional piece of triangular cloth tied to your waist on one end and affixed to your long stockings on the other, trying to keep it all together and covered in case your upper garments slid up or apart, revealing the family jewels. Cloth eventually became pouch stuffed with something or other. The article was funny, but restricted to the 50 years or so in which the fashion item was en vogue, as documented in numerous Renaissance paintings, before it pretty much disappeared again. As fashion is want to do.

Portrait of Antonio Navagero (1565) with an accentuated codpiece, oil on canvas by Giovanni Battista Moroni, 

The short clip below draws a longer arc, from the 1500s to the fashion choices of various Star War characters, Heavy Metal Bands and fashion idols of the Gay community in contemporary design. It has an impressive collection of art on display, devoted to the fashion pride of the subjects….worth watching for that alone.

It, too, is funny – I wonder if witty people are drawn to strange subjects, or if that kind of revealing item brings out the wit – but I digress.

And here is an NYT interview with one of the people who still produce codpieces…

The most interesting thing about the codpiece is that form signaled but also contained function. It was not just a signal, announcing status, prowess, (lots of them attached to body armors claiming military might) gendered power, however you want to call it, but had a medical function as well. It turns out that syphilis was treated during those years with bandages holding an application of a messy mix of mercury and lard ointment, which could be safely contained in these bulging contraptions. Your clothes were protected from stains, bandages were demurely hidden. Or deceptively.

The demise of the codpiece was eventually brought about, among other factors, by prominent literary voices, Shakespeare’s among them. Ridiculing its attempt to signal masculinity was perfectly captured in 1628 by Robert Hayman.

Two Filthy Fashions

Of all fond fashion, that were worne by Men.
These two (I hope) will ne’r be worne againe:
Great Codpist Doublets, and great Codpist britch,
At seuerall times worne both by meane and rich:
These two had beene, had they beene worn together,
Like two Fooles, pointing, mocking each the other.

A more in-depth exploration of the way gendered fashions of all kinds have been elevated or struck down by cultural voices can be found here (assuming you have currently time for unanticipated but interesting reading….) – codpiece included.

And for music we have a nice compilation of Renaissance tunes, although that picture looks suspiciously like an ouud and not a mandolin…

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Gardens

By all reports, people are emptying nursery shelves of edible plants and seed catalogues are running out of products to ship because we are back in Victory Garden mode. With all that war-related terminology – fighting the invisible enemy – it’s no wonder that old war concepts are making a come-back.

Planting additional gardens to provide food was originally started in WW I, ironically to save our European allies from starvation- their farms had become battlefields and their farm workers soldiers. US citizens were asked to grow their own food so that we could send more industrially produced foods to Europe. During WW II 20 million additional gardens produced 40% of the nation’s food; the process included administrative manuals to help citizens with planting and pest control, and instructions for canning and preserving to help with excess crops. Here is an interesting re-counting of the history. And here is an incredible historical propaganda video sporting a patriotic family doing their share towards the war effort in a HUGE (quarter acre) victory garden, mostly dug by a horse and tended by a 14-year old who inhales enough pesticides to be guaranteed lung cancer – (as a side commentary, every one in the film has a name, Dad and Grandpa Holder, Dick and Jane, and then there is…. mother! Also, Jane likes to garden in penny loafers. Just saying.)

Food insecurity is indeed a monster raising its ugly head even higher in times of mass unemployment and disrupted supply chains. Yes, I’m speaking of today, not 1944. The statistics from just 2 years ago are staggering – over 37 million Americans, including 1 million children, lacked consistent access to enough food for an active healthy life. African-Americans are hit twice as hard compared to Whites when it comes to hunger. (Which reminds me: if you read one single thing today that I link to, read this: Kendi on the causes for disproportionate suffering experienced by minority populations facing Covid-19.)

Extra vegetable gardens, with now so much more need for food arising, are indeed a good idea. That is if you have a plot, as small as 2 by 6 feet, that gets 6-8 hours of sun a day, an inclination to get your hands dirty and a nursery that can still provides some seedlings and bags of soil or other stuff to plant in. Never gardened before? Luckily you don’t have to rely on James Burdett’s 1943 book, The Victory Garden Manual. He was the founder of the National Garden Bureau, a non-profit organization “that exists to educate, inspire, and motivate people to increase the use of plants in homes, gardens, and workplaces by being the marketing arm of the gardening industry.”

Yes, they market, oh do they market, but they do so cleverly to help the un-initiated find the joy of gardening. Their latest effort, Victory Garden 2.0, is a step by step internet tool that I can actually see being successful in adding food to the food banks. They offer instructions for raised-bed or container gardens of various types, a salad garden, a kitchen garden, a high yield garden and a giving garden – for the hungry. Everything is spelled out – from soil preparation to pest control to what kinds of seed you need, how to plant, space, water, pollinate – you name it. Example below. The link goes into way more detail.

Way to go.

While waiting for vegetables to grow, I’m getting anticipatory pleasure from fruit-tree blossoms – not my own, since my garden is too shady, although I have one ancient pear tree that yields about 4 exemplars per year, worm-eaten in my pesticide-free zone, but pears none-the-less….

Music today by Béla Bartók who seemed to appreciate certain kinds of vegetables:  

“And then, after moving to America in 1940, he and his wife visited Los Angeles where he first encountered the avocado pear while eating a version of Waldorf salad. ‘This is a fruit somewhat like a cucumber in size and colour,’ he carefully recorded. ‘But it is quite buttery in texture, so it can be spread on bread. Its flavour is something like an almond but not so sweet. It has a place in this celebrated fruit salad which consists of green salad, apple, celery, pineapple, raw tomato and mayonnaise.”

Schiff’s playing is tight, and the second movement of the 3rd piano concerto sounds at times as if the ducks have gotten lose in the garden…

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Happily ever after?

Several large wedding ceremonies were held over the last weeks in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish Community, despite the city’s requirements of social distancing and federal recommendations to avoid large groups. As of last Saturday more than 240 participants registered as fallen ill, in three clusters in Borough Park and Williamsburg. Not only is this a tragedy for the families and neighborhoods involved, but the insistence on large communal events is also sparking fears of anti-Semitic reprisals.

Blaming the Jews is, of course, nothing new. (I am not endorsing holding mass weddings right now, mind you, even if religious laws are cited to justify them. Last I looked, a primary pillar of Judaism is the value of life, which allows all kinds of abandoning of rules associated with Shabbat, fasts, etc., when a life is to be protected.) I am more interested in the fall-out from irrationality and behavior in the face of looming, uncontrollable diseases.

Here are some of the historical facts. Jews were persecuted in huge numbers, whole communities, whenever epidemics broke out (and particularly through out the mid-1300s with the first wave of the Black Death), accused of malevolent well-poisoning. This was done by the local gentile populations even if the Church or the worldly rulers warned against it, partially driven by the convenient fact that the confiscated belongings of the murdered would be distributed among the villagers. Hundreds of Jewish communities were massacred, even though as a group they had been harder hit by the plague than most. Their constrained living quarters in ghettos and lack of access to clean water made them a sitting target for the fleas that brought the disease.

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Blaming the Other is, however, not a preoccupation solely reserved for non-Jews. There is plenty of evidence of irrational accusations to be found in Jewish history as well. Natan M. Meir, the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University, is about to publish a book that lays out in great detail how Eastern European Jewry resorted to fear management via scapegoating marginalized figures in their own communities. Stepchildren of the Shtetl, The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 will be published in July, 2020. Assuming we are still home-bound by then, it might be just the right thing to read when we need to convince ourselves that things could always be worse….(Having spent some time with Natan when we were both panelists discussing text and translations of Jewish sources, I can vouch for the passion and learnedness he brings to everything he tackles.)

It seems that during the 1866 cholera epidemic, some Hasidic communities “declared that Jewish women wearing crinolines and earrings were to blame for the epidemic,” with physical attacks on them following in short order. More generally, Rabbis blamed adultery as causal factors with some stories told that adulterers, reported by community members, were killed to help abate the disease.

And then there was the magical thinking tied to a completely different approach: the cholera wedding also known as the black wedding, believed to mitigate the impact of the scourge. (Excerpts from a review of the upcoming book here )

“The cholera wedding generally involved finding two of the most marginal residents of the town (whether orphans, beggars, or the physically handicapped) and forcibly marrying them, usually in the cemetery. The cholera wedding, also known as a shvartse khasene (black wedding) or mageyfe khasene (plague wedding) was presented as an ancient Jewish rite, but Meir argues, it was a newly invented, modern response to what was then a newly arrived disease. Because it was a late-developing belief and not textually based, the mechanism by which it was believed to work is open to interpretation.

The last one we know of over here, happened during the flu epidemic 1918, in Winnipeg, “at one end of the Shaarey Zedek cemetery in the city’s North End, a ceremony that drew more than a thousand Jewish and gentile guests, with a minyan of 10 Jewish men conducting a funeral for an influenza victim at the other end of the graveyard.”

The cholera wedding didn’t have one single interpretation. For example, some rabbis felt it was efficacious because helping to marry off a needy bride was a great mitsve that would please God, all the more so for the marginal of the community who were unlikely to marry in any case. However, what comes across in many of the appalling descriptions of the forcibly married, and their reactions to each other, is that the act was far more callous than charitable. But it was enabled by traditional attitudes around communal charity. Those who had relied on it were seen as being, quite literally, property of the townspeople and thus had no say when their (previously reviled) bodies were needed to protect the town.”

Who owns whom, and who owes what is a topic that really emerges in many contexts in these pestilential times, beyond issues of magical thinking, religious beliefs and despairing search for ways to ward off the worst. We’ll look into more of that during this week in the context of economy and power structures. At least that’s the plan.

Music from London-based She’Koyokh which will bring a spring into your step on another lonesome Monday.

If I could only visit to photograph you all dancing while liberally applying disinfectant to the surfaces of your homes….

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Deal with It!

I started the week with stealing a title and I’ll end it the same way.

Deal with It is the title of a podcast that features interviews with Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984), one in a group of podcasts that I am sending your way today. It is, of course, a fitting exhortation in these uncertain times, one I find myself muttering frequently, even though I am clueless about how to accomplish the command.

Deal with It

Maybe podcasts will help. I figured you might need some truly interesting presentations during long hours of self-isolating, or fighting yet another cold, or simply needing to hear something empowering during these challenging times.

The whole series, Radical Women, is a wonder. Here is the introduction, all sources and photographs courtesy of the Getty Research Institute:

What was it like to be a woman making art during the feminist and civil rights movements? In this season of Recording Artists, host Helen Molesworth delves into the lives and careers of six women artists spanning several generations. Hear them describe, in their own words, their work, relationships, and feelings about the ongoing march of feminism. Contemporary artists and art historians join the conversation, offering their own perspectives on the recordings and exploring what it meant—and still means—to be a woman and an artist. This podcast is based on interviews from the 1960s and ’70s by Cindy Nemser and Barbara Rose, drawn from the archives of the Getty Research Institute.

Take your pick: Alice Neel (1900–1984).

Viva La Mujer

Betye Saar (b. 1926)

Working my Mojo

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) Hah!

Let ‘er Rip

Yoko Ono (b. 1933)

A Kind of Meeting Point

Eva Hesse (1936–1970)

Oh, More Absurdity

So there we have it: in this week devoted to women’s history we started with composers, went on to activists, pilots, then scientists and now artists as a cross section of role models, all resurrected from forgetting. If that isn’t motivating to fight the blues, what could possibly be?

Maybe this? A list of the ten National Parks that would not exist without the championship of women?

Or simply singing the Blues?

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The Matilda Effect

In 1993, Cornell University historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter published a paper that evaluated systematic, sex-based bias against women scientists and their work both in a historical and a contemporary context. She named that bias the Matilda effect after suffragist and feminist critic Matilda J. Gage of New York, who in the late nineteenth century both experienced and articulated this phenomenon. Both the historian and her subject are fascinating personalities, but I want to concentrate on Rossiter’s work here, because it provided a lot of stimulation for social psychology research that has confirmed her notions in experimental settings of gender bias and science. (My source is a terrific essay in the Smithsonian from last year.)

Rossiter was one of the few female grad students in History of Science at Yale in the 1960s and wondered why no-one would ever teach about female scientists, Marie Curie excepted. Her curiosity set her on a path devoted for all of her professional life, to excavate all those women scientists who had been relegated to the dustbin or excluded or simply stricken from the record. Equally important, she investigated the mechanisms by which male domination in STEM fields continues to flourish.

Her three books (the first published in 1982) on the topic began with this introduction: “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place,’ in science (and thus their invisibility to even experienced historians of science) was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” (Here is the most recent volume:Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World since 1972.)

Her work emphasized that women CAN do the work by providing countless examples of what women had accomplished; her writings eventually led to a program by the National Science Foundation funding efforts to increase “the representation and advancement of women in engineering and academic science degrees.” She also showed how often male scientists either received or more often took credit for the work done by their female colleagues. Misplaced credit has had enormous consequences, both for the betrayed women but also for STEM fields as a whole who underestimate, curb or exclude the potential contributions by scientists not male.

One of the things not considered by Rossiter in her decades of writing and research is the role played by sexual harassment in the STEM fields. Her archival sources used to stitch together the picture of women in science across the centuries were simply mute on that point. We do, however, have more information for our own time: A year and a half ago the National Academy of Science published a book with stunning statistics (Sexual Harassment of Women Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine(2018.) Here are some of the numbers:

-Women in STEM endure the highest rate of sexual harassment of any profession outside of the military.
– Nearly 50 percent of women in science, and 58 percent of women in academia, report experiencing sexual harassment, including 43 percent of female STEM graduate students.
– 90 percent of women who report sexual misconduct experience retaliation.

No wonder then that so many drop out of the programs altogether.

What fascinates me is the effect that a singular curiosity – first Gage’s then Rossiter’s preoccupation with the disappeared women scientists – can lead to a real shift in how a society approaches a subject. Whether it is NSF funding, or social science research, or simply writers who start being hooked on the topic and investigate themselves – our view is changed forever and to the better. And speaking of writers, here is a fun book with portraits of women scientists – the link leads you to two of the 52 short biographies presented:

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science and the World

Music is also nifty today: Kronos Quartet’s cellist Jeffrey Zeigler performs works of 8 contemporary composers who created a piece related to a specific scientist. The full album can be found on Spotify – Sounds of Science (Jeffrey Zeigler.) Here is one track. And another (by Yuka C. Honda, composing for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson who died in January. And another (Felipe Pérez Santiago composing for Jill Tarter, an American astronomer looking for extraterrestrial life.)

Photographs of diverse works at the Venice Biennale 2015.

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Flying High

Today I invite you to spend your 10 minutes usually dedicated to the blog watching a video instead. It comes from a PBS series on American Masters – Unladylike 2020 – Unsung Women who changed America. It is a well- executed series, alternating between documentary clips and artistic renderings, telling short stories of activists.

Given the current circumstances, where travel in general and flying specifically is curtailed for many of my generation or for others who want to help flatten the Covid-19 infection curve, I was specifically drawn to a portrait of a pilot. The first black woman pilot who was awarded an international license, as it turns out. (She HAD to learn flying in France, since the soul crushing times around 1919 in this country prevented anything that racist possibly could prevent from being shared with those deemed inferior.)

Bessie Coleman defied everything and everyone – as one of 13 children of a Texan sharecropper she migrated to Chicago and eventually fulfilled her dream of becoming a pilot and sound artist. As an activist she refused to fly at events – now being a sought-after celebrity in her late 20s – that enforced segregation between the races – a public and effective gesture. Her life was cut short at age 34 when she was thrown out of her plane during a stunt, but her goal to open flying schools for POCs was eventually met by friends who finished what she was not able to see to fruition. The video has her story but also voiced-over commentary culled from writing she left behind. It is awe inspiring.

Bessie Coleman: First African American Aviator

Here is an imagined obituary from the NYT that provides more detail; (Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.)

Photographs are of young ones who hopefully have more of an opportunity to choose whatever they want to pursue – I am sure there are several Bessie Colemans among them.

And here is an entire album devoted to Bess by Pursuit Groove. Click the first track and then it will unfold. I particular liked Lady Bird.

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Changing History

Ever heard of Maria Louise Baldwin (1856 – 1922)? Neither had I. You can find a portrait of her and other female African-American activists at this Library of Congress site. I came across her name and that of many other activists in an illuminating essay by a SUNY professor of anthropology and women’s studies, Denise Oliver Velez, who talks about a fitting term for the lack of prominence that black women activists experience: misogynoir. Love that word, hate the concept, namely that being black makes it even harder for women to be treated fairly or even being remembered…. gender compounded by race.

Photograph today are from a Guardian report on International Women’s Day 2020 – poignant images, NOT my own.

Baldwin was a highly respected and successful educator in the Boston area in the early 1900s, and believed that a democratic multiracial society could be established in the US. She was a prominent leader, teaching people like e.e.cummings, among others, and became part of the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAAPC (not without a fight there, either: the male members of the movements at first did not want to admit women…) The movement was convened to renounce Booker T. Washington’s accommodation-ism (the movement name derived from the fact that as black folks they had to rent hotel rooms in Ontario, Canada, because nobody would let them on the US side.) Here is what Baldwin and others in the movement fought for (and here is a good source for the general history of resistance in that era:)

…. freedom of speech and criticism; a free press; manhood suffrage; abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color; recognition of the principle of human brotherhood; belief in the dignity of labor; and a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership.

That fight has continued throughout the last 120 years, obviously, with black women leading the charge in so many cases, voting rights included. We only have to remember the events of Bloody Sunday in Selma, which has its anniversary in close proximity to this International Women’s Day. To borrow the words of Marcela Howell, the founder and president of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda: “Black women leaders are carrying both the water — as we do the hard, unglamorous work of organizing in and nurturing our communities — and the torch, as we inspire the country to see past the darkness to a just future.”

If all this makes you more curious about history and you are looking for informative sources – here’s a reading list (selected not by me but Keisha N. Blain, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of the multi-prize winning book, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. The list looked interesting, and the two books I knew spoke for the rest that I have not (yet) read.

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America Paula Giddings (1984) 
To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War Tera W. Hunter (1998)
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday Angela Davis (1999)
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision Barbara Ransby (2005)

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching Crystal N. Feimster (2009)
Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism and the Making of Black Left Feminism Erik S. McDuffie (2011)
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray Rosalind Rosenberg (2017)
Sex Workers, Psychics and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy LaShawn D. Harris (2017)

Let’s resurrect the memory of these incredible women!

And do it while listening to some of the more energetic music around – Yola will make us hum!

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It’s just rowdy youth, they say

It’s just rowdy youth was a typical commentary found in some Austrian media in light of the news that an art project honoring Holocaust survivors was defaced and destroyed over the last couple of days in Vienna. German-Italian photographer Luigi Toscano had erected 80 larger-than-life portraits of Holocaust survivors, an exhibit called Lest We Forget, opened recently by Austrian’s President Van Bellen.

Photo credit:DPA

Many of these faces were slashed by knives, some had antisemitic slurs and swastikas written all over them.

The portraits are large, 8 ft tall, and printed onto gauzy, water-repellent material. The exhibit has been shown in San Francisco and other places without incidents, while one version that is currently up in Germany has police protection. So does every single Jewish institution from daycare centers to schools to synagogues in Germany, according to Chancellor Merkel who was interviewed about the matter after the government agent responsible for anti-Semitism had announced last Saturday that Jews should not always be wearing kippot in public because it has become unsafe. As a response to this warning the German government suggested that all German citizens should go out in public with skull caps to show solidarity. A lot of good it will do….

Certainly the Austrian police will not follow this call for solidarity. They did not even show up when the vandalism was reported originally and the artist called to have the perpetrators pursued. “It’s just property damage.” Yes, let’s pretend there is no political context during a week where the Austrian Neo-Nazi Vice Chancellor Strache had to resign amidst scandal (a secret taping of his pre-election discussions with a presumed Russian agent to exchange favors for help.) A resignation that extended to cabinet members, a vote of no confidence for Chancellor Kurz, and new elections slated for September. The whole sordid story here.

Before we descend into complete gloom, however, there is also good news. Muslim citizens came to protect the images, artist collectives guarded them overnight, and a group of young people brought sewing kits and repaired the slashed surfaces. And at the beginning of this month Timothy Snyder (a Yale historian who specializes in the study of the Holocaust) delivered a remarkable speech at the Viennese Judenplatz on the occasion of Europe Day 2019. If you have time and inclination, it’s truly worth a read.

Photographs are from the old Jewish section of the Zentral Friedhof in Vienna. It has fallen into terrible disrepair, with waving fields of stinging nettles, roaming deer, and only an occasional sign that someone still comes to visit.

Music is by the quintessential Viennese composer Schubert. This, his very last sonata, was called by someone a message from the dead to the living if there ever was one.

Lest we forget.

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