This week I reported on the willingness of large swaths of the population to blind themselves against the facts of science for reasons of tribal loyalty. I am afraid I have to add to that report describing the willingness of many other people to remain blind to the futility of voting rights legislation. Democrats assume that if the voting rights bills in question are thoughtful and fair (and miraculously passed, a whole other story,) they will not be rejected by the Supreme Court. This, of course, is a belief born out of despair over how far we’ve sunk, and in no ways supported by anything we know to be true of this Court – read the not-so-fine print of the decisions of the last years. A concise and non-technical analysis of the status quo of voting rights and the future of the American experiment can be found here. The essay is a short, worthwhile read, ending with the observation that nothing but an expansion of the Supreme Court is potentially going to rescue our democracy.
I am bringing all this up because I have had churning reactions to two books I read this week, one that came highly recommended and that I intensely disliked (why, so often?) and another that I chanced upon and devoured. They both made me think about what affects change and the scale of personal involvement, from ethereal withdrawal into a universe of feeling (if that) to the justification of taking personal action, violence included.
What are you going Through by Sigrid Nunez and White Tears by Hari Kunzru have one thing in common: they both integrate a systemic conflict, the climate crisis for the former, racism and exploitation of Blacks for the latter, into the narrative.
Nunez uses it as a cardboard foil for her larger subject of presence or absence of hope and empathic attachment. Her story is told by a woman who is asked by a distant friend facing terminal cancer to accompany her on her last weeks before actively ending her life with pills. The narrator is all over the map, in a dithery fashion mostly describing other women, from close friends and relatives to mere acquaintances or public figures in faintly, irritatingly misogynistic ways. She herself remains a stick figure, not imbued with any reason for us to root for her, least of all a deplorable tendency to name drop literary greats, with paragraphs of precise quotations.The only names, by the way, offered at all. The story’s inhabitants are all nameless, a successful distancing device. Well, that’s how I reacted. Others disagree (the linked review is typical of the praise the novel received.) In fact, Nunez conveys less a woman racked by feelings – the break-up with an ex-husband, a life without children, the newly blossoming attachment to her friend overshadowed by the impending suicide – than a woman trying on those feelings for size to see how they can be told as stories. An eternal distancing, from the fragility of close human interactions to the large scale one of the intensity of the climate threat. Drifting with willful oblivion along in the wake of death.
Kunzru’s novel is the polar opposite. The characters are so vividly drawn you might as well have met them in real life, even though for most of us they live in a realm somewhat outside our comfortable White middle-class existence. Two young people embark on a search for musical authenticity that leads one of them from New York City to the South, get into huge problems along the way, drawn into events of the past that reverberate into the present and future. The story evolves in ways that manage to surprise and shock, and hook you onto empathizing with the narrator(s) in a way that lures you into a complete understanding of their decisions even thought these eventually include unjustifiable acts.
Bits of magic realism seamlessly fold into a contemporary setting. The deeper issue, the systemic exploitation of Blacks through slavery, prison labor and a music industry commodifying traditional Black music, emerge as a core challenge to our thinking, rather than a foil. It is a novel that explores the toxicity of White appropriation, of the systemic degradation of anything Black – which is of course why it links back to my musings at the beginning of this blog on the chances of a voting right act to come into existence as one of the many ways needed to change race relations. Every page contains complex psychological material, an invitation to think difficult things through while simultaneously offering a grand mystery and real action, compared to the flat vignettes of observed fates in the first book. Here is an insightful review that provides you with details of the narrative.
Neither protagonist, the passive narrator of Nunez’ novel, suffused by diffuse reactions to the world around her, floating in a private universe of sadness, or the active protagonist of Kunzru’s tale, driven into mad acts by a revenge fantasy fed by assumed guilt and responsibility, can be our role models. The question of personal agency and efficacy towards bringing about change, if “only” to the size of the Supreme Court, remains unresolved. More books to read. And this.
Music today is the Blues, given its huge role it plays in White Tears. Photographs from South Carolina, providing a glimpse of the South now.
“So who are the good guys?,” my Beloved asked. “What do I know,” was my response, having only vague associations with Haiti, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, paramilitary violence of the Tonton Macoute, and devastating earthquakes. Crash course in history ensued, immediately regretted, given the revelation of nothing but horrors.
The small French-Creole nation occupies the western third of the Caribbean Island Hispaniola. Its inhabitants are the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with ⅔ of its children malnourished, and 1 out of 5 dying before the age of six. 60% of Haitians live on fewer than $2 a day. About half the population does not know how to write or read. How did it get there?
The island was claimed by Columbus for Spain in 1497, but the French took over in the 17th century and soon colonized it as a slave state raising sugar cane. Hard labor, torture and tropical disease ravaged the slave population, with endless slave ships arriving from Africa to keep the required numbers up around 800.000 slaves working for the French colonial masters. Definitely not good guys. In fact, really bad guys, because after a successful slave rebellion in 1804, they “negotiated” for years with the help of war ships to be paid reparations for their lost colony and human capital, eventually settling Haiti with a crushing debt of 150 million Francs to achieve indemnity, the acknowledgement of independence. With interest the debt was paid off finally in 1947. By then the necessary borrowing to be able to make the installments had undermined any chance to build a functioning educational and health system or public infrastructures. Details can be found here.
So the slave rebels were good guys? Hm, not entirely. The consistent rape of Black slave women by White slave owners had led to a separate class of Mulattoes who sought domination over the Black population after the uprising. Long story short, much infighting ensued between groups that really should have united forces against the colonial masters. The Mulattoe elites often used Black generals or politicians as puppets or their interest. Eventually the country divided in North and South being ruled by two different factions. The South clung to the ideal of the French revolution, with land being distributed to the poor. There, the average Haitian was an isolated, poor, free, and relatively content yeoman. In the north, the average Haitian was a resentful but comparatively prosperous laborer under restrictive rule of a royalist king.
Continued factional fighting and bloodshed eventually led to an occupation by US forces in 1915. Good guys? Ahem. Occupation was driven by interest in access to the Panama canal and vying for control of the Caribbean over European, particularly German interests. The occupation lasted until 1934.
Fast forward to 1957 with the election of Francois Duvalier, Papa Doc, who installed a regime of terror with the help of paramilitary executioner forces, the Tonton Makoute. Evil guy. More than 30.000 Haitians considered opposition were killed during his reign. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc, took over after his father’s death but had to flee to France when the extent of his kleptocracy, his regime’s theft and corruption became public. The role of the US? Bad guys. In the course of pursuing cold war interests, they did nothing to stop the atrocities or persecute those responsible later on, not even during human rights-focused administrations such as Jimmy Carter’s. “Butch Ashton, a business man who made his fortune during the Duvalier dictatorship by establishing corporations such as Citrus (a fruit exporter) and the Toyota dealership in the country’s capital, vehemently claims that the Tonton Macoute militia was trained by the U.S. Marine Corps and that the highest levels of the American government were complicit in this arrangement.” (Ref.)
And here we are in demand again, or so it is claimed by political observers who suspect that Haiti’s elite was behind last week’s murder of the current president, hoping to stave of a brewing revolution by the ever more impoverished population, suppressing it with the potential help of an American military intervention alongside Colombian and Honduran forces. Who was President Moïse, assassinated by a tightly organized group of paramilitaries pretending to be US Drug Enforcement agents, Americans and Columbians among them, apparently supported by Columbian ultra right-wing President, Iván Duque Márquez, bosom buddy of Brasilian president Bolsanero? (Particularly bad guys.)
Moïse a good guy? Nope. He had been clinging to the presidency even though his term was over; he had been syphoning away the money given through the Venezuelan funded program Petrocaribe to offset the devastating effects of the 2010 earthquake – 300.000 dead eventually and over a million Haitians made homeless, migrating to the cities in search for escape from starvation. Mass demonstrations against corruption and repression, urging his removal stoked fear in the 12 or so elite Haitian families who indirectly control the country.
There is clearly increasing rebellious fervor coming out of the millions of people cooped up in Haitian shantytowns. Marauding forces (no good guys either) were for the last decade a scourge on both the rich and the poor, with indiscriminate kidnappings and murders. Some of these gangs were hired by the business- and landowning mid- and upper class to protect their interests. Others formed as a response to the increasing poverty, particularly after the earthquake. Enter Jimmy Cherizier, a cop with an elite unit of the Haitian National Police called UDMO, the Departmental Unit of Maintenance of Order, who has organized many of these “gangs” into a G9 unit of vigilance on steroids and the expressed goal of cleaning up the rot of Haitian elites’ repression and extortion.
Moïse’s assassination might very well have been a means to an end to invite Columbian, Honduran and, in the end, UN or US forces, as a powerful barricade against a threatened revolution from below. In the meantime people starve to death, die of Covid-19 (inoculation has not even started,) and are kidnapped for ransom on random bases. No-one official coming to their rescue, as far as we can see, certainly no functioning government. Ariel Henry, the man who Moïse appointed prime minister just before the assassination claimed the right to lead Haiti, pitting him against acting head of state Claude Joseph, whose government has so far managed the response to the killing. Head of the Supreme Court, Judge René Sylvestre, who could have been Moïse’s successor, died of Covid-19 last week. No-one is certain who is in charge, when the next election will be, how to get a handle on the proliferating violence.
Repeat: no good guys. No easy solutions, either.
Music is a medley of Haitian musical styles from a recent performance at the Kennedy Center.
Montages are from my 2020 art series Setting Sail.
If you had asked me some months ago what Critical Race Theory is, the likely answer would have been, “Huh?” These days, there isn’t a news outlet that doesn’t engage the term on a daily basis, with emotional appeals to ward off the Right’s attacks on racial reckoning, or accusations of Leftie indoctrination of blessed little school children (let’s equip teachers with body cameras so we can control if they are indoctrinating!, let’s pass state laws that prevent school curricula from teaching CRT,) or scholarly treatises that try to explain why this or that approach to teaching history must not/must include this or leave out that.
I figured we could use a most basic description of the issues in order to understand where the roots for the mobilization of the current hysteria about the evil of Critical Race Studies lie. And I mean basic. The long versions from which I summarize, can be found here and here.
Critical Race Theory is a body of work that is anchored in legal scholarship, with three complex principles under constant evaluation (certainly not found in any primary school curriculum!) The debate established three main principles: that there is a Constitutional Contradiction, an Interest Convergence, and the Price of Racial Remedies. The Constitutional Contradiction, scholars argued, describes the framers’ choice to privilege the rewards of property over justice. Interest Convergence refers to the demonstrable fact that Whites will promote racial advances for Blacks only when they also promote white self-interest. The Price of Racial Remedies assumes that Whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status.
More generally, these days we see a lot of scholars, historians and journalists engage in Critical Race Studies, which basically try to teach us why the undeniable inequality, the ongoing differences in experienced violence and trauma for Blacks is not just an outcome of racist acts committed by some biased, racist people. Instead, they argue, the roots for the differences in lived experiences between Blacks and Whites, lie in systems that perpetuate the original power differential and beliefs in the supremacy of one race over the other – systems that include parts of our culture and the way it teaches history, parts of the social infrastructure that allows those on the top to stay there and prevents others to get a leg up, and institutional set-ups that perpetuate a certain order.
According to the Right, slavery, racial subjugation, segregation and inequity did (or might have) existed, but that’s a thing of the past. We now have – at least theoretically – equality before the law, they say, and so any differences in economic or educational attainment, in longevity or susceptibility for diseases etc., is due to personal choices, engagement, or absence thereof. No need to bring the subject of racism into the classroom, where it makes white children feel bad, raises ugly memories of a Civil War, and subverts the origin story of this proud country from individual freedom and initiative to a nasty tale of the original sin of slavery.
Not so, counter the progressives, we have an ongoing process of racial discrimination that can only be changed if we tackle the origins and point to the continuity built into our institutional systems, from prisons to schools to banks. We are at a cross road. The rising awareness of parallel lives in our society, embodied most dramatically in the killings of Blacks by police in recent years, have alerted and concerned enough people that a more truthful debate about our history can begin and should be carried into the schools.
History is mobilized, then, for political purposes, on each side. That is nothing new, of course, except that the dominant class, those in power, always had a monopoly on what and how history was taught, at least officially. With the ability to access other sources, for both students and teachers (who, for example, can benefit from the NYT’s 1619 project’s syllabi) that exclusive right is now under attack. Having lost other battles in the culture wars,(the majority of Americans now thinks positively of same-sex unions, for example,) CRT is the perfect new bogeyman that can whip the base into a frenzy, race having always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around, given how it can be used to stoke white resentment. Nothing more threatening than losing control over what your children think, or how critical thinking is encouraged in the first place.
Of course, if you intentionally and repeatedly misrepresent and distort the facts of what the engagement with our racist history in schools implies, if you lie about the present-day existence of racism and its systemic roots, you do not just undermine any possible objective discussion, but you endanger the entire democratic project that the founders tried to establish.
That said, making history culpable for the present, singularly dwelling on it instead of looking how to fight for a better future is to be avoided. As Frederick Douglass said in his Speech for the 4th of July: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”
Or as Princeton historian Matthew Karp put it (from whom I also borrowed above quote):
“The past may live inside the present, but it does not govern our growth. However sordid or sublime, our origins are not our destinies; our daily journey into the future is not fixed by moral arcs or genetic instructions. We must come to see history… not as “what we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by,” but rather as “what we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.”
And while we’re at it, one of the most accessible books about how the history of slavery is transmitted these days, is Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. Written at times poetically, always absorbingly, it is a must read. Review can be found here.
Yesterday’s NYT had an opinion piece on aliens – you know, the extraterrestrials who are rumored to exist, evidence of whom is alleged to have been carefully hidden by US State agencies. It is actually a thoughtful piece that offers a Gedanken experiment as to what would happen if we would indeed find some alien flight object crashed onto Oregon soil. What would the consequences be for the world, how would we react, as individuals, as a nation, as part of humanity at large? Would it unite or divide us?
A particular aspect that struck me was the discussion of not a land- but a narrative grab, a competition for interpretation that would have enormous consequences in allocating resources (let’s arm ourselves even beyond our teeth vs. let’s fund science to explore space and find these visitors,) or influence reactions (this is ours! No-one allowed to look at it! vs. let’s share among nations, since all of humanity is at stake.)
We don’t have to look to the extraterrestrial universe – the reality of narrative grabs is all around us and astoundingly dangerous. Whether we are talking about the Big Lie about a stolen election, or the conspiracies peddled by anti-vaxxers, or the testimony given during trials of police shootings, or the current tragedy unfolding in the Middle East – narratives are developed and disseminated to peddle influence, justify actions, distort the real picture, gain attention and adherents, shape tales of heroes, villains and victims.
This is particularly true if a conflict has hardened. It is also true if the narrative can no longer be controlled by those who were used to control it. If people can videotape events, if police have their own camcorders recording, the narrative from the reports can be offset by the visually documented history. To control the damage to those who used to call the shots, it becomes imperative to stop disseminating these sources. Whether it is police recordings that no-one is allowed to see, or iPhone videos that are blocked by undefined censorship rules on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook or whatever, the narrative is shaped by those who have the power of the domain. (One of the few things the Right and the Left agree on, by the way, each claiming to be silenced in egregious ways in different instances.)
There is a different psychological aspect of narrative grab, though, that we are also exposed and victim to, namely the way language shapes the way a situation is framed, and the way interpretation disambiguates a potentially ambiguous photograph in ways consistent with a particular narrative agenda. The overused “my terrorist is your freedom fighting martyr” example aside, there are other ways of shaping opinion.
Portland is a Warzone comes to mind, a description of protests that shaped the national conversation last summer, when really that was only when you saw select images and paroles on the Internet. Not that the city did not suffer from destructive action, or that those actions had consequences for more peaceful protests, but overall life was as undisturbed in most parts of the city as it had been. Which would be hard to believe if you consumed photographs of fiery walls, smoke filled streets, phalanxes of the feds and rioters, snapshots ripped out of the larger context. Note my wording: rioters, not protesters; phalanx as a military term; smoke filled streets hinting at fires out of control. Choice of words structure the narrative.
Another example is yesterday’s generalized accusation by Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and Anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, that Muslim youths are responsible for the current antisemitic acts in the country and need to be flushed out by police. German-Jewish reaction has been one of disbelief: the pervasive German anti-Semitism, more and more unabashedly out in the open, has been exchanged for a narrative that puts blame on another stigmatized minority, immigrants.
Given that we can probably agree on the fact that narratives are created, controlled and used for particular purposes, I believe we have the obligation to collect narratives from all sides, to learn about differing perspectives before we make up our mind about fact and/or fiction. This might be harder when sources are scant and monopolized, but it is possible. It is also more difficult when a particular narrative has dominated discourse for ages, prohibiting glimpses of the accounts of the other side.
I try to read widely nonetheless, not just the sources I trust and find comfortably echoing my own political inclinations. I welcome suggestions for reading sources I might not even know about that provide food for thought. It is work, agreed, and undermines all those nifty heuristics our minds use to make life easier, confirmation bias, anchoring and representative bias among them (I wrote about these cognitive short-cuts in reasoning and decision making in detail some time back here and here.) It is also our only chance to break patterns that are obstacles to finding solutions for dire problems, even life-threatening ones, be they pandemics, war or colonialism.
And just maybe, aliens.
Photographs today are open to differing narratives. Are those cute little insects helpers in the garden (aphid patrol) or pests that will go on to eat everything? Or both? Or different ones at different times? Unambiguous answers only.
Music today is about the Queen of narratives: Sheherazade. All she grabbed was time to live….
Let me take yesterday’s Mothers’ Day as my annual occasion to remind all of us that mothering would not be possible but for those who support it, parents and non-parents alike. Let’s celebrate ALL who make raising children in this world a shared adventure.
In this particular year my heart goes out to mothers who have lost their children in the pandemic, upending the natural order of parents dying before their offspring. I cannot imagine anything more painful than to lose a child. The hardest hit geographic areas, Brazil, Uruguay, India have also seen a huge percentage of young people killed by a virus that could have been contained, the latter a fact that adds insult to injury for the bereaved.
Gustav Klimt Mother with two Children (1909/10)
I cry with the mothers who have seen their children killed by political violence. Scores of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, this weekend alone. In Syria, the war has injured or killed one child every 8 hours in the last 10 years. In Yemen, at least 3,153 children have died and 5,660 children have been injured, according to a report by UNICEF. On average, 50 children are killed and 90 are wounded or permanently disabled each month.
Kaethe Kollwitz Die Eltern (plate 3) from War (1922)
The numbers for the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel vary depending on what source you read, but they are shockingly high even when reported by neutral parties. The deaths caused by IDF or settler activity are just the tip of the iceberg. The threats to health imposed by blockades, restricted access to medical care, electricity, food and water have their own consequences. A Human Rights Watch report can be read here and one specifically for Palestinian children by War Child, an organization that supports children in 17 war-torn countries, here. While bereaved families on both sides try to work together and plead for reconciliation, the violence against Muslims continues to increase, as we have seen this weekend in the shocking events at the Al-Aqsa mosque during end of Ramadan prayers. As reported in the Times of Israel, the Red Crescent was blocked by Israeli forces to come to the aid of the 200 wounded, many under 18 among them.
Tears for the mothers in our own country, too. In the last 6 years police have shot 22 children under 16 fatally. According to the Equal Justice initiative, the risk of being one of those victims is 6 times higher for those kids who are Black. If we look at mortality statistics for young Black men and teens, the risk of dying in a shooting, by police or by gang conflict, is increased 20 fold. Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 make up just 2% of the nation’s population, but they were among 37% of gun homicides in 2019 according to the CDC.
Heartache for the mothers and their children who flee unsafe lives for hope of asylum, only to perish on the perilous path across seas or deserts, or to be separated violently at the point of arrival.
Diego Rivera The Family (1934)
Solidarity to the women activists, many of them mothers, who are willing to face separation from their children, and/or threats to their health and lives by torture in prisons around the world: in Saudi Arabian jails, in Iranian jails, in Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian and Philippine jails, a list by no means exhaustive.
Kaethe Kollwitz The Mothers (plate 6) from War (1922)
Children should be safe. From war, from political conflict, from systemic, state sponsored violence, from racism, from hunger, from being ripped away from their families. Mothers should never have to bury a child.
Yes, I know. You are sooo done, at least for a while, with my lamenting around politics. Can’t we have a little break, you wonder? Some more memes, perhaps? Or a nice excursion into extraordinary art?
All in good time. First I had to get this off my chest, since I believe it is important to greet this new era with realistic expectations. (And you will get a break, I am taking the latter part of this week off. I need a break too!)
About a week ago, a consortium of scholars of democracy proposed some structural changes to our current political system. They see this as the only way to curb minority rule – a rule that increasingly spells the end of democracy given the number of voters who get overruled in these modern times. 50 Republican Senators can stop the legislation proposed by Democrats who represent 41 million more voters than their opponents.
The link contains their proposal in full, but here are the key suggestions:
“The Congress should take the following steps to enhance democratic equality and fairness:
Defend and expand the right to vote for all Americans.
Require nonpartisan commissions in each state to redraw congressional and state legislative districts, so that state legislatures can no longer gerrymander districts to advantage their party.
End the ability of a small group of ultra-wealthy donors to secretly bankroll candidates and parties by requiring transparency in all political spending.
Narrow the conditions under which the Senate filibuster can be used as a tool of legislative obstruction.
Grant the people of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico the right to vote for statehood, which would provide full and equal representation to nearly four million Americans who are currently disenfranchised.
Establish a nonpartisan, independent federal elections agency to ensure that the voting process is fair, consistent, secure, and legitimate.
Study ways to reduce politicization of the federal courts.
Why are these efforts needed? The sad reality is that President Biden has much less power to combat minority rule than we wish he’d have. A fact that motivated today’s blog, given all of our expectations – even if I’ll be accused of spoiling the mood….. The opposition is at it already.
Yes, he can make federal agencies provide voter registration services via executive order. Yes, his DOD can enforce the Voting Rights Act and file lawsuits against voting discrimination. Yes, he can prop up the postal system and regulate the Census.
What he cannot do is pass a new Voting Rights Act or overrule Republican gerrymandering or change the nature of the Senate or the courts without Republican help. And that will arrive when the cows get home. (This is a summary of what I learned here.)
Here are the simple facts about minority rule:
New and improved laws? The filibuster requires 60 Senate votes to pass legislation. GOP senators from 21 small states who represent less than a quarter of the population can thwart bills supported by a clear majority of Americans.
Fight it in court? 234 Trump judicial appointments will happily hear your case, then nix it. Biden has now inherited fewer than 25 judicial openings. The Supreme Court has excelled in curbing voting rights, and so it will be from the top down.
Redistricting?
“Following the 2020 census, they’ll get to craft the maps again in 20 states where they control the redistricting process, compared to seven for Democrats. (The rest have divided governments or independent redistricting commissions.) As a result, Republicans will draw nearly three times as many US House districts as Democrats will, a disparity that could easily cost Democrats the House in 2022. The maps passed in 2021 will likely be even more extreme than in 2011 because the Supreme Court has said that federal courts cannot review maps drawn for a partisan advantage, and states with a long history of discrimination will no longer have to get federal approval for those maps under the Voting Rights Act.”
The temptation to give up is understandable. Alternatively, let’s role up our sleeves and tackle the next fight. I’ll enjoy your company. It helps if you think of the consequences…
Photographs are from cemeteries in Charleston, South Carolina, a state that was one of the Southern segregationists after Reconstruction using the Filibuster to stop civil rights laws.
Music is a piece that will cheer you to no end after all this doom and gloom reading: Mozart’s Sonata Nr. 17 in C major. (The movements are unfortunately separated by ads…) I DO try to provide some balance…
Inauguration – today we rejoice! Tomorrow we remind ourselves that the mascot is gone but the team remains intact.
It is surely no coincidence that I have been thinking about South Africa’s long history of colonial racism, eventually codified in laws imposed by the Apartheid regime. Racist practices had begun with the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century, were later fortified by the British colonizers in the 19th century, but then legally structured (and then some) by the Nationalist Party which ruled South Africa between 1948 and 1994.
Despite the vanquishing of the racist German National Socialistic regime in 1945, South Africa decidedly went for its own version of White supremacy just three years later. Laws prohibited marriage and sex between the races, required registration of your race, enacted a prohibition for Blacks to vote and assigned them to certain areas or homelands through The Group Areas Act (1950.) This law partitioned the country into different areas, allocated to different racial groups. It represented the very heart of apartheid because it was the basis upon which political and social separation was to be constructed.
Gone are the Sacrificial Lambs (2011) (Series: Affirmation&Negation)
There were laws segregating universities, and those banning opposition parties. Laws drew divisions between the homeland areas themselves to prevent solidarity or joint action among different groups of Blacks. There were laws to formalize discriminations in employment, laws that controlled migration in and out of areas and protected forced and violent expropriation of property and relocations of Blacks to poor areas. As late as 1970 the Black Homeland Citizenship Act (1970) changed the status of the inhabitants of the ‘homelands’ so that they were no longer citizens of South Africa. The aim was to ensure Whites became the demographic majority within ‘white’ South Africa.
La Couturière (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)
By the mid to late 1980s opposition had become strong and vocal in a Defiance Campaign, and the regime reacted with violent oppression and police power. One of the ways the protest movements mobilized people and signaled meanings was through the use of color. Orange, white and blue, associated with the Nationalist Party, the colors of the first flag of the Republic of South Africa, were shunned. Visual graphics in posters and leaflets used black, green and gold instead, which stood for the color of the People, the green of the land and the gold for the wealth of the land. They had been chosen by the African National Congress, the main opposition party, since its inception in 1912. Those colors went underground in 1960 with the banning of the ANC, since people found by the regime to be in possession of items bearing these colours (no additional writing or image necessary) ran the risk of being beaten up, arrested or even killed.
But then came purple:
“On 2 September (1989,) police turned a powerful water cannon on thousands of protesters attempting to march to parliament. The water contained a strong purple dye, the intention being to mark all those who were protesting so they could face arrest at a later time, even if they managed to run away. Hundreds were arrested and for days it seemed a large part of the Cape Town population had become various shades of purple. This flew in the face of racial segregation laws and became a standing joke. People filled out ‘purple’ on the section of the arrest forms that demanded information about race and the defiance campaign slogan was changed temporarily to ‘the purple shall govern’. Ironically, the event contributed successfully to the Defiance Campaign in that people with different skin colour looked more alike. ‘Purple people’ signified the ultimate embodiment of the mode of colour as a political statement, more than the media of clothes mentioned earlier.” (Ref.)
The Moor (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)
A year later, the color red was added to the protest vocabulary.
Joe Slovo, General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, on returning home for the first time in 1990 after 25 years in exile, sent a message to his supporters anticipating his arrival. ‘Wear red socks’, he said and thousands did. No written explanations, images or verbal slogans were needed. When people put on their red socks for Slovo, they were acknowledging their own history of concurring with the senti-ments, politics and strategies of the South African Communist Party, and joining these thoughts with the quirky humour of the leadership. The choice of media, namely socks, was deliberate because socks are not immediately and overtly discernible and can be shown or hidden at will. (Ref.)
I’m going on about this at length for two reasons. For one, it is timely to remind ourselves of how racism has governed historical developments not even 100 years ago and how a mass movement could break some of the spell. Secondly, the mind-blowing sculptures by South African sculptor and photographer Mary Sibande, who I want to introduce today, can only be appreciated if we understand the historical significance of both color and costume.
Sibande casts life-sized sculptures of her face and body molded in fiber glass, creating an alter ego, Sophie. She then dresses these sculptures in gowns filled with enough symbolic references that it compares to decoding a renaissance portrait. Sophie is the silent narrator of the history of South African Black women, often in servitude or barely paid domestic workers, who are allowed to express their fantasies of what the world should look like if they weren’t indentured.
Silent Symphony (2010)
Blue was the chosen color in her early work, the blue of the traditional maid’s uniform; the shapes of the gowns are of Victorian splendor, and the activities enacted are undermining the racial and class hierarchy. (Below Sophie, with eyes closed as always, is repairing a superman cape.)
More recently the artist has added the color purple and now even red to her repertoire and the alternate versions of Sophie are juxtaposed as those representing her maternal past and those standing for the future of the progressive movement with an allusion to the events of 1989 described above.
A Reversed Retrogress: Scene 1 (The Purple Shall Govern). (2013)
“Sophie” straddles time, pre-, during and post-Apartheid, as well as roles. There is the specific inheritance of stories and dreams of the women in the artist’s family, four generations who were maids or other kinds of domestic workers. There is Mary as Sophie, now, drawing on the repository of African myths, beliefs and wisdom.
There is also, it seems, a general representation of the struggle of Black women in the system, their marginalization in a post-colonial world as well. In each configuration she is confident, alive, a subject that tells the story, her story, rather than someone subjugated.
The sculptures really strike me as a celebration of strength.
Detail from the series “In the Midst of Chaos There is Also Opportunity” (2017)
I assume anyone not familiar with the politics of South Africa would still be moved and made to think by this emotive work. If you are able to fill in the necessary facts around the use of color, or other symbolism of note in the fight against Apartheid, the full power of these sculptures unfolds. Oh, when can we travel again to see all this in a museum in the country where it come from? Or at least in a gallery in our own nation?
Music today is interspersed with talk – I learned a lot. Music mobilizing protest.
Photomontages are from 2010 and 2011, chosen for the colors blue, purple and red and the fact that they, too, focused on narrative.
22-year old poet Amanda Gorman was chosen to read at the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. I am linking back to my post from 2019, below, where I had introduced her while writing about reasons for optimism. The poem I chose, “In This Place (An American Lyric),” was her work for the 2017 inauguration of U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. It celebrated poetry as a tool in the service of and fight for democracy.
Apparently Jill Biden recommended her for this week’s inaugural reading. The poet lives in L.A., hence today’s choice of photographs.
As reported in the Baltimore Sun: “She is calling her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” while otherwise declining to preview any lines. Gorman says she was not given specific instructions on what to write, but was encouraged to emphasize unity and hope over “denigrating anyone” or declaring “ding, dong, the witch is dead” over the departure of President Donald Trump.”
Now, personally, I wouldn’t mind hearing ding, dong the witch is dead on Wednesday. Except that would be a lie – let us not, ever, forget that we are dealing not with a singular witch but a coven, which is going to have its tentacles in our political and social fabric for a long time. Or was that the Kraken? Getting my metaphors mixed here, which is why you’ll never hear anything written by yours truly at any inauguration of any kind or anybody.
Better that way. I am sure the powerhouse that is Amanda Gorman will move us all with her words, the words of a generation that has to live with the consequences of the disastrous policies of the last 30 years – yes, I mean it – longest.
I was thrilled when I heard the news, just at the moment when I finished reading Anand Giridharadas’ short piece in the.Ink proclaiming hope and optimism.
“And I see then that this is both a very dark time and, potentially, a very bright time. It’s important to hold these truths together.
When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture.
This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something.”
……
“We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
AMEN!
Poetry matters, but so do books from 2020 about politics, by Black women writers. MLK would have approved – Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King!
Words fail. Well, they fail me, which is why today you are getting smarter, more experienced and reflective words from someone else. They sure are a wake-up call. (Which is why you also get not my own, but Associated Press photos of people who are sleeping in an unusual place, where they should never ever have to wake up and be on guard.)
The essay was written by Ibram X. Kendi, Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. I had introduced his writings before here. My motivation for posting the entire essay today is simple: we cannot hear this truth often enough and clearly enough. Unless we understand the basic underlying causes for everything that we are experiencing now, unless we stop denying what is at the core of American history, our hope – and fight – for change will be doomed.
Denial Is the Heartbeat of America
When have Americans been willing to admit who we are?
“Let me be very clear: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America. Do not represent who we are,” President-elect Joe Biden said during Wednesday’s siege.
“The behavior we witnessed in the U.S. Capitol is entirely un-American,” read a statement from a bipartisan and bicameral group of elected officials that included Senators Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Mark Warner as well as Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Tom Reed.
“We’re the United States of America. We disagree on a lot of things, and we have a lot of spirited debate … But we talk it out, and we honor each other—even in our disagreement,” said Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma. “And while we disagree on things—and disagree strongly at times—we do not encourage what happened today. Ever.”
“That’s not who we are,” Senator Ben Sasse said.
“This is not the America I know and love,” Representative Brenda Lawrence said.
“I know this is not our America,” Representative Ed Case said.
“This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace said.
“This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic—not our democratic republic,” Republican former President George W. Bush said.“This is a national tragedy and is not who we are as a nation,” Democratic former President Jimmy Carter said.
Do these statements represent the American dream? Is the American dream the great delusion about what America is and who Americans are?
To say that the attack on the U.S. Capitol is not who we are is to say that this is not part of us, not part of our politics, not part of our history. And to say that this is not part of America, American politics, and American history is a bald-faced denial. But the denial is normal. In the aftermath of catastrophes, when have Americans commonly admitted who we are? The heartbeat of America is denial.
It is historic, this denial. Every American generation denies. America is establishing the freest democracy in the world, said the white people who secured their freedom during the 1770s and ’80s. America is the greatest democracy on Earth, said the property owners voting in the early 19th century. America is the beacon of democracy in world history, said the men who voted before the 1920s. America is the leading democracy in the world, said the non-incarcerated people who have voted throughout U.S. history in almost every state. America is the utmost democracy on the face of the Earth, said the primarily older and better-off and able-bodied people who are the likeliest to vote in the 21st century. America is the best democracy around, said the American people when it was harder for Black and Native and Latino people to vote in the 2020 election.
At every point in the history of American tyranny, the honest recorders heard the sounds of denial. Today is no different.
Americans remember and accept the enfranchising of citizens and peaceful transfers of power as their history, while forgetting and denying the coup plots, the attempted coups, and the successful coups. White terror is as American as the Stars and Stripes. But when this is denied, it is no wonder that the events at the Capitol are read as shocking and un-American.
In March 1783, Continental Army officers plotted mutiny against the Confederation Congress until George Washington convinced the officers to remain loyal. In 1861, pro-slavery insurrectionists assembled at the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War came, lasting until 1865. White terrorists laid siege to the county courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday 1873, and violently overthrew the local parish government, massacring roughly 150 Black people in the process. On September 14, 1874, the White League violently attempted to overthrow the newly elected governor of Louisiana in the Battle of Liberty Place, in New Orleans. White terrorists rioted; destroyed ballot boxes; and intimidated, wounded, and murdered Black voters in Alabama’s Barbour County on Election Day in 1874, securing victories for their candidates.
In 1898, white supremacists murdered dozens of Black people and violently overthrewthe democratically elected and interracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1921—in one of the most devastating economic coups in history—white supremacists murdered hundreds of Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and destroyedtheir prosperous Greenwood District, known affectionately as “Black Wall Street.” In 1933, financiers attempted to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to hand overpower so they could establish a fascist government.
This is a small sampling—but are all the attempted and successful coups in American history not part of American history?
The denial runs through America like the Mississippi River system. I guess after Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia called for massive resistance to desegregating schools on February 25, 1956, those were not Americans who mobbed schoolchildren and college students from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Boston in subsequent decades. I guess those weren’t Americans who beat, jailed, and slaughtered the Americans waging the civil-rights, anti-war, Black-power, Brown-power, Red-power, Yellow-power, women’s-liberation, and gay-liberation movements from the 1950s to the 1980s. I guess their badges and Bibles and American flags weren’t American.
But distant history is one thing. Has American denial blinded Americans from seeing what has happened in their country over the past year in states across the land, on social-media apps across the internet?
Donald Trump has been attempting to incite coups since April 17, 2020, when he tweeted: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!; LIBERATE MINNESOTA!; LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” Armed and unarmed people gathered in state capitols in Michigan in April, Idaho in August, South Carolina in September, and Oregon in December over COVID-19 restrictions. And white terrorists plotted to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia last year.
On January 6, 2021, as the siege occurred at the U.S. Capitol, officials in several states, including New Mexico, Georgia, and Colorado, evacuated state capitols to protect against the gathering mobs. The crowds, on that day, breached the gate to the grounds of the governor’s mansion in Washington State.
All of this evidence. All of this, and still some say these people are not part of America. Their antidemocratic politics are not part of American politics. The long history of coups is not part of American history. Denial is the heartbeat of America.
A 2018 music video shows Childish Gambino shirtless in an empty warehouse. Two gold chains hug his neck. An afro and thick facial hair hug his face. Gambino starts walk-dancing to a sweet-sounding folk melody. He comes upon a man, head covered, sitting in a chair. Gambino pulls out a handgun, assumes a comical stance evocative of a Jim Crow caricature, and shoots the man in the back of the head.
The gunshot transitions the sweet melody to a hard-thumping trap beat. As the man falls to the ground, Gambino faces the camera, holds the caricature pose, and raps, “This is America.”
A child appears holding a red cloth. Gambino carefully lays the weapon on the cloth, and dance-walks away, toward the camera. Two children carelessly drag the body away in the background as Gambino raps, “This is America.”
Don’t catch you slippin’ now Look at how I’m livin’ now Police be trippin’ now Yeah, this is America
After a while, the thumping transitions back to the melody. A robed Black church choir sings and sways. Gambino reappears, walk-dancing in glee, until someone tosses him an automatic weapon. He guns down the church members, in an unmistakable reference to the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting.
The gunshots again transition the melody back to the thumping beat. Gambino raps, “This is America,” as the bodies are dragged away, as he delicately lays the rifle on a red cloth again, held again by a waiting child.
Is this America? Does America protect violence more than people? Is gun life America?
Were the Trump supporters violently occupying the U.S. Capitol America? Was all that violence, all that antidemocratic sentiment, who Americans partially are? Did more than 74 millionAmericans vote for Trump? Do 77 percent of those voters believe what he believes, what those insurrectionists who sacked the Capitol believe, against all evidence to the contrary: that the election was stolen from Trump and that he actually won? Is all that happened on January 6 part of America?
It is. They are. All of what we saw at the U.S. Capitol is part of America. But what’s also part of America is denying all of what is part of America. Actually, this denial is the essential part of America. Denial is the heartbeat of America.
Since 2018, when “This Is America” unpacked three words used to cloak persisting violence, I’ve been arguing that the heartbeat of racism is denial. There is the regular structural denial that racial inequity is caused by racist policy. And whenever an American engages in a racist act and someone points it out, the inevitable response is the sound of that denial: I’m not racist. It can’t be I was being racist, but I’m going to try to be anti-racist. It is always I’m not racist. No wonder the racist acts never stop.
What is the inevitable response of Americans to tragic stories of mass murder, of extreme destitution, of gross corruption, of dangerous injustice, of political chaos, of a raw attack on democracy within the very borders of the United States, as we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol? This is not who we are. From this bipartisan perspective, America is existentially nonviolent, prosperous, orderly, democratic, just, and exceptional. America is apparently not like those so-called banana republics, which are existentially violent, poor, chaotic, tyrannical, unjust, and inferior—as Republicans and Democrats keep implying. America is apparently not like those “shithole” countries, as Trump called them.
To overcome Trumpism, the American people must stop denying that Trumpism is outside America. Trump is the heartbeat of American denial in its clearest form. He is America, shirtless and exposed, like Childish Gambino in the video. Trump is not fundamentally different from those elected officials saying, “This is not who we are.” He denies. They deny. The difference is the extremism of Trump’s denial. While Americans commonly say, “I am not racist,” Trump says, “I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.” While Americans commonly say to those Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, “You’re not us,” Trump says, “You’re very special.”
Trump’s political opponents rage about the red meat he keeps feeding his base while starving them of truth. But when Republicans and Democrats say, “This is not who we are,” whom are they speaking to? Are they speaking to swing voters? Do they believe that older white centrists can’t handle the truth? Are they starving them of the truth, too? Are they feeding white centrists the red meat of denial?
Two groups of Americans are feeding, and feeding on, American denial. There are Americans like Trump who nonviolently—and, like his supporters, violently—rage, and engage in the carnage at the U.S. Capitol in complete denial of the election results. And there are the Americans who during and after the carnage say, “This is not who we are,” in complete denial that the rioters are part of America.
The white domestic terrorist who denies his own criminality and the American politician who denies that the terrorist is part of us both remain in the foreground of the American media, of American politics—taking up all our care and concern. Meanwhile, in the background, the violence is placed on red cloths as the victims of the carnage are carelessly dragged out of sight and mind—as Eddie S. Glaude Jr. powerfully says, “This is us.”
In a fall 2020 survey, 54 percent of Americans said that their nation is the greatest in the world, with 80 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats expressing this sentiment. In January 2020, the majority of Americans said in a survey that the United States embodies the grandeur of gender equality, happiness, health consciousness, and public health. Nearly four in 10 Americans said that their nation promotes income equality.
But America’s actual standing in the world tells a different story on these issues and others. The life expectancy of Americans is shorter than for people in other rich countries that spend far less on health care. The U.S. has the highest maternal-mortality rate of any rich country. Police in the U.S. kill their fellow citizens at significantly higher rates than in any other rich country. The United States has the largest incarcerated population per capita in the world. The rate of gun violence here is significantly higher than in any other wealthy nation. Only Israel has a higher rate of poverty among rich countries than the United States. Among G7 nations, the United States has the highest rate of income inequality. The U.S. ranks second only to Greenland in the highest rate of suicides by firearm, and most of those suicides are by white men.
This is America, just like the insurrection in the Capitol was America. We need to see this reality with clear eyes, because nothing has held back America more than its denial. Nothing has caused more human carnage than American denial.
If you can look at the carnage and respond That’s not us, then you’ll consider it to be an anomaly. Humans—like nations—are not going to perform radical surgery on cancers that they don’t think are part of them. Instead of seeing white supremacists as the greatest domestic-terror threat of our time, too many see them as marginal actors. Thus, the marginal response to the carnage. Thus, the carnage continues.
Police violence—instead of being seen as the unnecessary killing of three Americans every single day—is dismissed as the product of bad apples. Thus, the marginal response to Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s killings. Thus, the carnage continues. Voter suppression—instead of being seen as corroding American electoral politics—is dismissed as a rogue GOP operation. Thus, the marginal response to electoral carnage. Thus, the carnage continues.
Economic inequality and mass poverty—instead of being seen as the inevitable results of racial capitalism—are dismissed as glitches in the economy. Thus, the marginal response to economic carnage. Thus, the carnage continues. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism—instead of being seen as systemic and pervasive—are dismissed as being carried out only by those individual red hats and rednecks. Thus, the marginal response to the carnage. Thus, the carnage continues. And on and on, with climate change and pipelines and transphobia and assault rifles and #MeToo. And on and on, the carnage continues.
We must stop the heartbeat of denial and revive America to the thumping beat of truth. The carnage has no chance of stopping until the denial stops. This is not who we are must become, in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol: This is precisely who we are. And we are ashamed. And we are aggrieved at what we’ve done, at how we let this happen. But we will change. We will hold the perpetrators accountable. We will change policy and practices.We will radically root out this problem. It will be painful. But without pain there is no healing.
And in the end, what will make America true is the willingness of the American people to stare at their national face for the first time, to open the book of their history for the first time, and see themselves for themselves—all the political viciousness, all the political beauty—and finally right the wrongs, or spend the rest of the life of America trying.
In 1995 the German publishing house Aufbau-Verlag printed two volumes of diaries, covering the years 1933 to 1945. They were written by Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish professor of Roman languages, who had survived the Holocaust. The diaries won great acclaim both in Germany and later in English translation in the US – Peter Gay, in his review for the New York Times, declared them a collective masterpiece and referred to Klemperer as “one of the greatest diarists—perhaps the greatest—in the German language.” Klemperer had been dead for over 30 years by the time of publication, having spent his post-Holocaust years in his hometown of Dresden, chronicling life in East Germany as well.
Immediately after the war, Klemperer published a small book, a lexicon of what he called Lingua tertii imperii (“the language of the Third Reich”), in which he noted and analyzed the rhetorical giveaways of the regime in painstaking detail. Equal part linguistic analysis and survivor’s memoir, the book describes many of the rhetorical tools that we see in abominal revival in our current political landscape. (It is a hard read, on many levels.)
Some contemporary authors, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny comes to mind, pick up on Klemperer’s analysis of the language of fascism and pre-facism and draw out the parallels to our time in more accessible form. Tools of supremacist language range from distorting the meaning of words, lulling people into a collective trance, erasing boundaries between fact and fiction, making it impossible to hold on to truth. Importantly, the rhetoric establishes an infinite repeat of an “us vs them,” uniting your followers against a common enemy.
Klemperer describes numerous ways in which truth is thrown out of the window. For one, leaders ignore it and supplant it with numerous small lies. Secondly, they do so by relentlessly repeating phrases and ideas, making the concepts or slogans familiar, familiarity that builds an emotional connection between them and their followers. Thirdly, they consciously use contradictory logic, forcing us to abandon rational reasoning. And lastly, they demand unlimited faith and loyalty, establishing faith over reason. When you put loyalty and emotion before reason, you will not be able to be persuaded by rational argument, becoming a true follower buying into any lie delivered by the leader.
All this came to mind when I was confronted with anti-Semitic language and symbols displayed in the media images of the people storming the Capitol last week. The rioters came from many different backgrounds, but were fused by shared “enemies,” using language (displayed on t-shirts and sweatshirts, or symbolized by hand gestures or types of flags and banners) that identified the enemy as “the Jew.”
Some of the language is easily (and horridly) accessible, like Camp Auschwitz printed on a sweatshirt. Other parts are more available to the initiated – or do you know what “6MWE” on a t-shirt means? It is an acronym common among white supremacists standing for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough.” Or have you noticed how certain names appear in triple parentheses? They stand for “the Jew,” or Jewish, a linguistic marker that fascist Germans used to employ: Forced to repeat “the Jew Klemperer” enough times, one thinks of that person not as Victor Klemperer but as “The Jew.” The Jews were in effect deprived of their name, and in turn of their humanity.
The New Synagoge
The Anti-Defamation League has a website that compiles and explains these various hate symbols, a great educational tool. Here are some examples.
I have been unable to stop thinking about the rhetoric used by the GOP and these words found in The American Interest, (not exactly a hotbed of progressivism, but I do try to read all sides…) by the very smart Elisabeth Draw:
“Demagogues and authoritarians need enemies. They use language to distort, manipulate, and corrupt discourse; to direct, control, and oppress…..In Hitler’s Germany linguistic habits shaped attitude and culture, and eventually acquiescence to a system of segregation and dehumanization. The language of the Third Reich was corrosive, and contagious.”
Someone here, and now, surely has learned and re-implemented that lesson. We saw the consequences on January 6th.
Photographs are from Dresden, Klemperer’s hometown.
Music is presenting Victor Klemperer’s cousin, Otto Klemperer, a world-renowned conductor. I chose Egmont because it is a tragedy, written by the quintessential German poet Goethe, about the downfall of a man who trusts in the goodness of those around him.
