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Racism

Songs from the Congo

· Black Artists of Oregon/Africa Fashion at Portland Art Museum ·

““I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos — and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo.”

– Franz Fanon Black Skin White Masks, 1952

Last week I visited Africa Fashion and Black Artists of Oregon at the Portland Art Museum, downstairs and upstairs in the main building, respectively. Downstairs was empty, upstairs was jumping, middle of a weekday, for a show that has been open since September. I started my rounds on top and my eye was immediately caught by a group of young women motionless, except for their heads.

What were they staring at? Bent over, studying, then four heads lifting in unison, looking at each other, then bending again, back and forth, like a silent dance. Once the young women left, I walked over to see for myself and found this:

damali ayo Rent a Negro.com (2003) You can listen to the artist explain the evolution of this work here.

What reaction would an interactive piece like this, riffing on the commodification and objectification of Black labor, elicit in high school students who are most likely not (yet) too familiar with conceptual art? One of the first satirical pieces of internet art, damali ayo‘s Rent-a-Negro is an ingenious take on the system that has progressed from purchasing and owning the Black body to leasing it (although prison labor needs to be considered a form of slavery, if you ask me,) to using token Blacks to satisfy demands for “diversity.” How would it be processed by the Black high-schoolers in contrast to those like me, old White folk? Rage and revulsion by those whose ancestors were subjected to exploitation and oppression, ongoing even? Shame and sorrow by those whose forbears might have wielded the whip and ran the auctions, with patterns of discrimination not a thing of the past?

Julian V.L. Gaines Painfully Positive (2021)

Ray Eaglin Maid in USA (1990)

Fanon’s insight that someone like me will not be able to understand certain forms of art as they would be by those from whom it originates, popped up in my head with urgency. And this leads to one of the elephants in the room that needs to get aired: how does a White woman review exhibitions of Black art with the depth and understanding they deserve, while aware that the racial, potentially distorting, lens cannot be abandoned? It is naive, bordering on ignorant, to assume that art can be seen, understood, felt in some neutral fashion, when our implicit stereotypes guide our interpretations, and when our lack of knowledge specific to the history of a community affects our comprehension.

Tammy Jo Wilson She became the Seed (2021)

Al Goldsby Looking West (ca. 1970)

Furthermore, any reviewer aware of their implicit biases and wishing to be an ally to those who are burdened with historical or ongoing discrimination, will walk on eggshells. You want to avoid harsh criticism, or piling onto stereotypes, or being overly deferential, despite all of that being already a form of unequal treatment, born from awareness of culture constructed around race. You so want to avoid putting your foot in your mouth and appear arrogant.

Or racist.

Thelma Johnson Streat Monster the Whale (1940)

Mark Little Despondent (1991)

Isaka Shamsud- Din Land of the Empire Builder (2019)

I vividly remember a lecture I gave about the psychology of racism on invitation by PAM in the context of a Carrie Mae Weems exhibition over a decade ago. I talked about the Implicit Associations Test – IAT –  the psychological measure that confirms how many of us hold stereotypical assumptions associated with racism. It is a test that looks at the strength of associations between concepts and even the most liberal takers have gasped at their scores.  Mind you, it does not mean you are a racist; it just tells us that we have all learned associations between concepts that involve stereotypes associated with Blacks. Some in the audience erupted in anger, astute, educated, intelligent docents among them. That could not be true! They fought against racism all their lives! I clearly failed in getting the point across: there is a difference between consciously acting on your stereotypes and unconsciously being affected by them. But even the latter was denied by these well-meaning citizens.

Jason Hill Lion King (2019)

In any case, one can have read brilliant work like Franz Fanon’s about the Black psyche in a White world, racial differences, revolutionary struggle and the effects of colonialism until the cows come home, it will not ease the task of reviewing exhibitions like the one currently on view. Not that that has kept me from doing so, most recently with Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems in Dialogue at the Getty and Red Thread/Green Earth which showed work of several members of the Abioto family at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.

But it has made me aware of how much I already censor in my head, how worried I am about the reception of my takes, and the damage they could do, how my approach to work are colored by the political context, something that would not happen if I just walked into any old show of a collection of artists, race unknown.

Ralph Chessé The Black Women Work (1921)

Bobby Fouther Study in Black (2023)

***

The current exhibition was curated by Intisar Abioto after years of research into the spectrum of Black artists in Oregon, some famous, some locally known, some hidden in the embrace of their community. She put together a remarkable show, and her line of thinking as well as the expanse of the art is fully explained in a in-depth review by my ArtsWatch colleague Laurel Reed Pavic, who talked to the curator and listened to her podcasts about the exhibition. (You can listen to the podcasts yourself – they range from general introduction to a number of interviews with individual participating artists.)

My first association to the upstairs show was the contrast to what is exhibited downstairs, African Fashion. Previously shown at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, the latter was hailed as a vital and necessary exhibition by eminent art critics. It felt to me, however, like one of those luxury fruit baskets filled with luscious and exotic goods, wrapped in cellophane with a glittery bow – something that often does not live up to its visual promise when you are actually starting to peel the fruit.

Contrast that with the show upstairs: like a farm-to-table box dropped off at your doorstep, stuffed to the brim, packed to overflowing, with produce you sometimes don’t even recognize, but all locally grown and, most importantly, invariably, truly nourishing.

Katherine Pennington Busstop II (2023)

Latoya Lovely Neon Woman (2019)

Packed is the operative word here, 69 artists and over 200 objects, sorted into categories like “expanse, gathering, collective liberating, inheritance, collective presence, and definitions. The art is competing for space, focus, time and attention, with those limited resources not meeting demand. I assume it was a conscious curatorial decision. If you have, finally, a public space willing to open up to a neglected or even excluded collective of artists (collective in the sense of a shared history rather than a shared goal,) you might as well grab the opportunity and allow every one in the community a shot. This is particularly true when you don’t know what the future holds and which opportunities emerge in times where the racial justice backlash is raising its ugly head ever more prominently. Yet you do early-career artists, no matter how promising, no favor when placing them among the hard hitters.

Henry Frison African Prince (1976-79) with details

Alternatively, the inclusion of so many art works might have been a conscious attempt to demonstrate the diversity that is offered by a community long segregated from traditional art venues, never mind neighborhoods. It might be an attempt to shift what psychologists call the outgroup homogeneity bias, our tendency to assume that attitudes, values, personality traits, and other characteristics are more alike for outgroup members than ingroup members. “They are all the same! Know one, you know them all!” As a result, outgroup members are at risk of being seen as interchangeable or expendable, and they are more likely to be stereotyped. This perception of sameness holds true regardless of whether the outgroup is another race, religion, nationality, and so on.

That bias certainly affects what we expect (particularly, when our expectations are driven by other cognitive biases as well.) Our unconscious expectation of less diversity in the creative expressions of the art were certainly put in doubt with the plethora of work put up by Abioto. In confirmation of the bias – and thus the value of her curatorial decisions – I certainly caught myself regularly looking for a common thread of political statements, however indirect, commenting on the experience of being Black in Oregon, a notoriously racist state.

MOsley WOtta Baba was a Black Sheep (2023)

The history can be found here in detail. Simply put, Oregon had not one but three separate Black exclusion laws anchored in the Oregon Constitution and it took until 2001 to scrap the last bit of discriminatory language from the records.

We are one of the nation’s whitest states, and had at some point the highest Ku Klux Klan membership numbers nationally. Of our 4.2 million Oregon residents only about 6% are Black, and many of these have been displaced within the state over and over again, making room for construction projects and/or gentrification of neighborhoods. Nonetheless, Black leadership and organizations providing support for education, including the arts, are resilient and effective. (A recently updated essay by S. Renee Mitchell provides a thorough introduction to these achievements. Another informative article about Black pioneers can be found here.)

Arvie Smith Strange Fruit (1992) Detail below

Much of the art reflects the history, referencing the pain and injustice of lived as well as inherited experience. But there were also pieces that simply depicted beauty, documented landscape, revered what is. No message necessary or intended. It is a conversation I would love to have about all art, at this moment in time, how our ability and willingness to make art outside the need to bear witness, or instruct, or frighten, or alert to social change needed, is obstructed by multiple internal and external forces – but that has to wait for another time.

Sadé DuBoise Collective Mourn (2023) with detail

For this exhibition there was more art on display than could possibly be processed during a single visit. But all of it was nourishing, even in passing, as I tried to express in my initial description – food for thought, yes, as well as a feast for the eyes.

Natalie Ball Mapping Coyote Black, June 12 and 13, 1987 (2015)

Natalie Ball Mapping Coyote Black , June 12 and 13, 1872 (2015) (Artist new to me, enchanted by the work.)

I felt at times as if I was, if not an invited, surely a tolerated guest at a family reunion – meeting of long lost friends and relatives, happy to run into each other, artists introducing each other. It was a vivid, social experience during a time where I am still socially isolated due to the pandemic, even if I was standing double-masked at the margins, observing so many people truly engaging with art, potentially new to them. Twice (!) I was asked to take photographs of people who had met at the museum by chance and talked to each other in front of this or that piece.

I left the museum more hopeful than after any of the recent shows I’ve been reviewing (and the last year included some real winners!). The vibrancy of the work on the walls and the liveliness, even giddiness of the social interactions of many visiting generations all conveyed a sense of resilience and optimism that somehow rubbed off onto me. I might not get the songs of the Congo, but I do have an inkling, provided by this exhibition, of what local Black art stands for: a community that refuses to let go of history, no matter how painful. A community that believes in a more just tomorrow as well, forever willing to fight for it, no matter how hard that is made by the rest of us. A community standing its ground, with art that reflects that strength.

Ralph Chessé Family Portrait (1944)

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Octavia E. Butler, Beacon.

Today’s musings will be all over the map, geographically, emotionally and with regards to content that has preoccupied my brain for a while. It all leads back to Octavia E. Butler, a writer who I admire for her exquisite, creative world building, her focus on in/justice, and her ability to transcend genres. I am even more grateful for all of her modeling of what it means to have courage and persistence, to stick to goals defying racist, patriarchal, professionally closed systems, while skirting existential poverty and loneliness during formative years.

Mural at the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School in Altadena, CA.

All over the map: Let’s start with Trieste, Italy. Why Trieste? I was somewhat condescendingly amused during my 2018 visit there to see flocks of fans follow the footsteps of their hero, James Joyce, who lived and wrote major works in Trieste for years. Selfies with his statue, tour lines in front of his lodgings, photographs of the multiple plaques conveniently placed by the Bureau of Tourism: Joyce walked over this bridge here! More than once!

Well, I was wrong, I’ve joined the multitudes and never should have sneered. Not pursuing Joyce, nor taking selfies, but I am now trying to walk along the paths of someone I wish I’d understand, taking in the neighborhoods and buildings that were part of her daily life, reading about her struggle, and visiting places that keep her memory alive.

Pasadena, CA, then, is next. No plaques here, but a helpful map laying out routes frequently taken by Butler, prepared by people at the Huntington Library which holds the author’s archives. An even more helpful book by journalist Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky – the World of Octavia E. Butler, which introduces the canvas on which Butler drew both herself and the worlds she constructed from the insights captured by her daily struggles, the physical environment in which she labored, and the mental landscapes that she traveled while growing into the writer some of us now devour. George describes the author with exceptional sensitivity and intuition, during the years before Butler would go on to become a MacArthur (Genius) Fellow and win a Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as Hugo and Nebula Awards for her trail­blazing work in science fiction—the first Black woman to win both awards.

Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA, to a mother who worked as a maid and a father who was a shoe shiner and died when she was very young. She was dyslexic, isolated in school and not particularly supported by the majority of her teachers. Later she turned to menial jobs, often physical labor, that did not require much thought so she was free to do her own thinking, and could use the rest of her time to walk or visit libraries, some involving hours on the bus.

Historic center Pasadena, including the post office where checks, manuscripts acceptance or rejection letters might have arrived in her P.O.Box.

Lynell George’s account of these early years is, among other things, based on archival items that Butler saved over the years: lists. And lists. And lists. On scrap paper, or any other expandable surface she could write on, perhaps compulsively constructed to organize and likely ward off a flood of fears that might otherwise prove overwhelming. Shopping lists. To-do lists. Lists to evaluate what could be pawned to head off starvation. Lists of goals. Lists of dreams. Lists of exhortations or promises to Self, or incantations about how the world should be and how to make it so.

An eternally slow start to find her way into publishing, with 2 small manuscripts sold in 5 years, interminable stretches of professional drought, and yet this author went on to write and publish over a dozen books, with artists, play-writes, musicians and film makers increasingly inspired by the work since her death from injuries sustained in a fall at the age of 58 in 2006. Her novels are taught at colleges and universities around the country (well, where there are not yet banned, I should hasten to add…) and you can now watch adaptions of her books on TV. (Coincidentally, this weekend’s NYT listed an introduction to some of the essential works, so you can see for yourself how much ground was covered or where to start.)

***

Many of Butler’s books can be found in a small book store on North Hill Avenue in Pasadena, Octavia’s Bookshelf. It opened about a month ago and offers a range of works by BIPOC writers, and a welcome space to sit down and explore.

Here I meet Nikki High, owner of the store, who is helpful in recommending books when I approach her to pick her brain and perfectly happy to spend some of her valuable time chatting with this stranger. Which brings us to the Republic of Ghana, the west-African country where sociologist and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois resided during the last years of his life and is buried. He died on the eve of the civil-rights march in Washington,D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream”speech and where Roy Wilkins of the NAACP announced Du Bois’s death from the podium. I mention to Nikki that I am currently reading a thought provoking, beautiful novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Lovesongs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and she tells me about her recent travels to Ghana to visit Du Bois’ grave and the house he lived in, visibly moved by the reliving of that memory.

Jeffer’s novel revolves around the concept of Double Consciousness that Du Bois introduced in his seminal book The Souls of Black Folk (1903.) So does Kindred, (2003) Butler’s historical fiction/fantasy novel introducing a heroine who time travels between the 19th and 20th century, between the slave plantation where her ancestors suffered and her interracial marriage in 1976 L.A.. The novel has become a cornerstone of Black American literature.

Du Bois argued that living as an African American within a system of White racism leads to a kind of fragmented identity. The double consciousness refers to “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

“It is a socio-cultural construct rather than a baldly bio-racial given, attributed specifically to people of African descent in America. The “two-ness” of which it is a consciousness thus is not inherent, accidental, nor benign: the condition is presented here as both imposed and fraught with psychic danger.” (Ref.)

The socio-cultural existence is defined by a racial hierarchy that includes hostility and suspicion, subtle or outright exclusion, a life lived in uncertainty and guardedness. The individual’s identity, both novels argue, is also affected by the historical fact that harm extended beyond the individual to whole family structures and networks of kin. Only when you understand the legacy of historical trauma and merge it into your own sense of self will it cease to afflict you. Past and present need to be integrated to mend a disjointed self.

***

As luck would have it, the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School‘s library celebrates an OEB science fiction festival the next day. Previously Washington Middle School, the institution’s new name (since Fall 2022) honors its famous alumna. Since I have to avoid crowded indoor settings during the pandemic (it is NOT over, folks!), I cannot join the activities, but manage to get a few photos in a ventilated hallway. New generations are introduced to a role model that leaves you in awe for the obstacles overcome.

On to Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, CA, where Butler is buried. It is a peaceful place with beautiful old tree growth, als long as you ignore the coyotes that they warn you about, patrolling in packs, by some reports.

Butler’s grave marker is unobtrusive, not easy to find. The inscription is one of her most frequently cited insights, from the book The Parabel of the Sower (1993), where she turned her attention to climate catastrophe and the subsequent militarization of state and rapidly shrinking chances of survival. Set in 2024, it seems utterly prescient in retrospect, its descriptions outlining the contours of our lived or soon to be lived reality.

Allow me one short digression, and some speculation, you’ll see why in a minute. Butler’s last resting place sports numerous strange grave stones, if you can call it that, artificial tree stumps carved with the emblems of a maul, wedge, axe and dove, as well as markers inscribed with repeat phrases, the Latin motto “Dum Tacet Clamet” which translates to “though silent, he speaks.” A bit of research brought me to Omaha, Nebraska, where one Joseph Cullen Root founded The Woodmen of the World (WOW) in the early 1890s. It was essentially a mutual aid society, a beneficiary order that provided death benefits and grave stones to its members by essentially passing around a hat.

That turned out not to work exactly, and so shifted thirty years later to become a regular life insurance company. By 1901 it was the largest fraternal organization in Oregon with 140 camps and a membership of 15,000. Membership conditions: you had to prove yourself in various ways, be older than 16 and – White. A subdivision, Women of Woodcraft, is captured in this photograph.

Women of Woodcraft (likely a drill team), ca. 1910. Object ID: 2011.033.001; Copyright Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center

Would Butler be turning in her grave, surrounded by valkyries like these? Likely not. She would point to the importance of the idea of mutual aid, and to change: if you look at the website of the WoodmenLife Insurance Company that grew out of WOW, you find images of Black, Asian, Brown and other faces among the White beneficiaries, carefully assembled to stress diversity. It might only be on the surface, who can tell, but change nonetheless. And in any case – she might stay silent, but her work speaks to millions, in contrast to the wood people of the world….

***

This brings me to the reason why I, an old White European woman who can take privilege seemingly for granted, am so preoccupied with a Black writer who envisioned change and imbued her heroines with strength and refusal to give up, forever pursuing humanistic goals. She instills hope.

I feel like living in an era where, here as well as internationally, change is pursued or co-opted to move us backwards. The powers that be (or wannabe) want to affirm or re-install structures – and I mean STRUCTURES – that go beyond individual racist impulses or acts, to dominate on top of a hierarchy and use that dominance to extract riches and suffering. These forces are insisting that “differences”exists, be they racial, religious, gender, sexuality or simply cultural. Don’t ever believe in equality! Put a value label to these differing categories, with some “better,” others “worse,” with the dominant category, of course, being the superior one. This valuation is extended to an entire group, depreciating not just single humans, but a whole category. “Negative valuation imposed upon that group becomes the legitimization and justification for hostility and aggression. The inner purpose of this process is social benefit, self-valorization, and the creation of a sense of identity for the one through the denigration of the other. And as is evident, the generation and expression of hierarchy run through it from beginning to end.” (Ref.)

Whether you look at the Nazi play book, present-day Hungary, Russia, India or other authoritarian movements, these principles are at work every single time, with the content attached to the “difference” changing according to local need du jour and historical hierarchies, including colonialism. In addition, progressive movements so often weaken themselves by intra-group strife instead of collaborative fighting against a common enemy. I can think of no better explanation of those principles than in Arundhati Roy’s speech last week at the Swedish Academy.

It is so easy to lose hope, to withdraw by feeling overwhelmed, helpless, powerless to achieve true equality. And yet there was a person who faced obstacles beyond description, who believed in hope and the power of community.

Here is someone who put it in words better than I ever could, Jesmyn Ward, a formidable writer in her own right:

“This is how Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, and browbeats: she writes her way to hope. This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair. This is the real gift of her work… in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.”

Against the backdrop of a legacy of trauma she provided us with a legacy of optimism, that the lessons of successful collective action and resistance in the past will guide us to the right kind of change in the future, with the help of courageous and resourceful Black women.

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Art on the Road: Horticultural Treasures and the Politics of Memory.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” – Karl Marx The German Ideology (1845)

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“As a matter of fact indeed, this generation, that grew up with the “end of history” of Francis Fukuyama, does not seem to be affected by the central historical events of their life time in any enduring way … [This generation is] pragmatic, history-less, free from economic and ideological system conflicts of the Cold War, grown up after the “end of history”. If you look at this generation through the lens of the events of its history, it does not afford any strong “interrelation”, no strong generational “narrative”. – Anna Sauerbrey, Machtwechsel: Wie eine neue Politikgeneration das Land Verändert. (Change in Power: How a new Generation of Politicians changes the Country.) (2022)

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“Let us remember we will never truly breathe whole breaths, as whole beings, as a whole country and people, until we reach a collective reckoning, and repair … until we become whole and so can exhale into a place of healing at the depths of the blood and marrow in our bones. Imagine that breath.” – traci kato-kiriyama  Navigating With(out) Instruments. (2021)

I WOULD HAVE have almost missed the small plaque, easy to escape my attention that was held by so many other sights: a gorgeous botanical garden unusually laid out across steep slopes, an indescribably beautiful location, a forest of blooming camellias, bulwarks of birds of paradise hedges, lazy lizards, groves of mulberry trees, surrounded by pristine canyons, with a green sheen after all this rain.

Having spotted it, however, and later reading up on what was hinted at, led to contemplation of memory cultures and their variable perspectives, depending on who you ask. Or who has the power to shape the narrative, as the case may be. All that happened during a visit to the 165- acres Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, CA, some 10 minutes outside of Pasadena, which contains one of the world’s largest camellia collection with some 800 species and as many as half a million camellias in bloom simultaneously, if you visit in the early months of the year. A spectacular sight.

One might be pleased to see an acknowledgement of the history that transpired after President Roosevelt issued his infamous Executive Order 9066 in March 1942, authorizing the removal and incarceration of over 120.000 Japanese American women, men and children on suspicion of being potentially dangerous enemy aliens. Some 70.000 of those rounded up with lightning speed were actual American citizens.

Or one might wonder why the text refers to War Relocation Centers instead of Internment camps, or even concentrations camps as Roosevelt himself and other U.S. officials referred to them. The War Relocation Authority, the federal agency created to manage the incarceration process, succeeded with a political spin and created euphemistic terms, calling the forced removal an “evacuation,” incarceration “internment,” and the facilities “relocation centers,” rather than concentration camps. (Certain American Jewish institutions, the National Holocaust Museum among them, reject the term concentration camp, fearing that it invites false analogies to the Holocaust, demeaning history. Others, like Michael Rothberg, a UCLA professor of English and comparative literature who holds the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, point to the fact that not only Jews were detained in concentration camps, and defines them as “mass detentions of civilians without trials,” many of which happened before the German atrocities – e.g. the 19th century Spanish in Cuba, the British in South Africa during the Boer wars, or China’s extrajudicial camps for millions of Muslim Uighurs who face systematic brutality and dehumanization.) (Ref.)

Moreover, one might wonder what is implied in the simple statement that the founder of this garden, newspaper publisher E. Manchester Boddy, purchased plants from Japanese nurserymen, namely the contents of Star Nurseries, headed by Francis Miyosaku Uyematsu and Mission Nursery, headed by Fred Waichi Yoshimura. If you go to the history section of the garden’s website, (and who does, pray tell?) you get a few more sentences: “These people’s terrible loss, reflecting years of labor, was Rancho del Descanso’s immediate gain. The purchase of their plant inventories became the basis for Descanso Gardens’ first signature collection.”

“Can’t you just for once enjoy a garden and help us vicariously admire the scenery?” I hear from the back rows. You know me. Or should, by now. Nope! Important history to convey.

IF YOU LOOK AT scholarly exploration of what actually happened, including archival research, oral histories and interviews with surviving members of the families, a different narrative emerges. (I am indebted to Wendy Cheng, Associate Professor of American Studies at Scripps College, who gave me access to her 2020 article Landscapes of beauty and plunder: Japanese American flower growers and an elite public garden in Los Angeles, a combination of factual revelations and incisive analysis that taught me a lot.) Summarizing best I can, the original official story around Boddy’s acquisition was that of a friend of the Japanese community paying a “fair price” for priceless treasure during hard times, his generosity appreciated, the ruling narrative goes, by those who had few other choices before seeing their entire stock destroyed.

Alternatively, one can see this act as a form of plunder, reminiscent to me, as a German, of the forced sales of Jewish art and property to Nazi vultures or collaborating opportunists. Legality aside (hey, these people did nothing illegal, if they acquired stuff on the cheap as the opportunity arose…) plunder can be defined as a dishonest acquisition of property, whether through violent dispossession of native lands or orderly transfer in business settings during structurally disordered conditions that allowed to prey on vulnerable minority groups. The losses incurred by Japanese Americans? Estimates are that 75% of those incarcerated lost all of their property. Overall economic losses (not adjusted for inflation) are presumed to lie in the $1 to $3 billion range. Half of the total number of flower growers in the L.A. region were Japanese, some 90% of them working on leased land due to racist tenancy laws instituted in 1913 (Alien Land Law.) Businesses on that land were taken over by Whites, after Pearl Harbor.

There is a small but well designed Japanese garden wit the tallest flowering cherry tree I have ever seen.

Boddy’s “fair price,” as the term appeared in the narrative of the garden (rescinded only 4 years ago), was in reality likely a 5th of what the stock of mostly camellia and ranunculus from three different nurseries was worth. Some 300-320000 plants changed hand for the Uyematsu nursery alone (the garden gives a far lower number) from a horticulturist known across Asia as one of the most gifted and successful cultivators. They included seedlings that Uyematsu had nursed for over 12 years and that Boddy propagated at Descanso, and eventually named, an implicit assertion that he was the original cultivator. As far as we know, no further tracing of the actual provenance has been undertaken since the 1942 transaction.

In addition, even though Boddy acknowledged publicly that the historic circumstances were unjust, there is archival evidence that his dissatisfaction with the camellia deal led him to try and shut the nursery down for other sales, offering lower whole sale prices for gardenias and azaleas. He also initiated a bitter and long-lasting law suit against a third nursery, the Yokomizos, for breach of contract after they returned from the camps, suing them for land and damages – a suit that was settled shortly before trial. That story seems not to be included in the history of the garden at all.

***

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT to get the facts right and display them in a fashion that allows, or even forces people to remember? Has our nation not done enough to acknowledge the injustice committed against Japanese Americans? Official narratives – – the ruling ideas as Marx would have it — admit to wrongdoing, but also defend its necessity (legal cases) or claim that it was an aberration (congressional acts), or point to the fact that victims were given compensation, or point to a larger arc of progress in the U.S. that has incrementally increased diversity, equality and inclusion, insisting we have left the dark past behind.

Except, we haven’t. Hate crimes against Asian Americans have risen sharply across the last years and countless political groups as well as state governors fight against DEI policies across the nation, never mind attempting to constrain education about the actual history of this country by radically privatizing it, blackballing facts that are not congruent with the ideas of American exceptionalism and the moral superiority of those living on the shining hill.

Different memory work, not the official narrative, needs to get done in the area of Japanese incarceration, argues Erin Aoyama in the L.A. Review of Book, as “a process of locating and listening to stories about the past, reckoning with how they shape our families and communities in the present, and then sharing these stories and our experiences within them with others.” The first generation of imprisoned Japanese Americans often preferred to be silent about their incarceration in the early postwar years,”burying the shame, the fear, and the pain to rebuild their lives.” But new generations, she argues, can and do embrace memory work as a way of engaging with the past that impels each of us to action in the present, questioning the official story.

Image from the JANM website announcing the exhibition.

Some museums pick up on that as well, and it is worthwhile exploring exhibitions that open a door to the past, like the current one, Don’t fence me in, at the Japanese American National Museum in L.A.

***

However, we also need to be aware of a paradox, namely that any specific memory culture alone does not promote change, and even might provoke a backlash. Looking to Germany as an example that I know, we see a country that has by far more Holocaust memorials and Jewish museums than other European countries, Holocaust education as part of every school curriculum, and official commemorations of historic dates that spelled doom for its Jewish citizens. Yet antisemitism and Holocaust denial or relativization thrive, and according to the World Jewish Congress in 2019, 41% of Germans thought Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. The notion of Germans as victims holds a special place in certain political circles, and the joke among German Jews that all of us know not a single German who didn’t claim they personally rescued a Jew or are related to someone who did, doesn’t come out of thin air.

There is a funny disconnect between the fact that non-fiction books about third-Reich related history reliably win prizes and journalist Anna Sauerbrey’s observation, listed above, that current generations of politicians are not anchored in the history of the country. In 2022 alone we saw winners of the German Non-Fiction Prize and the highest award in his field, the Prize of the Historisches Kolleg (Institute for Advanced Study in History) go to authors dealing with the political developments between 1918 and 1945.

© Rowohlt Berlin, C.H. Beck, Propyläen, Rowohlt Berlin

Some scholars claim that we need to go beyond dichotomizing victims and perpetrators to understand the increase in “virulent racism and racist violence” even in the presence of a memory culture that is dedicated to educating about historical trauma. For A Memory Culture beyond Victims and Perpetrators, an essay written by Michael Rothberg, as an introduction to Valentina Pisanty’s book The Guardians of Memory (CPL Editions, 2021), helped me understand some of the issue – and also link back to the case of Manchester Boddy, friend to and plunderer of Japanese Americans.

Rather than solely distinguishing between evil and innocence, we need to look at the complexities of roles assigned or assumed during historic conflicts. There are not just victims, perpetrators, bystanders and the Just. Rothberg suggests another category, that of the implicated subject, those who enable, benefit from, and perpetuate injustice and inequality without being direct perpetrators and without controlling the regimes that produce injustice. Failure to intervene, or cooperating and consenting to the horrors that are committed, indirectly entangles us. Many of us are in some ways also implicated because we have inherited the history of oppression and violence of the past:

“…implicated subjects are certainly not guilty of the crimes of those who came before them, but by virtue of their membership and participation in national collectives they bear historical and political responsibility for those wrongs — and for the legacies they leave behind. One of the shortcomings of the familiar Holocaust memory culture, we might say, is its inability to activate recognition of our ethical and political implication in injustices — not just those that are past, like the Nazi genocide, but those in which we continue to live.”

We have a collective responsibility that goes far beyond the individual one of the Boddy’s of the world — non-evil people just out to make a deal, telling themselves that they are on the morally right side by giving hand-outs to friends in distress –to assess history in all its painful truth involving colonialism, slavery and racism, to reveal our own implication, the way we perpetuate to this day the inequalities they have wrought. Only then can we hope to breathe whole breaths, as Japanese American poet, author and activist traci kato-kiriyama envisions our future.

A good thing to contemplate in an extraordinary garden.

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S,M,L,XL Xmas

As per usual, a far-fetched analogy ruled my brain: the various sizing of Christmas decorations reminded me of the variability in the length of book reviews. Some reviews are short and non-demanding, some medium length and inviting, some are long and challenging. And then there are the XL ones which function almost as gate keepers: only those of us who are willing to slog through them might have the energy to also read the book.

Small: decorations in the window of our local toy shop.

I am very partial to XL reviews, even though I mostly end up NOT reading the XL books they discuss, acknowledging that my attention span these days has been severely curtailed. The reviews at least give me an insight into the questions people ask, and if the review is good, it alerts to some of the answers that have been given. I think that is extremely valuable in and of itself, reviews as introduction to new ways of thinking.

Medium: Rudolf the Red-nosed Lion? Glittery Reindeer?

So it was with David Waldstreicher’s review of Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U. S. Fascism in the Boston Review.

David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at Houston University. His work is centered on racism, now extended to where it intersects with fascism, which is, of course, where my interest peaks.

The holes in my knowledge of American History, large enough to drive a truck through, are slowly being filled. One of Horne’s previous books that I read, The Counter-revolution of 1776 – Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, argues that the “so-called Revolutionary War was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others–and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved.” 

Large: Santa looks to be in need of AAA…

According to Waldstreicher’s review, the new book explores the circumstances of Texas’ secession in 1836, when Mexico abolished slavery, and the consequences of subsequent increase in slavery, slaughtering of indigenous people, violent repression: all leading to present-day Texas leadership in ultra-right forces.

Something that Ursula LeGuin once said, came to mind:

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say.”

Slightly altered, the sentiment might very well be applied to progressive historians.

“One of the functions of historians is to give people the facts to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast ignorance in any culture, and part of a historian’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to teach.”

So it is with book reviews.

Note that I am not referring to “objective (factual) truth” here, since history, like art, is a form of story telling rather than provider of scientific facts. But changing the framing, exactly like a good writer does, allows to deepen or radically revise our understanding of history.

Extra Large – what can I say…. but evoking the Nutcracker ballet, it happily called to mind another XL, learned review of teaching in that domain by one of my friends and fellow Oregon Arts Watch writers, ballet critic Martha Ullman West.

***

My own reviews of books this year have been scant, as far as I remember. The one book-related blog I consider important was Of Books and Jailers, which was directly tied to structural racism, and the issue of obstructing resistance. Maybe worth a re-read.

Still need to choose a last minute Christmas gift for the politically curious book lovers in your circle? Here is a list of recommendations from people who’ve read way more than I did this year.

Merry Christmas!

And here is Corelli’s Christmas Concerto – never understood why it is not in a major key.

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Reclaiming Nature: Revelations at the Reser.

“The most obvious contribution to social change that literature can make is simply to inform people of something they know nothing about. There are other situations where we believe we know something but don’t really know it in a visceral way, don’t really know it emotionally, to the point where it moves us to action.” – Howard Zinn in Afterword to American Protest Literature.

HOWARD ZINN’S WORDS echoed when trying to take in the riches of the current exhibition at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, Red Thread : Green Earth. Here I was surrounded by narratives (words as well as visual and performative acts of storytelling) offered by a collective of six African American women, telling us about their relationship to nature, history and mythology along ancestral pathways. Many of the stories were unfamiliar to me. At the same time, the work shown would make anyone who is the slightest bit interested in nature feel a bond to the artists who explore their own deep love for it. That combination of differences and similarities makes for a powerful experience, a sense of being invited into an unfamiliar circle and then discovering you belong there in bits and piece as well, easing your way into learning about all that you don’t know.

Intisar Abioto The Black Swan Has Landed

The women of Studio Abioto, mother Midnite and daughters Amenta, Kalimah (Dr. Wood Chopper,) Intisar, Medina and Ni offer a range of work across different media: poetry, assemblage, sculpture, film making, photography, printmaking, computer graphics, music and interactive performance are all on the menu. The different art forms do not dominate (or distract from each other) but rather enhance each other, just as the artists did in real life when I interviewed them, in warm and mutually reenforcing interactions. The art on display provides individual pieces towards the completion of a larger puzzle. Whatever the dynamics in this tightly knit family of artists might be, their work is proof positive of the old German Gestalt Psychology adage: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each individual voice contributes, but it is the message sung by the chorus that emerges with clarity and force.

Front Row center: Ni Abioto. Right in yellow jacket: Medinah Abioto. Back Row: Second from Left Dr. Wood Chopper, Center: Midnite, third from Right Intasar Abioto, Second from Right: Amenta Abioto.

Photo Credit: Joe Cantrell

***

“The Mystery Unfolds.” – Amenta Abioto, Lyrics to Plant It.

BRING TIME, when you visit this exhibition. For that matter, bring the kids, the grandparents, your Thanksgiving guests, uncle Theo, whoever you can think of. There is much to explore and much that would hold interests for everyone across generations. The informality in the display of the work – clothespins to the rescue! – immediately invites you in, curled paper creating a 3 D echo of the sculptural work in its vicinity.

There are planters scattered throughout, plant materials used in the creation of several assemblages, plants dominant in photographs, plant parts used in small sculptures. The red thread, it seems then, is nature and the artists’ relationship to it, winding its way through the gallery and in and out of the works. Dig a little bit deeper, though, and the red thread emerges as a symbol of the strength and suffering of Africans in the Diaspora: the trail of blood created by ruthless slavers, the blood lines conferred by women who brought their children into the world, and taught them the body of knowledge of their ancestors.

Midnite Abioto upper right, The Egungun upper left, details.

Two larger-than-life matriarchal figures can be found in the main gallery and in the upstairs lobby. Created by Midnite, they embody pretty much every possible symbolism representing the experience of slavery and the torturous path through a society that has yet to overcome structural racism. The artist was trained and worked as a lawyer and Civil Rights advocate in Mississippi and Tennessee before she relocated to Portland. Her art reflects both her analytic precision as an attorney and her broad knowledge of the historical backdrop. She attributes her confidence to explore ever new avenues of artistic expression to her upbringing in a Baptist church that empowered young girls to find their own way.

The Egungun Rise From the Depth of the Sea upstairs evokes the millions of lives lost during the Middle Passage, on ships, water and land. The many photographs, historical items, beads, tools, vessels and plant materials, are collaged into a statue that stands in front of a poem, The Egungun’s Song, which provides the frame for thoughts about freedom – or the absence thereof. A small mirror at eye level within the sculpture cleverly reflects the visitor’s own face while exploring the mysteries in front of us – we are drawn into a connection that implies a shared history, linked through the generations, part of the picture but on different sides.

The Forest Queen Descent in the Middle Passage downstairs, again juxtaposed with text, is a marvel constructed of foraged plant materials, pottery, fabric and written documents relating to the slave trade. Full-figured with an emphasis on voluptuous form so often ridiculed, a typical body type of Black women, she proudly lifts up new life and the memories of lost souls emerge through translucent dried leaves of the “silver dollar” plant (Lunaria Annua) also known as Annual Honesty. The concept of money and slave trade are easily understood; some of the other symbolism – river birch as protection, adaptability, and renewal, for example – need a bit of explanation. The European Renaissance tradition of symbolism in art, providing multitudes of clues that (only) the initiated understood, finds a perfect counterpart here, inviting us into a world of meaning that is new for many of us and begs for exploration. In some ways it alerts to the ways how specialized knowledge was used to separate people, historically used to keep power hierarchies intact.

Midnite The Forrest Queen Photo Credit for lower right: Joe Cantrell.

The upstairs Emerging Artist gallery also displays some of the work of the youngest member of the Abioto family, Medina. Her magical and mythological creatures are made with digital art processing programs and display throughout Black features overall still absent in the fantasy arts world. These fairies also contain a multitude of symbols associated with nature, tulips, flame lily, wisteria and, importantly, water, among them. I found them not just whimsical, maybe even enchanting for the younger kids, but suggesting a certain toughness, a brave willingness to engage the world on their own terms.

Medina Abioto, Water Nymph. Photo Credit on Left: Joe Cantrell.

***

“That by sharing our love of Nature, we might call each other into a better relationship with the Earth and with each other, rather than dismissing those whose views differ from our own. That by revealing what it is we love, we honor our common ground and our common humanity.” by Carolyn Finney, Earth Island Journal, 7/2022

INTISAR ABIOTO’S PHOTOGRAPHS, hung on the walls and etherial against the windows of the Reser Gallery, embrace portraiture and nature – preferably one situated within the other. Some of the images bring the point home by a kind of double exposure – photographing a person and then photographing a print of that portrait in the forest, a crossover in time and place. Next to the beauty and vivacity she reliably captures, both in the very young and the old, the photographer documents the relationship between these women and the environment, in the woods and on the farm. The interaction between Blacks and nature in this country has been often evaluated through a White lens – one claiming that White desire and privilege of embracing, experiencing and conserving nature was not shared. Funny we should think so, given that everything was done to prevent Black citizens from pursuit of existential interaction with the land – namely farming – or recreational experience of nature, hiking in the great Outdoors.

Intisar Abioto Sidony III Photo Credit on Left: Joe Cantrell.

Historic legislation limited both movement and accessibility for African Americans, as well as American Indians, Chinese, and other non-White people in the United States. This included the California Lands Claims Act of 1851, the Black Codes (1861–65), the Dawes Act (1887), and the Curtis Act (1898). The reason to exclude non-White people from nature was a simple one: with the abolition of slavery plantation owners and former slave holders needed a way to force the Freedmen to work during Reconstruction. Their solution, as I’ve written elsewhere,

“…make it so that the former slaves had no independent access to food or others means of survival, so that they were forced to accept working conditions and substandard wages just to stay alive. Previously, slaves had been assigned small garden plots and permitted to forage and hunt on the plantation grounds, so that the owners could save feeding costs. It was theoretically possible for the 4 million freed slaves to go on living from the land, and selling surplus goods if foraging was successful. It had happened before – In the Caribbean Islands slaves from sugar plantations went to live in the hills, and the British colonialists had to import workers from Asia at great cost. So hunting and fishing or grazing livestock on private land was outlawed, and labor laws and vagrancy statutes established that allowed courts “to sentence to hard labor “stubborn servants” and workers who did not accept “customary” wages.” The threat of starvation had to hang over laborers to force them into working the fields.”

These days, access to public land is theoretically no longer tied to race. Yet the remnants of historic exclusion linger, and there are horrifying statistics about how often Black hikers, campers and birdwatchers are threatened, even though their numbers are enormously underrepresented in State parks. The range includes attacks on property and physical safety, from slashing tires and tents, to actual attempts at lynching. Publications like the Sierra Club Magazine, not known for hyped-up commentary, delivers the statistical details.

Intisar Abioto Sidney and the Amaranth

Carolyn Finney’s eye-opening book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors describes the historical underpinnings of this exclusion, as well as facets of the African American experience of working with the land and regaining farming expertise. One of my favorite photographs in the exhibition is a young girl handling collard greens at the Mudbone Grown farm in Corbett, OR. Thoroughly grounded, clearly in her element, the girls looks like an embodiment of a new farming generation. Mudbone Grown “is a black-owned farm enterprise that promotes inter-generational community-based farming that creates measurable and sustainable environmental, social, cultural, and economic impacts… with a five-year goal to enhance food security, reduce energy use, improve community health and well-being, and stabilize our communities.” Reclaiming green space and production still has a long way to go, but vanguards exist, and Abioto’s documentation will hopefully spread the word as much as remind us that we share common ground in our love of nature.

Intisar Abioto Mone Auset

***

“I’m trying to speak––to write––the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.” – Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower.

LIKE BUTLER’S PROTAGONIST in the Parable of the Sower, Kalimah a.k.a. Dr. Wood Chopper, desires to present the truth as clearly as possible. She also embraces several of Butler’s recurring themes, the issue of inclusion and exclusion among them. She might not be interested in being fancy or original, but, let me tell you, original she is. Somehow the artist manages to make the deadly serious witty, and the seemingly funny descend into a dark place. The short films on display in the little projection room of the Gallery at the Reser are clever and enormously empathetic when it comes to describing how all that is “different” can be labeled in either constructive or destructive ways. The way that our gaze is directed to perceive something that might be a particular talent as something that is perhaps sinister, reveals the power of labeling, and/or othering. One video is a dire, yet extremely funny warning about climate change and the consequences of our greed undermining restorative action, again echos of Butler’s post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Screen Shots and Stills from the videos.

Kalimah has worked as a teaching artist at NW Film Center, Boedecker Foundation, Caldera Arts and others, centered around documentary and experimental video, story structure, and the technical aspects of making a short film. Take the time to view what is looped at the Reser. Much food for thought.

Amenta Abioto. Dr. Wood Chopper Photo Credit on right: Joe Cantrell.

Next to the video projection, Amenta Abioto’s lyrics can be read on the wall. Here is her music video of Plant It. She is a gifted musician and a notable figure in the Portland music scene and will perform in the context of the current show later this year. Some of her sculptures, fashioned from foraged materials and some of her prints can also be found at the downstairs gallery.

***

“Say the people who could fly kept their power […] They kept their secret magic in the land of slavery. .” – Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly.

Since last November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC offers an Afrofuturist Period Room named Before Yesterday We Could Fly. Afrofuturism is a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination. The name of the Period Room is inspired by Virginia Hamilton’s legendary retellings of the Flying African tale, “which celebrates enslaved peoples’ imagination, creative uses of flight, and the significance of spirituality and mysticism to Black communities in the midst of great uncertainty.”

Well, the MET is late to the game. Already over a decade ago, the Abioto sisters co-produced The People Could Fly Project, a 200,000-mile flying arts expedition exploring realities of flight and freedom within the African diasporic myth of the flying Africans. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, Egypt; Djibouti, it traveled across the US, to Morocco, Djibouti, Jamaica, and beyond to seek the reality of this legend in the lives and dreams of people today.

Ni Abioto returns to the issue of dreaming and creating new realities for the world with her contribution to Red Thread:Green Earth, her installation of the Altar of the Emerald Ocelot. The site is intended as a portal into imagination, asking all of us to contribute our hopes and visions, written down on provided slips of paper or sent in via social media, tagged #emeraldocelot @niabioto @studioabioto.

Ni Abioto (Photo from Studio Abioto Website) Imagination Portal.

It is an inclusionary process, stressing the communal action required to imagine and then realize a better, healthier world. It really encapsulates what I took home from this exhibition in general: there should not be an us vs. them, particularly not when it comes to cherishing and protecting our earth. Love for nature is a shared enterprise, and so is stewardship, our responsibility to the planet and each other. The evil of slavery has left ugly scars on souls, bodies and access to nature alike, but these artists embrace all who are willing to work towards change and commit to conservancy. A powerful message of healing.

***.

THE RESER OPENED ITS DOOR IN MARCH, 2022, in Beaverton, OR, one of the most diverse places in this not very diverse state. In these short months, the Art Gallery has established itself as an important player in my book, with multiple exhibitions committed to “multicultural learning experiences” which research has shown to break down barriers between differing cultures and to encourage creative thinking. It helps to have a curator, Karen de Benedetti, who is willing to take on enormously complex exhibits and who seems to have a special radar for impressive local talent. Importantly, the shows I have seen did not sacrifice quality for message. But the commitment to message – one of common ground and shared humanity – seems to be strong at the Reser, and for that we should be grateful. This is all the more important in times like our’s when the teaching of history – ALL aspects of history of our nation – is under assault. From book banning to restricted curricula, there are powers that hope to erase, dismiss or ignore the experiences of whole populations of our nation. Learning about how non-White groups live, suffer, hope and dream is of the essence if we want social change towards a more equitable world. We have a long way to go.

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Red Thread: Green Earth

November 2 – January 7

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Art Gallery at The Reser

12625 SW Crescent Street, Beaverton, OR 97005

Saturday, November 19 | 11:30 am: All Ages Performative Storytime

Wednesday, November 30 | 6:30 pm Artist Talk & Film Screening

Friday, December 2 | 6 – 9 pm First Friday

Friday, January 6 | 6 – 9 pm Closing Reception & First Friday

All gallery events are FREE and open to the public.

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No Trespassing

Do you know that moment when you read something and all of a sudden things fall into place, finally a factual reason given that validates previous amorphous feelings? So it was when I read an essay by Brian Sawers in The Atlantic about the origins of trespassing laws, which I’ll summarize below. My inkling that trespassing signs are an expression of power structures more so than a desire to simply protect property, on land and water, was confirmed when I learned about the legal history.

Photographs today are of various fences, keeping people out, as it were.

As one might expect, the history is not pretty. But makes so much sense when you consider the consequences of the abolition of slavery. The criminalization of trespassing started in earnest after the end of the Civil War, starting in Southern states. Punishment for trespassing was seemingly race neutral, but it was very severe. Alabama, for example, applied a penalty of three months’ hard labor. Florida allowed 39 lashes in punishment for trespassing.

What was going on?

Labor control, that’s what was going on. The biggest problem, as the plantation owners and former slaveholders insisted themselves, was to force freedmen into work during the times of Reconstruction. Black Code laws, affecting the (former) slave population were suspended by Union commanders. Under them, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. So how would you get people to work if you lost those threats, in an economy that was based on hard field labor that no-one else wanted to do?

Simple, make it so that the former slaves had no independent access to food or others means of survival, so that they were forced to accept working conditions and substandard wages just to stay alive. Previously, slaves had been assigned small garden plots and permitted to forage and hunt on the plantation grounds, so that the owners could save feeding costs. It was theoretically possible for the 4 million freed slaves to go on living from the land, and selling surplus goods if foraging was successful. It had happened before – In the Caribbean Islands slaves from sugar plantations went to live in the hills, and the British colonialists had to import workers from Asia at great cost.

So hunting and fishing or grazing livestock on private land was outlawed, and labor laws and vagrancy statutes established that allowed courts “to sentence to hard labor “stubborn servants” and workers who did not accept “customary” wages.” The threat of starvation had to hang over laborers to force them into working the fields.

One problem? Most White people also used to hunt on plantation owners’ properties, and did not want to see their traditional rights to be cut. Racist solution:

“Planters proposed and state legislatures adopted a work-around to statewide laws where possible: Many restrictive laws were enacted county by county, singling out majority-Black ones. In some counties, the new laws had to be crafted even more precisely to limit their application to parts of the county with more Black residents. If the new laws applied in areas with white residents, advocates were vocal in calling on all landowners to allow their white neighbors to continue hunting and fishing without interference.“

Northern landowners were just too happy to follow suit soon thereafter, even though labor control was a smaller issue. They did, however, felt they needed to show who was boss and in particular felt that immigrants needed to be severely controlled. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, upheld a 1909 Pennsylvania law specifically designed to stop immigrants from hunting. The state went a step further and banned immigrants from owning dogs in 1915.

Privatizing the outdoors is, of course, ongoing.

Here is an overview of some of the implications for all of us.

Occasionally, there are small victories. In a small community close to where I live, for example, the 400 acre lake in the middle of Lake Oswego, was cut off for decades from public access by the rich homeowners surrounding the water. This April, a judge ruled that Oregon’s public trust doctrine applies to Oswego Lake, and the public therefore has a right to access the lake through public parks, a sudden reversal in a longstanding battle. If it isn’t about economics, it’s about privilege. Let’s not have the plebs disturb our view, or come close to our gardens…

You might remember what I wrote about foraging and prohibited access in an earlier blog. Here is Alexis Nelson and her co-host, Yara Elmjouie, introducing us to trespassing laws in a quick video.

And for music today there is Wind in Lonely Fences by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. And First Light from the same album, AMBIENT 2.

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Of optimistic and offensive pigs

I think we missed it twice in 40 years, our annual pilgrimage to a zoo on “ZooDay.” It is a commemoration of our first date ever at the Bronx zoo in NYC, all those centuries ago. Since we misremembered the original date by about 2 weeks when we first went back, we decided to add two weeks to the calendar every year and so it has been rotating through all seasons. This year it was cold, like all of this interminably rainy spring.

Traditionally a pilgrimage is defined as a journey, “often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life,” tells me my trusted Wikipedia. What we are doing at the zoo is not exactly a pilgrimage, but a celebration of a journey together – plenty of unknown places encountered there as well, and, yes, personal transformation.

I sometimes wonder why we stick to it (the zoo date, not the marriage!) Zoos elicit mixed feelings – how can you not feel for living beings put into cages? Then again, some species only escape extinction because zoos these days enable them to live and, with luck, procreate. And certainly zoos have an important educational function, allowing kids cut off from nature to experience first glimpses of awe when seeing something beyond a two-dimensional screen. At least that was what I thought, before reading some more on it.

There is quite a bit of smart writing around the controversy of zoos’ legitimacy these days. Here is a list of zoo-related books that cover a wide array of topics. Many argue that zoos should be abandoned. The most fascinating, for me at least, is a recent book called Zoo Studies, an interdisciplinary collection that examines zoos from historical, philosophical, social, and cultural perspectives, edited by Tracy McDonald and  Daniel Vandersommers. And here is a fun paper, What’s new at the zoo?, that looks at the last decade of research results around zoo-related issues, including whether animals have human-like emotions and should be afforded the rights of people.

(The New York York Court of Appeals, by the way, ruled this week that animals are not persons in the legal sense, and therefor can be denied fundamental human rights, like not being illegally imprisoned in zoos. The advocacy group who sued on behalf of an elephant interestingly used the legal construct of habeas corpus, in vain. (Funny how the Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons, for even longer than Citizens United, when our closest biological relatives are not, but that is a story for another day.)

There are many articles around claiming that science has “proven” that animals have emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, etc.), even complex emotions (shame, for example), like humans. One that caught my eye was a study about pigs that were deemed optimistic. The pigs were conditioned to two different sounds that signaled either something positive (food) or something unpleasant. They quickly learned to approach the good and avoid the bad. They were then put in differing environments – the lucky pigs got room to roam, and stimulating interactive toys. The control group pigs were in small cages with one non-interactive toy. Next they were presented with a novel sound, and, surprise, the stimulated pigs approached it, the other ones avoided it. Conclusion by the research team: good “mood” or stimulation fosters “optimism” in their research participants. They’ll approach in hopes the goodies will come.

I have a beef with that pork interpretation: Let’s start with Occam’s razor which is basically a scientific principle that says you should always prefer simpler explanations over complicated ones (parsimony). Why is this? The answer has several parts, but at the least, you should put into your theory only things that are truly demanded by the evidence, and no more.

The notion of pig optimism tramples that principle. First, let’s be clear that the evidence that’s at issue is nothing more than a behavior of approach or avoidance. That’s all. Where is the evidence here that in any way speaks to the pigs’ mood or emotions much less complex emotions?

How should we think about these pigs? One of the classic principles of behavior is Thorndike’s Law of Effect which basically means if you do something and it has a good result, you keep at it. If you do something and it turns out badly, you’ll stop. This principle explains many bits of human behavior but it also explains the behavior of a range of other animals, including organisms as simple as sea slugs. And that is all the theory you need for the pigs.

In the enriched environment the pigs saw novel objects, approached them, found them to be not harmful and in some way useful. That encouraged a habit of approaching novel objects. They learned to generalize broadly, in contrast to the control group who was provided only with a narrow gradient of experience. The pig did not have to develop a world view of the sort we might call optimism, the pig did not have to develop any feelings about this, and the pig didn’t need any brain sophistication to follow the Law of Effect. I say again: extraordinarily simple organism follow that law, with no implications for what they feel or believe.

Is it possible that pigs have feelings? Yes, I suppose. But if this behavior counts as evidence, then we lose any hope of figuring out which animals are complex enough to feel emotions and which are not. Here is a really interesting overview of the issues, anthropomorphism included, by Philipp Ball, a science writer.

And on a completely unrelated topic, involving a pig that elicits complex emotions rather than having them: the highest German Court just decided this week that a 13th century stone relief of a huge sow suckling identifiably Jewish people, with a Rabbi lifting the pig’s tail and staring into her anus, can remain in place above a famous church door. Jewish plaintiffs had gone to court to have the anti-Semitic sculpture removed, unsuccessfully. The BGH ruled that the church in Wittenberg (where Martin Luther – a rabid anti-Semite himself – once preached) had done enough to transform the sculpture into a “memorial,” by adding a bronze baseplate and a nearby display with an explanatory text. The sculpture is known as Juden Sau, Jewish Sow, a derogatory term for Jewish people used then and now by anti-Semitic Germans. For much longer than since the first ever zoo was ever established in 1793 in France….

Of course, not a single photograph of a pig. At least it’s the title of today’s music – the beautiful sound track for a movie I still have not seen but am told I have to…Pig.

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Displacement

Next-door Neighbors is a list-serve that lands in my inbox on a daily basis. Calls for lost cats, yard debris removal, plant identification, smart tips for sales or earthquake preparation, shout-outs to helpful encounters or complaints about car and porch thefts, photos of sunrises or yet another deer in the backyard all outline a microcosm of life going on around us. It is also a coincidental lesson of people’s perceptions, worries about and cursing of the number of houseless people pitching their tents in our area.

The discourse ranges from simple requests for advice what to do, to rants about throwing all these “addicts” into jail since they do not want to work or play by the rules, to well intentioned explanations of the nature of living with paranoid schizophrenia which does not allow you to live in cramped homeless shelters; and, really, everything in-between. Advice to call on help from churches, civic-oriented neighborhood organizations or the police outweigh the comments listing structural, political factors producing houselessness by probably 10:1.

I was thinking about the absurdity that many of those complainants, safely situated in their middle-class homes, are actively pursuing strategies that in turn lead to their neighbors losing their homes, and potentially ending up in a tent on the sidewalk. What am I talking about?

Last week the Portland Mercury and OPB both linked to a city Ombudsman’s Office report on how Portland enforces its lengthy list of property maintenance rules. “The report found the city’s system regularly allows minor eyesores to snowball into financial ruin for homeowners. Those living in gentrifying areas of the city are hit the hardest.” Concretely, poor homeowners in formerly Black neighborhoods in the North of Portland are subjected to the complaints of their new mostly White neighbors.

Some of the mind boggling facts: “One Portland homeowner amassed $30,000 in liens after a neighbor reported peeling paint on the exterior of her home to city regulators. A blind veteran racked up $88,000 in debt due to a complaint about unruly grass and unsightly vehicles outside his home. A senior with a severe brain injury almost had his home foreclosed on after a neighbor reported vehicles in his yard and an unfinished remodeling project.”

A system of property maintenance rules and the ability to complain anonymously has led, according to the statistics, to over 15.000 complaints by neighbors who moved into areas where they now want to see rises in property values. Private complaints then call in the city inspectors with the Bureau of Development Services and these dish out fines which accrue after a 4 week grace period for repairs. Fines, if not paid, will double after three months. If you can’t pay, you loose your home.

Some of the history: Oregon was one of only six states that didn’t ratify the 15th amendment, which formalized Black citizenship and suffrage after the civil War. Our Constitution was adopted in 1857, banning the entrance, property ownership, or residency to any Black person. In the 20th century entire neighborhoods were zoned for explicit racial segregation with government directing disproportionally public funds to White neighborhoods. Blacks were segregated into the Albina neighborhood (now part of the deluge of complaints about maintenance.)

In 1919 the Portland Realty Board “adopted a rule declaring it unethical for an agent to sell property to either Negro or Chinese people in a White neighborhood.” The restrictive covenants were legal and widely practiced. Now the North PDX neighborhoods that were homes to Blacks due to earlier segregation are the very areas where young White professionals can still (barely) afford to buy houses and they want to see a return on their investments. Let’s sick the city on inspectors on our neighbors to uphold our own standards!

Of course, Portland is not the only place where issues of blight associated with those you don’t want in front of your eyes received despicable treatment. In our contemporary fight against accurate history lessons that fact should never come into our sight, either.

Case in point: D Magazine, a monthly publication covering Dallas/Fort Worth Tx, was removed from the shelves of a grocery store last week, because the current cover offended enough complainants. The cover? An aerial photograph of a parking lot that had a history. “That parking lot used to be a neighborhood. Driven in large part by racist antipathy directed at the Black folks who lived in about 300 houses there, the city of Dallas in the late ’60s and early ’70s used eminent domain to buy up the properties, displace the people who lived there, and pave over a swath of South Dallas.” If you look at the cover you can read the historic mindset of many of the citizens of Dallas but 50 years ago. Seems some in Portland, half a century later, fit right into that mold.

Photographs today are what’s left of the tuberoses, floating away to unknown destinations, just like displaced neighbors.

Music could not be more à-pro-pos: Sanctuaries: A Tale of Displacement is an opera inspired by gentrification’s damage to Portland’s Black community. It premiered recently by Third Angle – details here. Darrell Grant wrote the music, libretto by Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani (I had recently posted his poem found in windows.)“This piece concerns itself with the spiritual dimensions of displacement, fallout from gentrification, getting to the root causes of the evil that seeded predatory capitalism and the commodification of the Black body.”

Darrell Grant’s playlist that offers takes from the opera can be listened to in full on Spotify. Search for The Sanctuaries Mixtapes. Act I – Darrell Grant.

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