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I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start. Here, have a passage: As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start.

Here, have a passage:

As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

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This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this—You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”


This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking “Why?” The fact that we — and I mean all of us, black and white — are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates in a post that soars above the mire of the material he’s critiquing — a Forbes piece called “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” by a self-described “middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background.” 

I just noticed that this same guy refers to himself in his Forbes bio as “a short, balding and mediocre certified public accountant (biggest downfall: if it’s close enough it’s good enough).”

Cue Ta-Nehisi:

… mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook—but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.

Yep.

'The Kissing Case' And The Lives It Shattered : NPR

tballardbrown:

In 1958, James Hanover Thompson and his friend David Simpson — both African American, both children — were accused of kissing a girl who was white. They were arrested, and taken to jail. Prosecutors sought a stiff penalty — living in reform school until they were 21.

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For a sample of coverage from back then, see “NAACP Leader Appeals to Ike After 2 Negro Youths Placed In Reform School” in the 11/14/1958 Ocala Star-Banner.

(this post was reblogged from tballardbrown)

If You Don't Think This Is Racist, I Would Honestly Love To Hear What You WOULD Consider Racist.

lazybookreviews:

Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people—mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”

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Yes, American history makes an image depicting Obama as the ape child of ape parents inordinately more toxic than this image of ape-baby Bush snuggling with ape-daddy Ariel Sharon.* Still, the Obama-as-ape story out of Orange County and the “I Would Honestly Love To Hear What You WOULD Consider Racist” headline I’m reblogging above reminded me of Larry Wilmore’s 8/22/06 appearance on The Daily Show when he denounced “lazy racism” that’s unworthy of  a nation “born out of the eradication of one race and the enslavement of another.” He played a clip from Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign and put Thurmond’s words up on the screen. These words: 

There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

As Wilmore said right after the clip, “Now that’s a racist motherfucker.”

(Well, they bleeped it. But it’s clear what he said, and it’s clear that it’s true.)

- David Quigg, 4/17/2011

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* In an American context, at least. Globally, the inclusion of Ariel Sharon makes the Bush photo more complicated. In a slapdash effort at thoroughness, I Googled “jews as apes,” braced myself, and got hits such as NPR’s “Saudi Textbooks Still Teach Hate, Group Says.”

(this post was reblogged from lazybookreviews)
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Are you really that sensitive or (is) this just some act?

- a question for me from a fellow commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ theatlantic.com blog, where I’d posted the gist of what I’d just written here on my very own blog about the plan to strip the word “nigger” from a new edition of Huck Finn.

My answer, which I’ll italicize since it seems slightly less self-aggrandizing than putting quotation marks around my own words, went like this:

If those are my only two choices, I guess the answer is that I’m “really that sensitive.” I think this gets at something interesting: the difference between being a receiver (reading something silently to oneself) and being a transmitter (reading something aloud to others). For most of Twain’s words, it was a joy to be a transmitter. For “nigger,” I just hit a point where it was too much. Not because it was going to “poison” my kids. I just hated the sound of it coming out of my mouth. To be clear, that’s not Twain’s problem, and I wouldn’t want the text of Huck Finn altered to spare me from saying a word I don’t want to say.

Why am I quoting myself?

First, it’s quicker and lazier than writing something new. (You’re welcome.)

Second, I think I’ve hit on something real with this receiver-transmitter distinction. As Publishers Weekly reported, “The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word (‘nigger’) with ‘slave’ when reading aloud.”

Like me, the professor was reading aloud, transmitting. So that struck me.

Then, late on Friday, I read Susan Orlean’s newest blog post, “CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS AND HUCKLEBERRY FINN.” I’m just going to serve up the slice of Orlean’s post that fits the narrow needs of the point I’m trying make here. Go read her whole post, if only to spare yourself the sleeplessness of wondering why a celebrated New Yorker writer is invoking Captain Underpants.

Here, as promised, is the slice of Orlean’s post that might maybe possibly validate my little receiver-transmitter theory:

I faced a somewhat similar word issue in the book I’m writing. In a section about how our perception of German shepherds changed in the nineteen-sixties, I refer to the Charles Moore photographs of Alabama police dogs attacking civil-rights marchers. I found a quote from Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, in which he bragged about how effective the dogs had been. His exact statement was “Look at those niggers run.” I was torn about using the quote—not because it somehow didn’t portray Connor accurately (I’m afraid it did) but because I found it almost nauseating to type the word, to imagine having it as part of my book. … I put the quote in, took it out, put it back in, waited a while, and finally made my peace with it. That is what happened; that’s what he said; and as uncomfortable as it made me to put my fingers on my keyboard and spell it out, that word is part of what’s real.

Just as with me and with the professor who dreamed up the sanitized Huck Finn, Orlean’s experience seems to be about taking on the role and responsibility of transmitter, about finding it “almost nauseating to type the word, to imagine having it as part of my book.”

As much as what I’m writing here feels like a fresh insight to me, I will bet every bit of loose change in my pocket that some communications theorist documented this same phenomenon ninety years ago and came up with fancier names than “receiver” and “transmitter.”

He probably got tenure.

All I got was this lousy tenure-themed T-shirt.

(Note: T-shirt not especially lousy. Figure of speech.)

“

… the invocation of nigger by Twain is not a moral failing. But because of our needs, Twain isn’t good enough. Because we can’t handle the story of who we were, and evidently who we are, Twain must be summoned up from the dead and, all against himself, submitted before the edits of amateurs. This is our system of fast-food education laid bare: Children are roaming the halls singing “Sexy Bitch,” while their neo-Confederate parents are plotting to chop the penis off Michelangelo’s David, and clamoring for Gatsby and Daisy to be reunited.

Let us all live in a world of warm snugglies. Let the air-conditioning anesthesia sprawl free. May the flowers of happiness multiply out. May Mark Twain’s ghost haunt us all.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic, in a 1/6/11 post called “A Nation of Cowards.”

Publishers Weekly has background here, including this:

The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with “slave” when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the “n” word (“My mother said it’s only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people”) and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. “My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it.”

I sympathize with all of this. When I sat down to read Huck Finn to my kids last year, I was stunned to see how often Twain used “nigger.” I’d simply forgotten.

My imperfect solution: I interrupted my reading to call attention to the word and its meaning and its longstanding role in American life. I explained how noxious it is. Then I kept reading.

For a couple of pages.

I started to feel sick, vile. So I interrupted my reading again.

This time I explained that I couldn’t do it anymore, just didn’t want the word on my lips again. I said something like this: “The word is still there in the book. It’s in there a lot of times. We can talk about it more. But I’m going to stop reading it out loud. It just hurts my heart to keep saying it.”

This, again, is an imperfect solution. I’m not pretending otherwise. But I prefer what I did to the wholesale replacement of “nigger” with “slave” or with any other word. I would like to think my kids learned something from my sincere attempt to explain the word and its place in history. I also hope that the word’s toxicity is all the more real to them for having seen me overdose on saying it.