The Fall of White Supremacy

The January 6 attack on the Capitol is

one more sign that equal justice draws nearer

I started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, with two particular thoughts in mind. First, having absolutely loved her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, I was certain that my investment in reading Caste would be repaid several times over. Second, it goes without saying that I, and virtually every other white person in America, need to be repeatedly schooled about the African American experience and how white supremacy has imposed relentless and almost overwhelming burdens on Black people since the first Africans were transported in chains to colonial America. Indeed, that white supremacy has not led to the complete genocide of African Americans is due largely to the vitality, endurance and resistance of Black people in the United States.

 

Without a true understanding of the struggle of African Americans to survive systemic inequality and to achieve equal rights under the law, it is too easy for white people to assure ourselves that the fight to dismantle white supremacy is not ours. But to understand that white privilege includes the assumption that Black people must fight their own battles, one only needs to consider how many times we hear whites claim that they are colorblind, or that their immigrant heritage absolves them of responsibility for the racism that took root in American life centuries ago and endures today.

 

Trump voters are perhaps the best examples of whites who have been made impatient and angry by the very notion of #Black Lives Matter and by last year’s regular demonstrations protesting police killings of people of color. But the persistent demonstrations are both a marker of fatigue with 400 years of oppression and exploitation and an increasingly powerful mobilization against the system that maintains those conditions. Those who are tired of that very visible resistance to inequality and discrimination need to recognize that though such mass activism doesn’t happen every single day, it will persist, and it will increase, until the very idea of whiteness has relinquished its hold on the white majority.

 

It is that reality, and the losses that throwing away lives and talent, impose on all of us that white people need to understand. In our iniquitous world, my white privilege is a constant. And though I cannot change the color of my skin (or my class background or my gender or my gender identity or my sexual orientation), if we are to prosper together in a world in which all lives do, in fact, matter, then we must separately and collectively reject what has been imposed on us. As Wilkerson writes,

 

“The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things that we cannot change; a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.

 

“The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not a collective will to maintain them.

 

“A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist—in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be (pgs. 379-380).”

 

A first consequence of such “truths,” faithfully believed by the vast majority of white Americans for centuries, is the exclusion of people of color, and the loss of much of the energy, creativity and brilliance they would have brought to bear on the American project. Together we might have built a United States of America that at this point in time had come much closer to fulfilling the promise expressed in the nation’s foundational documents and by our most celebrated visionaries. Neither should we overlook the fact that so many of those visions of a better America were first articulated by Black voices, like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.

 

Why a discussion of caste?

 

Before I had gotten very far into the book, I had a number of conversations with people, both black and white, who wondered why anyone would bother to examine the impact of caste when race seems to be the root cause of so much that is wrong in American society. The book’s subtitle, “the origins of our discontents,” clearly signals Wilkerson’s intent to persuade us that we should see the characteristics of caste systems as the foundational problem that must be addressed by efforts to promote comprehensive social change. But in 2020, the year in which events supercharged the notion that Black lives matter, the odds rose dramatically that a significant number of Americans, perhaps a majority, would be inclined to say that race, not caste, is the origin of our discontents.

 

Still, Wilkerson asserts that race is the mechanism that orders the underlying caste system in the United States. “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive,” she writes. “They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place (pg. 19).”

 

Caste itself is such a rigid and comprehensive mechanism of social control that understanding it in detail is necessary to the work of dismantling it. In pursuit of that understanding, Wilkerson identifies the Indian caste system, which has endured and evolved for 2,000 years or more, and the fleeting, but ferocious treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, which expropriated Jewish labor and wealth before moving on to the almost complete extermination of European Jewry, as the two closest analogs to the caste system in place in the United States. Writing about the similarities between the three distinct structures, Wilkerson defines “the eight pillars of caste.” These pillars uphold “a belief system, the piers beneath a caste hierarchy. As these tenets took root…it did not matter whether the assumptions were true.” It only mattered that people came to assume that they were true.

 

“These are the pillars of caste, the ancient principles that I researched and compiled as I examined the parallels, overlap, and commonalities of three major caste hierarchies,” Wilkerson writes. “These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were at one time or another burrowed within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a caste system to function (pg. 99).”

 

A new nation is being born

 

Early in the book, Wilkerson writes that

 

“…in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that, by 2042, for the first time in American history, whites would no longer be the majority in a country that had known of no other configuration, no other way to be.

 

“Then, that fall, in the midst of what seemed a cataclysmic financial crisis and as if to announce a potential slide from preeminence for the caste that had long been dominant, an African-American, a man from what was historically the lowest caste, was elected president of the United States. His ascension incited both premature declarations of a post-racial world and an entire movement whose sole purpose was to prove that he had not been born in the United States, a campaign led by the billionaire who was now in 2016 running for president himself (pg.6).”

 

It doesn’t take much imagination to connect the prediction that whites, and white supremacists, would be outnumbered by people of color by 2042, to a number of other markers that link to the attack on the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. That list includes the hardships that working class Americans, southern and rural white workers among them, suffered in the economic collapse that exploded in the fall of 2008; the election of Barack Obama that followed; Donald Trump’s birther campaign to delegitimize Obama’s presidency; Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s six-year effort to obstruct Obama’s leadership; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; and Trump’s 2016 election victory (and 2020 defeat). The extremist mob on Jan. 6 might not have been explicitly aware of the details of the coming demographic change, but they surely sensed in the political tensions and economic difficulties of the last decade that the consolations they once obtained from whiteness were in serious jeopardy.

 

For some poor whites who live in isolated white communities, not being black has meant that come hell or high water, they were still white and not sentenced to life at the bottom of the American caste system. The teachings of caste, the pillars of caste, as outlined by Wilkerson, had long ago persuaded them that someone other than themselves were deservedly ranked lower. They may not see the end of the caste system coming, but their panic and hysterical fears of stolen elections and welfare queens and masses of refugees camped out on our southern border are a sign that they feel the fragility of white supremacy in their bones.

 

 

If the majority only knew…

 

White Americans, Nazis, and Brahmin elites imposed a structure on their own people and culture that divided their own populations for the purpose of stealing wealth and labor, with the goal of maximizing their own comfort and ease. Wilkerson elaborates insights from Erich Fromm, a German Jewish refugee who, in the process of writing about fascism and racism in 1964, eerily describes the president who Donald Trump (and Trumpism) has been these last four years (pg. 271):

 

“Fromm well knew the perils of group narcissism from both his training in psychanalysis and his personal experience,” Wilkerson writes. “He saw firsthand the Nazi appeal to the fears and insecurities of everyday Germans in the lead-up to the Nazi takeover.

 

“If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews,” Fromm wrote, “one can easily recognize the distorted character of their respective judgments. Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and fabrications. If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.”

 

Comparing the American and German supremacist systems, Fromm observed that people marginalized by poverty, unemployment, lack of education and low-paid labor are nevertheless elevated by caste. A person in this group might be persuaded that despite their individual difficulties, “I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—'I am white;’ or ‘I am Aryan,’” Fromm wrote.

 

“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own,” Wilkerson writes, crediting Fromm with the insight.

 

I think it’s telling that Wilkerson begins the book quoting James Baldwin and Albert Einstein. In tandem, the two quotes speak volumes about Wilkerson’s intent.

 

Baldwin: “Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they know what I said was true.”

 

Einstein: “If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.”

 

Actually, what Baldwin was in the habit of saying was clearly understood and known to be true by a healthy percentage of the people who took the time to read his work, African Americans, especially. Nor was he the first to make similar points; he was one in a distinguished line of largely Black writers who have been speaking truth to a white-dominated country for generations. What has historically gone missing in that equation was an audience of white believers large enough to change the perspective of the majority; to persuade white people that the dream of a community characterized by inclusiveness and equity offered something to whites that surpasses the consolations of caste. Hence, Einstein’s wish that the indifferent majority come to understand the root of the evil with which we all live.

 

Clearly, Wilkerson set out to write the book that would define that unacknowledged reality thoroughly. It follows that if the end of white supremacy will grow out of the continuing activism of African Americans and other communities of color, and the growing numbers of white Americans who have been schooled by Black Lives Matter, by the disproportionately black and brown casualties of the pandemic and now, finally, by Isabel Wilkerson’s book, then Einstein’s prediction that we are on the road to a cure will finally become the reality of our collective lives.

 

 

Underway: The collapse of white supremacy

 

Though Wilkerson does not say so, reading her book has caused me to rethink my own understanding of American history. In particular, I am persuaded that 22^nd century historians will identify the hundred-year period from the end of World War II to the middle of this century (1947-2042, say) as the final phase of the 400-year long struggle against white supremacy. Tim Black, the oral historian of the Great Migration as it manifested in Chicago, and, for more than 60 years a progressive political activist in the city, told me once (he was my high school history teacher) that returning World War II veterans, both Black and white, came back to the city on fire with the belief that they could lead the city and the country toward racial justice and equity.

 

Though the Great Migration provided little relief from white supremacy, it did expand the space in which newcomers to the north were free to join organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League. The return of World War II veterans moved by the same spirit that motivated Tim Black added momentum to the struggle. The NAACP, itself, grew from 90,000 members in 1919 to 600,000 members in 1946.

 

A partial list of the advances against white supremacy that followed those years would have to include the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. By 1968, the expanding community of black activists and their allies experienced exponential growth with the development of Black Power, the Black Arts and African American Studies movements, and new allies in the anti-war, feminist, Chicano, American Indian, gay liberation and environmental movements.

 

These movements did not always move forward in unity, or adopt common strategies, but even when they disagreed or followed a separate path, they educated each other, identified areas of common struggle and widened the space for social change. In many instances, leadership passed from one organization to another. Groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society contributed new energy and fresh critiques of entrenched elites. But at no time was the path ahead of the liberation movements ever clear of obstacles. Some victories were unsustainable in the face of the forces moving against them, forces aimed at maintaining and reinforcing the white supremacist system.

 

The loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs that began in urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast in the ‘70s initiated a dramatic increase in poverty rates in minority neighborhoods. That in turn set the stage for the growth of the carceral state in America. Prison sentences began increasing even for non-violent offenders as states began passing three-strike laws. With the Reagan-era development of the War on Drugs and a boom in prison construction and private prisons, the process accelerated.

 

“The term ‘welfare queen’ became a not-so-subtle code for ‘lazy, greedy black ghetto mother.’ The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let ‘some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,’ while ‘you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.’ These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it,” Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow (pg. 49).

 

Promises to beef up policing and expand the prison system were often only a part of a larger strategy that cut federal budgets, starved aid programs of sufficient funding, and proposed privatizing Social Security. These, too, were racialized attacks on the common good and were most often aimed at creating political advantages for Republicans. But in the 1990’s, Democratic President Bill Clinton launched his own version of the Republican agenda, cutting benefits and time-limiting welfare eligibility, endorsing the passage of a federal three-strikes law, and announcing “the end of big government.”

 

All of these changes added up to something more than reinforcement of a white supremacist system that had been severely shaken by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They were also a direct assault on the well-being of minority communities, forcing the energy of liberation efforts to refocus on mitigating emergencies in those same communities and on defending them from the relentless assault of the carceral state.

 

The War on Terror launched by the Bush administration following the September 11 attacks (2003) had the added effect of further diverting funding from domestic needs and drove minorities to seek employment in the military and, ultimately, into an expanding war effort in which people of color would account for the overwhelming majority of casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the face of the economic downturn of 2008, the worst since the Depression, African Americans turned out in unprecedented numbers to elect Barack Obama as president. Despite years of Republican electoral and policy victories, Obama’s election created new anxiety about the strength of the white supremacist system. Donald Trump and a number of other right-wing opportunists launched the birther movement which claimed that Obama wasn’t even an American.

 

But the liberatory energy that had been diverted and suppressed so effectively during the previous four decades of right-wing counterattack manifested anew in 2013 as Black Lives Matter, which became both a leadership organization and a symbol of the revitalization of a movement to deconstruct white supremacy in the United States. None of this proves decisively that the history of the last seventy-five years can be framed as the final confrontation between the growing and increasingly effective mobilization of African Americans and their allies against the tottering edifice of white supremacy in the United States. That would take a much more detailed investigation of the flow of events since the middle of the 20^thCentury. But it seems clear that the struggle to liberate the United States from racism and white supremacy continues to gather momentum and support.

 

Nothing, certainly not victory, is promised to the multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational movement outlined here. But the pandemic, and its disproportionally devastating effect on communities of color, has persuaded a growing number of white Americans that equal justice and equity must be a first priority, that racism and the caste system cost us all more than we can bear. Making the most of this moment in which it is suddenly clear that white supremacists also see the fragility of the racialized caste system that sustains them will require an extraordinary attention to the details, to deconstructing the pillars of caste.

 

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander outlines the challenge: “If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice today than assuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last (pgs. 18-19).”

 

It is time to give Isabel Wilkerson the last word:

 

“In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying acrobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto-Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute—all of those feats should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

 

“In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world, raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is setback from the progression of our species.

 

“A world without caste would set everyone free (pg. 388).”

 

Toni Morrison will endure

The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.

I’m a seventy-two-year-old straight white male, born into an upper middle-class Jewish household. I dropped out of college in 1966 and spent at least the next three decades recklessly squandering some of the advantages my array of privileges created for me and discovering the multitude of ways that those same privileges nevertheless would manifest to rescue me. Would I have escaped quite as many fraught situations relatively unscathed if I had been gay or female or of color? Probably not, but it’s a certainty that I have not earned all the do-overs that life has granted me.

Regardless, over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that however impossible it might be to evade my white-skin privilege, I need to find productive ways to reckon with it, to understand it, and to use it, wherever and whenever possible, for good. Ultimately, that means to me that I should learn how to be an anti-racist, to stand forthrightly against the white supremacist culture of our country.

A variety of life experiences, including my friendships and work relationships with black folks (see most especially my tribute to Phyllis Hall, her son Perry, and the rest of her family in "The Spirit of Phyllis Hall"), the energizing effects of the moral and political courage of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and numerous lessons learned from writers like Richard Wright (Black Boy, Native Son)Manning Marable (How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America), Bryan Stephenson (Just Mercy), bell hooks, Edward Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told), Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns), James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Tupac Shakur, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Amari Baraka, Roxane Gay, poet Brian Gilmore, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison and many others, have been instrumental in leading me to the conclusion that standing aside from the struggle against white supremacy would be the ultimate in privileged behavior; and, also, because our collective lives, impoverished by a society that absolutely refuses to recognize the humanity of people of color as equal in every way to that of “white” people, white supremacy injures us all. It deprives us of the full range of achievement and invention that would enhance every aspect of our lives together, and sentences us to shared fear, anxiety and misery. In such a world—in this world—anti-racism and active opposition to white supremacy is a fundamental first step in getting to a truly just society. I will go even further than that to say that I don’t believe that our country can right itself, can address other truly urgent problems, like climate change and disastrously underfunded public education, without also dismantling white supremacy.

I don’t know when I first discovered Toni Morrison, but it was probably around 1971 or 1972 when I came across a paperback copy of The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel. I have since read three or four other books by Morrison, both The Bluest Eyeand Belovedmore than once. Most recently, just before Morrison died, I’d begun rereading Belovedfor the third time, in the process coming full on the understanding, maybe for the first time, that straight, white males were not the audience that Morrison had in mind when she sat down to write. In fact, this time around I felt like a spectator —a voyeur, perhaps— watching while Morrison told a wise and important story for the benefit of all her beautiful babies, her African American readers, who would have both an instinctive grasp of the story she told, and would move on from the story with a richer understanding of the weaknesses and strengths, of the trials and burdens and transcendent beauty of black folks, in the land of white supremacy and African American dauntlessness.

I cannot say how the United States gets from where we are now, with a president whose banalities, crudities and cruelties are so deeply rooted in racism and privilege, to a place where our biggest gifts—our multiculturalism, our collective creativity, inventiveness and profound sense of community, and our fundamental human desire to do good—define a United States where equal justice prevails, but I am certain that it would help for us to read more Toni Morrison.

I submit the following quotations from Belovedfor the benefit of those who need to be enticed to pick up one of Morrison’s books and read through to the end. I further submit that Morrison’s work is certain to lead most readers to the inevitable conclusion that four centuries of travail have equipped black folks to lead the way to that place where equal justice prevails; a lesson that white folks need to learn over and over again if we are to reach the promised land.

Passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Paul D “…recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name. He was about to ask her who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman who was drifting was drifting from ruin. He had been in Rochester four years ago and seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The war had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the backroads and cow paths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, ‘Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.’ Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets,’ they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.”

 Pg. 52-53

“This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the colored people he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired, or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless colored woman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.

            “Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot—with a woman, or a family—for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia.

            “From all those Negroes, Beloved was different. Her shining, her new shoes. It bothered him. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t bother her. Or it could be timing. She had appeared and been taken in on the very day Sethe and he had patched up their quarrel, gone out in public and had a right good time—like a family. Denver had come around, so to speak; Sethe was laughing; he had a promise of steady work, 124 was cleared from spirits. It had begun to look like a life. And damn! a water-drinking woman fell sick, got took in, healed, and hadn’t moved a peg since.

            “He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless colored girl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.”

Pg. 66

“I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying, Go on, and Now. Me having to look out. Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?”

“Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place, mist, doves, sunlight, copper, dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; layed down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant; to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”

Pg. 163

“When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice into chunks. She dropped the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the pieces into a basin of water. When the music entered the window she was wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved’s forehead. Beloved, sweating profusely, was sprawled on the bed in the keeping room, a salt rock in her hand. Both women heard it at the same time and both lifted their heads. As the voices grew louder, Beloved sat up, licking the salt and went into the bigger room. Sethe and she exchanged glances and started toward the window. They saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot, cloudless sky. Sethe opened the door and reached for Beloved’s hand. Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.

“The singing women recognized Sethe at once and surprised themselves by their absence of fear when they saw what stood next to her. The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and glistening, she stood on long straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of hair twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling.

“Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. It is when she lowers her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her that she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No, no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand, it is her hand.

“Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is smiling. But now her hand is empty. Sethe is running from her, running, and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe has been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. Away from here to the pile of people out there. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

Pg. 261-262

Job one for white progressives: Engage other white folks about racism

A recent study exploring the effect of race-based political messages on white subjects showed that a certain subset of whites, "liberals with higher levels of racial resentment," were particularly responsive to both racially explicit and implicit attacks on government social programs. The story, headlined "Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump," ran on the Huffington Post website earlier this month,

Reporter Arthur Delaney noted that the study's authors, sociologists Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer,
"offered a few theories about why [racially coded] welfare rhetoric would move white liberals more than conservatives. One is simply that conservatives are so familiar with welfare-bashing from Republican officeholders that they can't be swayed any further," he wrote.

"Another is that liberals may be uniquely vulnerable to this rhetoric because they are afraid to talk about racial inequality. Watts and Willer noted that 'strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political culture mean negative outcomes among black Americans as a group are rarely discussed.'"

Clearly, it would be rash to reach any number of conclusions based on a  single academic study, which itself cannot be fairly assessed without knowledge of the kind of details that a news report cannot easily include or evaluate. Still, another statement in the article provides a jumping off point for considering where white progressives should focus their activism. "...strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political culture mean [that] negative outcomes among black Americans as a group are rarely discussed," Delaney wrote, quoting Watts and Willer.

That suggests to me that white folks who consider themselves allies of African Americans have a particular responsibility to engage other whites who may have "higher levels of racial resentment" in discussions of the history, the social and cultural impact, and the continuing significance of 400 years of racism in the United States.

This is necessary for a number of reasons. In 2016, Donald Trump won 46 electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that had twice previously been won by Barack Obama. Trump won those three states by less than 90,000 total votes, giving him 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 232. There are all sorts of ways to parse that outcome, including the notion that far lower 2016 turnouts of African American voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Flint and Milwaukee compared to the two previous Obama campaigns may by themselves account for Hillary Clinton's defeat.

But the combination of white Obama voters who defected to Trump, or who voted Green or Libertarian, or who simply sat out the election because their distaste for Clinton obscured their grasp of the damage a Trump victory would, could, and did do, very likely were also enough to swing the three critical states away from Clinton. Looking ahead to the presidential election in 2020, it seems reasonable to conclude that increasing African American turnout and effectively mobilizing estranged white liberals are key to denying Trump a second-term.

In a country that is increasingly polarized and seems almost ungovernable, addressing the general white refusal to understand the full impact of slavery, of the collapse of reconstruction, of Jim Crow, night riders, lynch mobs, mass incarceration, disinvestment and 400 years of economic exploitation is a central task, now and into the future. Whatever one believes to be the most urgent policy questions facing our country, our government and ourselves, it is clear that our collective political dysfunction stands in the way of effective government action on any number of priorities, including climate change, economic inequality, public education, the right to organize, mass incarceration, abortion rights and so much else.

I would argue that racism and white privilege are the very root of that dysfunction. If that is so, and, if for that particularly critical subset of white liberals who can be moved by racist dogwhistles avoiding discussion of race issues is both bad habit and unfortunate priority, than white progressives who are willing to promote discussions of race with other white folks can play a critical role in the effort to restore functionality to our political life.

African Americans cannot play that role with whites. Nor should they. As a practical matter, African Americans already deal with white racism 24/7. They are isolated by it, defined by it, under attack by it, undermined by it and stereotyped by it. Nevertheless, productivity, inspiration and genius are part of the heritage and the contemporary experience of African Americans individually and in community. Eliminating white obstacles to the dissemination of African American social and cultural influence, and the enhanced quality of life that would follow, ought to provide further motivation for white progressives.

We know, or can guess, how much better life could be in the United States if the obstacles to full creative participation in our culture were eliminated for all. Racism alone has probably wasted more work, more talent, more genius than any other single factor. Had we found a way to continue the work of reconstruction after the Civil War, to restore stolen wealth, to create a world characterized by equal justice and equal opportunity, our current political challenges would almost certainly feel far less urgent. That is the world we could come to live in, but getting there may depend very much on the efforts of white progressives to lead in opening the discussion of racism and white supremacy within our own communities.

This will be hard and will take persistence, human kindness, and an unrelenting focus on the world still to win. But we must keep our eyes on that prize.

A Lesson from Everfair

Decisions of when to fight, and where to fight, and how to fight, are never automatic; however decisive and clear an unjust incident may be, why does the responsibility to respond always fall on the shoulders of those we think are the most aggrieved?

Nisi Shawl's Everfair, proposes an alternative outcome to the late-19th, early-20th century genocide in the Congo perpetrated by Belgian King Leopold on the way to thoroughly expropriating the valuable resources of that African land. Mark Twain, who wrote several polemics denouncing the genocidal Belgian attack on the Congo (including King Leopold's Soliloquy), believed that Leopold ranked as one of the most villainous figures in all of world history.

"In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and peity-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there--which will be soon, let us hope and trust," Twain wrote in the post-humous Mark Twain in Eruption.

In Shawl's alternative history novel, a diverse collection of demographically distinct groups, including faith-based, back-to-Africa, American blacks, European socialists, and native Africans, unite and eventually establish their own free state on parts of the Congo wrested by force from Leopold. The book is full of singular characters, important resurrected history, and subtle moral lessons. I haven't yet reached the end of the book, but before I do, I'd like to highlight one of those lessons.

One of Shawl's major characters, Lisette Toutournier, is a bi-racial Frenchwoman. She is smart, passionate and apparently fearless, a set of characteristics that makes her appearance in the Congo as a dedicated opponent of Belgian colonialism unsurprising. As the resistance to Leopold grows and the utopian Everfair begins to take shape, Toutournier finds enough free time to pursue a number of love affairs.

At a critical point in their affair, one of her lovers, a white European woman who has come to occupy a revered position in Everfair's pantheon of heroes, cluelessly insults Lisette's racial heritage; an incident that leaves Lisette both speechless and unwilling to continue their affair. But though the affair has ended, Lisette's lover cannot begin to guess the reason why.

Perhaps, by the end of the story, Lisette will have shared the pain and anger that she felt at the moment her lover so casually and ignorantly derided one of the central aspects of her identity. Regardless, the reader knows that Lisette's lover, a respected leader of Everfair, is nevertheless a product of the racism of her time and place. The reader also knows that it is not possible for Lisette, however gifted and disciplined she may be, to address and remediate all insults and the racism that underlies them.

This brings us (or me, anyhow) to #blacklivesmatter and the growing refusal of African Americans and their allies to stand aside in the face of police brutality and police killings in black communities nationwide. Huge numbers of white Americans seem surprised by the growing militance, though both that surprise and the number of white people who pretend or allow themselves to be surprised seems to be diminishing in the face of the persistence of #blacklivesmatter, North Carolina's Moral Monday Movement, and similar local and national groups.

The surprise white folks seem to feel is a fundamental manifestation of white privilege, which is ultimately the privilege to ignore the realities of one's surrounding community, or country, or world. It is more than a little ironic that white folks, who have for generations reaped the benefits of exploiting the black community, seem to need those same people to do one more thing for them; to clarify with endless patience what racism is, how it permeates our society, and how it is manifested and sustained in feigned shock at acts of black resistance and rage.

That white folks need such remedial instruction from black folks is outrageous. Fundamentally outrageous. After all, African Americans live every day with insults and assaults simply because of their skin color, and must decide to ignore so many of those insults and assaults so that they might instead both live their lives and maintain their sanity. Who has time in the face of the daily demands of life and the tactical demands of resistance to racism to also scrub clean the souls of white folks? 

That Sisyphean tasks reminds me of a truth I stumbled upon some years ago when I first wondered how many times a gay friend of mine needed to come out in order to best take care of himself and to move forward in solidarity with comrades organizing to resist homophobia in all its manifestations. Eventually it became clear that the question of coming out to new people in new places was an endlessly repeating requirement that he was forced to reconsider under constantly changing conditions.

It struck me then and seems equally clear to me now that addressing homophobia and racism are not primarily the responsibility of gay men and lesbians and bisexuals and transgender people or of African Americans. Indeed, if we are to rid the world of racism and homophobia, the main responsibility for rooting out such scourges belongs to those who carry those diseases in their most virulent forms. Straight people and white folks.

Postscript: I cannot resist adding that Shawl dedicates her book to Octavia Butler, whose books offer many lessons that complement Everfair. I reviewed one of those books, Parable of the Sower, a few years ago. To fight back in Parable's dystopian world, which shares many characteristics with our own, Butler develops a tool, a new religious "faith that that has no supreme being, only a profound and Buddhalike understanding of the world that humans must embrace, sharp points and sharp edges, notwithstanding. 'All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change,' she writes. In other words, there is nothing for it but to live in the world, and to see oneself as both responsible for what the world becomes and subject to its conditions at any given time. People are most present in the world when they are growing and changing.

I have to say that with Everfair, Nisi Shawl establishes herself as Octavia Butler's spiritual heir.

Separately and together, we must invent joy

I'm trying to complete a post I started on July 25. Though I don't remember my original intention, the post has quickly become a mashup of thoughts about Marilynne Robinson's Lila, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and an estranged childhood friend who occasionally takes a swing at me via e-mail or Facebook message. Since the piece, tentatively entitled "Life crushes us all," ranges across issues of class and race and whiteness and the deepest disappointments that life can deliver, it has proven not merely difficult to bring to an integrated, well-reasoned conclusion, but has also become, into the bargain, no damn fun.

Of course, I am quite familiar with all the tactics I routinely rely on to both avoid bringing a writing project to a conclusion, and to excuse each failure to simply sit down and write. I should add, also, that in regard to the twin challenges to write and to keep writing, though familiarity does breed contempt, it does not reduce the effectiveness of those stale, old maneuvers.

In the 1990s, the decade that Marrianne McMullen and I shared major responsibility for publishing the Dayton Voice/Impact Weekly, I had the happy experience of quite often bringing writing projects, news stories, opinion pieces, et al., to a conclusion. But even then stories begun in a burst of inspiration would sometimes grind to a halt and find themselves forever abandoned. As any writer can testify, such failures are common and ought not even be remarked. After all, the opportunity to succeed once more, or even for the first time, arises with each new day, with every new story.

Sometime, in that period, I came across The Courage to Write, a book by Ralph Keyes, who lived in nearby Antioch, Ohio and was a leading figure in the Antioch Writer's Workshop. I fell instantly in love with the title, with the idea of the courage it takes to write. Surely a whole book on the subject was just the thing, and so I bought a copy; several copies, in fact, and gave some of them to people I knew who also trekked through the unmapped writer's swamp.

As it happened, the book did me no obvious good. Keyes' repeated assurance that no writer is alone in that boundless swamp did not seem to empower me, however hard he worked to document the point. But, in struggling with "Life crushes us all," I have found myself thinking about The Courage to Write. And for about four days running, I'd sit down and read a few pages from the book and find myself able to add 300, 400, even, 500 words after each reading. It was as if I had finally found the secret that works for me, that gets me sitting down, that gets me confidently picking my way through the swamp.

Alas and predictably, the moment I felt that I had discovered the right path for me, it turned out to be a mere trick, dissolving quickly into wisps of smoke. But a day or two ago, I encountered a 2013 Atlantic Magazine post of a video featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates himself talking about writing. In the video, he also uses the phrase "the courage to write."

"I think breakthroughs," Coates says, "come from putting an inordinate amount of pressure on yourself and seeing what you can take and hoping you can grow some new muscles. It's not really that mystical. It's like repeated practice over and over and over again and then suddenly you become something you had no idea you could be... I strongly believe that writing is an act of courage, almost an act of physical courage..."

Writers, Coates says, need to go back to their work repeatedly. Revise, rewrite and after awhile the idea you had in your head is 50 percent realized, then 60 percent, then 70 percent. It's never fully realized, he says, but you can get closer when you don't let up.

I am certainly writer enough to know that Coates is correct. You don't let up, you go back repeatedly and you revise and refine and every once in a while, after all that pressure focused on putting an idea into words, you achieve real clarity, a sentence, a paragraph, a whole piece to make you proud.

So, I'm going to get back to "Life crushes us all," though it might help if I came up with a new working title that was less of a club with which to whack myself, but not right this instant. In point of fact, the struggle with the piece really is not merely about the courage to write, it is also about clarifying my own thinking in a way that weaves together several related ideas that are nonetheless separate and most often considered independently of each other.

There is whiteness and the struggle, as Coates describes it, of black folks to both live with and within the havoc that white supremacy visits on a daily basis and to live and to forge independent identities beyond the reach of whiteness; there is also the injuries and insults of class as portrayed in Lila, and the special victimization of women who are further silenced and marginalized even in a time of extreme poverty when solidarity ought to be the default state of human relations; and there is also the accumulating losses and humiliations that the world has inflicted on my estranged childhood friend.

All of these are part of the collective experience of life and history in the country we live in together, and are more easily considered separately, but if we are ever to move into a world of justice, deep and shared, we need a more profound understanding of who we are separately and what we each have been through. And since it is impossible to both succinctly and comprehensively explore the variety of oppressions that afflict both our separate and collectives selves, the challenge is, to pervert a phrase from Lord of the Rings, to construct the one metaphor that will rule them all.

I haven't figured out how my draft of "Life crushes us all" gets from where it started to that happier place. But while I've been thrashing about in search for the courage to write, I've tried also to write in my journal, to sneak up on the problem(s) before me, to write around and through it. I might be getting somewhere. Yesterday, in my journal, I got to here:

"Sorrow
is for the love, the people, the things
taken from us...

"This, of course, is not enough because one cannot be forever sorrowing. In the face of the standard litany of loss that people endure, we must each rise up again after every lying down. We must proceed, not merely stoically. We must rise and proceed in spite of the beat-downs. Separately or together, we must invent and reinvent joy."

Barbara Ransby's biography of Eslanda Robeson

The story of a smart and fierce woman written by a rigorous intellectual and a passionate partisan


I saw Barbara Ransby at Bus Boys and Poets last night. She's on a tour promoting her new book, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson.

I haven't read the book yet, but Barbara described Eslanda Robeson in very compelling terms. Robeson, called Essie by her friends (and by Ransby who spent six years researching and writing the book), was a journalist and advocate for human rights through a peripatetic lifetime, both as a companion to Paul Robeson and on international journeys of her own. She possessed "...a passion to live and speak and know and understand the world in all its amazing complexity...a capacity to love, to remain loyal, and to speak out with emphatic eloquence and steel-willed resolve against so many of the injustices of her day," writes Ransby.

How like Barbara herself, who describes her own circle of friends and family as progressive champions of a similar sort, and who deserves to be at the top of any list of current-day anti-racists, anti-imperialists and feminists. Clearly, Essie Robeson captured Ransby's imagination:

"[She] lived a life that was complicated and vibrant, rich and full, privileged but often difficult. Along the way she made some hard choices about the path she was going to follow, and about the the kind of woman she was going to be. Tough and determined, Essie fought long and hard for the ideas she believed in and on behalf of the people she loved and admired. She won some battles and lost others, but she was a fighter to the end."

I've know Barbara for a long-time, but not in the intimate way she has come to know Essie Robeson. Still, "tough and determined" sounds like Barbara to me, and so does fighting "long and hard" for ideas, and for principles and for progressive change. It does not surprise me to discover that Barbara has become the biographer of her soul-sister.

Eslanda is available from Teaching for Change. Ransby's earlier book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, is also available from Teaching for Change.