Who We Are (March Reading)
Apr. 6th, 2008 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseI think there's an unintentional theme this month. You figure it out.
The Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera): Reread. Picked it up the first time after seeing the movie. What's picked up a little in the movie is the intersection of the daily and the supernatural. What isn't picked up is how much of the book is influenced by the narration by Kahu's uncle. Paikea's the focus, but Rawiri leaves New Zealand (Aotearoa, to call it by the Maori name) for Australia and Indonesia, which shapes the edges of the narrative. If I haven't said it, this is one of the small novels that stay with me.
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff): Awesome. Exactly what the subtitle says: white and Black (or Negro) newspaper and TV coverage of the civil rights movement, focusing on the 1950's through mid-1960's. The civil rights movement is one of the many historical focuses where I have a vague list of names and anecdotes glossing a chasm of ignorance, so I got a lot out of this. Think of it as a Magic Eye moment: you look into the sky in the beach scene long enough, and a new pattern emerges. (This is a lousy metaphor, since it fails to encompass the glosses-unto-falsehoods of bad historical reviews, but it gives you something to start with.)
One concept that is glossed far too well in contemporary education is the cruelty, fear, and pathological hatred of the Jim Crow Deep South. How do you convey to men and women who couldn't find "miscegenation" in a dictionary that Emmett Till's murder was par for the Old South? How do you make their brains encompass that casual abuse and night rides are as much a part of the Southern heritage as sweet tea? How do you do this, and say, "we're doing better today. Do better still tomorrow." without losing your students to a socialization crisis?
The North wasn't - and isn't - free of racism, but it got a lot less attention than the South in The Race Beat.
On the theme of mosaics, let's talk about the reverend Dr. King. He's enshrined in popular culture as a symbol of nonviolent resistance, but it might be more accurate to say he worked hard to emphasize or provoke violent and threatening authority figures. Roberts and Kilbanoff touch on Dr. King's methodology as part of their overriding theme of media involvement and movement awareness: "nonviolent demonstrators" are met with violence by "racists", which raises attention and forces the feds to intervene or lose face (p376). What's interesting about this to me is that it's a strategy that hinges on your own supporters getting hurt. That's the entire point: R&K cover the Albany, AL failure to ignite as a civil rights flashhpoint in some detail, and emphasize Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett's refusal to be drawn into violent action as a significant contributing factor (chapter 16, "Albany").
The standout moment for the writers and their theme is 9:30 PM on March 7, 1965, when ABC interrupted Judgement at Nuremburg with footage of Selma, Alabama's Bloody Sunday. R&K treat this as a watershed moment when white Americans saw Nazi violence and hatred reflected in Selma police and rioters, and embraced the justice of the voting movement. Since this is less than 40 pages from the book's conclusion, I can understand why the authors went with the simplification.
After my ranting about cites and bias, this was refreshing because the research is traceable. Page after page of cites. Passing annotations on other secondary sources' sources (p415; footnote 2 for chapter two). It's not all police brutality and cites of old New York Times, it's humor sometimes, like editor Harry Ashmore's reaction to Sander Vancour: "that's not a name. That's a typographical error" (p193, paraphrased). The moments of humor are a relief compared to the other quotes, like Ralph McGill's stunning words after Martin Luther King's assassination: "White slaves killed Dr. King. The moment the trigger man fired, King was the free man. The white killer was a slave to fear, a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast." (p403) Rock it, McGill.
The organization is as rocking awesome as the selected quotes. Gunnar Myrdal's treatise An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is used as a framing device for Roberts' and Kilbanoff's work, since one of Myrdal's themes was the importance of bringing the suffering of blacks to nonblack consciousness. Myrdal proved to be ahead of his time when he wrote that, and when he said "we'd all be deluding ourselves if we thought that the American race problem will be solved before the end of this century" (p324). It's 2008 and we're still dealing with the legacy of that uniquely American racism, the legacy of slavery. We;re doing better, as a nation - go Obama! - but if you pull the name of a white person and a black person from the national census, the white person's still probably doing way better than the black person. Where do we go from here?
Touchstone (Laurie R. King): Harris Stuyvesant, American Bureau of Investigations agent, strikes out to England on the trail of an anarchist bomber. His nice simple quest for justice - vengeance – is tangled in the fate of Bennet Grey and an explosive conspiracy for – oh, who cares. This was much better after I threw my assumptions out the window and grooved on the instant friendship between the very damaged Bennett and the more subtly cracked Harris. The denouncement was suitably dramatic and entertaining, and I enjoyed the story before and after that point. Many of LRK's themes show up - World War I, British nobility, a little religion, the push of change after the War, all that dissipating jazz - in ways that mostly contribute to the story. Good entertainment reading: not deep, but not completely shallow either.
A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde): Five essays. "Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation" is an interview of Lorde by Susan Leigh Star (about whom I know nothing) critiquing the rise of S&M in lesbian circles. Lorde criticizes the practice as perpetuating straight white power dynamics in questionable ways. "I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities" is exactly what the title says: Lorde encouraging Black women to come together for political change. She also disputes claims that Black lesbians aren't political with examples from her personal history. (This is probably anecdotal evidence, but we're out of science and into the history/sociology/poli sci cluster of disciplines, areas whose methodologies aren't that rigorous.) What I didn't get out of De Veaux's biography is a good sense for what a crazy radical Lorde could be: De Veaux focused on Lorde's academic career and intersections of her personal experience with her writing, and not so much on ways Lorde was, well, ". . . spraying white paint over the black jockey statues, and their little red jackets, too . . ." (p22). Or claiming to; De Veaux also suggested Lorde liked to tell a good story. How much I am not sure. "Apartheid U.S.A." explores connections between white American racism and South African apartheid, and encourages "divestment" as economic pressure on the apartheid regime. I think Lorde overstates how dire the American race situation was in the '80s, but I also think that she was born two generations before me, on the oppressed and victimized side of the race line, and I am reading these essays some 30 years after their publication, and maybe a few years later than their writing, and I live in a place and social circle where it's acknowledged that Racism Is Very Bad And Stupid. If there's rich diversity today, it's because a lot of people bled and died and fought like crazy to give their children that revolution. "Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986" hits two or three of my themes: responsible parenting by giving your children knowledge and tools; not letting your rage at the world spill onto your children. Acknowledging that, by your choices, you have chosen for your children. Quoting Lorde quoting her daughter: "you think just because you're lesbians you're so different from the rest of them, but you're not, you're just like all the other parents..." (p45).
"A Burst of Light: Living With Cancer" is the longest essay, taking up more than half the booklet (pamphlet?). It's presented as journal excerpts - possibly similar to The Cancer Journals, which I haven't read yet - from January 1984 to December 1986. Lorde struggles with her diagnosis and treatment while trying to wring as much out of life as possible. Such beautiful language, and wrapping ideas skewed at least 45 degrees off mine. The questions about how to go forward are common ground; the urge to learn more is familiar; the answers are sometimes what I'd pick and sometimes not. As Lorde excerpted her diaries, so I pick and choose from Lorde's words.
"I've got to look at all of my options closely, even the ones I find distasteful. I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can't lose." (p61). "I wasn't supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up whiteboys' world." (ditto) On Christa Wolfe's The Search for Christa T.: "But there is one part of the book that really spoke to me. In Chapter 5, she talks about a mistaken urge to laugh at one's younger self's belief in paradise, in miracles. Each one of us who survives, she says, at least once in a lifetime, at some crucial amd inescapable moment, has had to absolutely believe in the impossible." (p63) "I am going to write fire until it comes out of ears, my eyes, my noseholes-everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!" (p76-77) "This evening brought together four of my deepest and longest-lasting interests- poetry, beautiful women, revolution, and me!" (p77, on the Hunter College Audre Lorde women's poetry center dedication.) "...I am ready to try anything so long as they don't come at me with a knife." (p83, Dilwaz and the Lukas Klinik) "The image of her as a young healthy aryan bigot was at war inside me with the pathetic old woman at our table, and I had to get out of there immediately." (p93) "It's always like this when you're trying to get people you love mightily to hear and use the ways in which you all are totally different, knowing they are the most difficult to reach. But it is the ways in which you are the same that make it possible to communicate at all." (p96) "There is nothing I cannot use somehow in my living and my work, even if I would never have chosen it on my own, even if I am livid with fury at having to choose." (p111) "Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle whever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor's office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom."(p120)
Lorde was a poet first, and has the most awesome words to show it.
The Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera): Reread. Picked it up the first time after seeing the movie. What's picked up a little in the movie is the intersection of the daily and the supernatural. What isn't picked up is how much of the book is influenced by the narration by Kahu's uncle. Paikea's the focus, but Rawiri leaves New Zealand (Aotearoa, to call it by the Maori name) for Australia and Indonesia, which shapes the edges of the narrative. If I haven't said it, this is one of the small novels that stay with me.
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff): Awesome. Exactly what the subtitle says: white and Black (or Negro) newspaper and TV coverage of the civil rights movement, focusing on the 1950's through mid-1960's. The civil rights movement is one of the many historical focuses where I have a vague list of names and anecdotes glossing a chasm of ignorance, so I got a lot out of this. Think of it as a Magic Eye moment: you look into the sky in the beach scene long enough, and a new pattern emerges. (This is a lousy metaphor, since it fails to encompass the glosses-unto-falsehoods of bad historical reviews, but it gives you something to start with.)
One concept that is glossed far too well in contemporary education is the cruelty, fear, and pathological hatred of the Jim Crow Deep South. How do you convey to men and women who couldn't find "miscegenation" in a dictionary that Emmett Till's murder was par for the Old South? How do you make their brains encompass that casual abuse and night rides are as much a part of the Southern heritage as sweet tea? How do you do this, and say, "we're doing better today. Do better still tomorrow." without losing your students to a socialization crisis?
The North wasn't - and isn't - free of racism, but it got a lot less attention than the South in The Race Beat.
On the theme of mosaics, let's talk about the reverend Dr. King. He's enshrined in popular culture as a symbol of nonviolent resistance, but it might be more accurate to say he worked hard to emphasize or provoke violent and threatening authority figures. Roberts and Kilbanoff touch on Dr. King's methodology as part of their overriding theme of media involvement and movement awareness: "nonviolent demonstrators" are met with violence by "racists", which raises attention and forces the feds to intervene or lose face (p376). What's interesting about this to me is that it's a strategy that hinges on your own supporters getting hurt. That's the entire point: R&K cover the Albany, AL failure to ignite as a civil rights flashhpoint in some detail, and emphasize Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett's refusal to be drawn into violent action as a significant contributing factor (chapter 16, "Albany").
The standout moment for the writers and their theme is 9:30 PM on March 7, 1965, when ABC interrupted Judgement at Nuremburg with footage of Selma, Alabama's Bloody Sunday. R&K treat this as a watershed moment when white Americans saw Nazi violence and hatred reflected in Selma police and rioters, and embraced the justice of the voting movement. Since this is less than 40 pages from the book's conclusion, I can understand why the authors went with the simplification.
After my ranting about cites and bias, this was refreshing because the research is traceable. Page after page of cites. Passing annotations on other secondary sources' sources (p415; footnote 2 for chapter two). It's not all police brutality and cites of old New York Times, it's humor sometimes, like editor Harry Ashmore's reaction to Sander Vancour: "that's not a name. That's a typographical error" (p193, paraphrased). The moments of humor are a relief compared to the other quotes, like Ralph McGill's stunning words after Martin Luther King's assassination: "White slaves killed Dr. King. The moment the trigger man fired, King was the free man. The white killer was a slave to fear, a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast." (p403) Rock it, McGill.
The organization is as rocking awesome as the selected quotes. Gunnar Myrdal's treatise An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is used as a framing device for Roberts' and Kilbanoff's work, since one of Myrdal's themes was the importance of bringing the suffering of blacks to nonblack consciousness. Myrdal proved to be ahead of his time when he wrote that, and when he said "we'd all be deluding ourselves if we thought that the American race problem will be solved before the end of this century" (p324). It's 2008 and we're still dealing with the legacy of that uniquely American racism, the legacy of slavery. We;re doing better, as a nation - go Obama! - but if you pull the name of a white person and a black person from the national census, the white person's still probably doing way better than the black person. Where do we go from here?
Touchstone (Laurie R. King): Harris Stuyvesant, American Bureau of Investigations agent, strikes out to England on the trail of an anarchist bomber. His nice simple quest for justice - vengeance – is tangled in the fate of Bennet Grey and an explosive conspiracy for – oh, who cares. This was much better after I threw my assumptions out the window and grooved on the instant friendship between the very damaged Bennett and the more subtly cracked Harris. The denouncement was suitably dramatic and entertaining, and I enjoyed the story before and after that point. Many of LRK's themes show up - World War I, British nobility, a little religion, the push of change after the War, all that dissipating jazz - in ways that mostly contribute to the story. Good entertainment reading: not deep, but not completely shallow either.
A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde): Five essays. "Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation" is an interview of Lorde by Susan Leigh Star (about whom I know nothing) critiquing the rise of S&M in lesbian circles. Lorde criticizes the practice as perpetuating straight white power dynamics in questionable ways. "I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities" is exactly what the title says: Lorde encouraging Black women to come together for political change. She also disputes claims that Black lesbians aren't political with examples from her personal history. (This is probably anecdotal evidence, but we're out of science and into the history/sociology/poli sci cluster of disciplines, areas whose methodologies aren't that rigorous.) What I didn't get out of De Veaux's biography is a good sense for what a crazy radical Lorde could be: De Veaux focused on Lorde's academic career and intersections of her personal experience with her writing, and not so much on ways Lorde was, well, ". . . spraying white paint over the black jockey statues, and their little red jackets, too . . ." (p22). Or claiming to; De Veaux also suggested Lorde liked to tell a good story. How much I am not sure. "Apartheid U.S.A." explores connections between white American racism and South African apartheid, and encourages "divestment" as economic pressure on the apartheid regime. I think Lorde overstates how dire the American race situation was in the '80s, but I also think that she was born two generations before me, on the oppressed and victimized side of the race line, and I am reading these essays some 30 years after their publication, and maybe a few years later than their writing, and I live in a place and social circle where it's acknowledged that Racism Is Very Bad And Stupid. If there's rich diversity today, it's because a lot of people bled and died and fought like crazy to give their children that revolution. "Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986" hits two or three of my themes: responsible parenting by giving your children knowledge and tools; not letting your rage at the world spill onto your children. Acknowledging that, by your choices, you have chosen for your children. Quoting Lorde quoting her daughter: "you think just because you're lesbians you're so different from the rest of them, but you're not, you're just like all the other parents..." (p45).
"A Burst of Light: Living With Cancer" is the longest essay, taking up more than half the booklet (pamphlet?). It's presented as journal excerpts - possibly similar to The Cancer Journals, which I haven't read yet - from January 1984 to December 1986. Lorde struggles with her diagnosis and treatment while trying to wring as much out of life as possible. Such beautiful language, and wrapping ideas skewed at least 45 degrees off mine. The questions about how to go forward are common ground; the urge to learn more is familiar; the answers are sometimes what I'd pick and sometimes not. As Lorde excerpted her diaries, so I pick and choose from Lorde's words.
"I've got to look at all of my options closely, even the ones I find distasteful. I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can't lose." (p61). "I wasn't supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up whiteboys' world." (ditto) On Christa Wolfe's The Search for Christa T.: "But there is one part of the book that really spoke to me. In Chapter 5, she talks about a mistaken urge to laugh at one's younger self's belief in paradise, in miracles. Each one of us who survives, she says, at least once in a lifetime, at some crucial amd inescapable moment, has had to absolutely believe in the impossible." (p63) "I am going to write fire until it comes out of ears, my eyes, my noseholes-everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!" (p76-77) "This evening brought together four of my deepest and longest-lasting interests- poetry, beautiful women, revolution, and me!" (p77, on the Hunter College Audre Lorde women's poetry center dedication.) "...I am ready to try anything so long as they don't come at me with a knife." (p83, Dilwaz and the Lukas Klinik) "The image of her as a young healthy aryan bigot was at war inside me with the pathetic old woman at our table, and I had to get out of there immediately." (p93) "It's always like this when you're trying to get people you love mightily to hear and use the ways in which you all are totally different, knowing they are the most difficult to reach. But it is the ways in which you are the same that make it possible to communicate at all." (p96) "There is nothing I cannot use somehow in my living and my work, even if I would never have chosen it on my own, even if I am livid with fury at having to choose." (p111) "Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle whever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor's office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom."(p120)
Lorde was a poet first, and has the most awesome words to show it.