Voting Day in Michigan

Early voting started last week, and I have voted.

 

Slavery and its consequences

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1858. (source)

The Grimkes: Published this month.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K Greenidge is making me think hard about Lincoln’s famous definition, though this quote doesn’t appear in the book. The profound depravity of many slave owners in this historic family, and the indifference and self-centeredness of many of the other White members of the famous abolitionist family is painful to learn about. In the preface, the author states an underlying observation: “The tragedy of the Grimke sisters’ lives was the fact that they never acknowledged their complicity in the slave system they so eloquently spoke against.” The self-awareness and suffering of the slaves, including the Black members of the Grimke family, is equally a torture to read.   

At the very beginning of The Grimkes, we find a list of 17 central figures, mainly members of the Grimke family. By following this enormous number of historic figures, this book shows the development of consciousness of the White abolitionists before the Civil war. It also illustrates (with really impressive historic details) the numerous possibilities for inhumane treatment and vicious cruelty that slavery afforded many masters. 

Further, the book describes in painful detail a number of violent attacks on free Black communities in Pennsylvania in the pre-war era. About one of these attacks and the way the sisters reacted:

"Angelina and Sarah Grimke undoubtedly heard the mob as it made its way down Lombard Street, through Sixth and Seventh and the narrow alleyways in between. And yet they never mentioned, either publicly or to each other, the actions of the city’s enraged white people, nor did they reflect in future writings on the lasting effects of such violence on the Black people they eventually claimed to serve." (pp. 10-11). 

Obviously, this book is emotionally challenging to read, and further, it's challenging to follow the intense amount of historic detail that is presented. 

I'm finding it even more challenging to review this profound social and political history, which looks at the American experience in ways I have never read before (though I haven't read that much). Besides the pain of reading about this era, our own era has plenty of  pain; specifically, the shooting last Sunday night in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those who lost their lives are also at the forefront of my thoughts: another horrifying mass shooting, three promising young people dead, and an entire community terrorized as the shooter was at large for 12 hours. (My two granddaughters are both students at UVa, so it's personal.)

Who Were the Central Figures of The Grimkes?

Of the many individuals that played a role in Greenidge's history, here are the ones that are the best known, whose lives I followed the most closely as I read:

• Sarah Moore Grimke (1792–1873), White daughter of slave owners in South Carolina who became a major participant in the abolitionist movement in Philadelphia and the North.
• Angelina Grimke Weld (1805–1879), her sister, an orator and leader of the abolitionists.
• Archibald “Archie” Henry Grimke (1849–1930), son of their deeply evil and cruel brother and Nancy Weston, a woman who was his slave. With the help of his two aunts, he received a traditional education at several famous institutions, including Harvard, and became a highly educated and influential figure in the late 19th and early 20th century.
• Francis “Frank” James Grimke (1850–1937), his brother, equally educated and prominent.
• Angelina “Nana” Weld Grimke (1880–1958), Archie's daughter, a well-known poet and playwright of the early 20th century.

Sarah Grimke, around 1850

The famous Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, fled from their family of southern plantation owners in South Carolina, rejected the slave-owning ethics of their parents, and moved to Philadelphia where they participated in the anti-slavery movement leading up to the Civil War. Along with a number of other abolitionists, they were founders of important anti-slavery societies, and later promoted women's suffrage as well as rights for the Black community, and efforts at justice for the freed slaves of the South. 

The author, while acknowledging their leadership, is very critical of their lack of respect for Black individuals and especially open about their blindness to the cruelty of their father and brother towards his own Black children, as well as to all enslaved people in his life.

The patriarchs of the Grimke family, like a shocking number of other slave owners in the pre-Civil-War South, virtually all had relationships with black women whom they owned and abused, and in general were unimaginably vile to their own children. 

Angelina Grimke, around 1850
(Images from the book)

"From New Orleans to Charlotte, the slaveholding tradition of white men installing an enslaved Black woman in a slave cabin on his plantation so that she could be sexually available at all times was so common that writers, antislavery and proslavery alike, wrote countless parables about the practice." (p. 113).

Angelina and Sarah’s brother was the most horrifying of cruel slave owners; the enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, mother of his children, was a strong and brave woman who did the most she could to raise her sons as responsible and impressive citizens, and to procure their freedom and then their success in life. She succeeded. I feel that anyone reading this book would have to be overwhelmed by the thought of a man who enslaved and tortured his own children, whatever their race. But even the well-meaning helpers were deficient: "white reformers’ dedication to Black people as a moral obligation to be fulfilled did not always translate into a belief that Black people were intellectually and politically capable." (p. 168).  

Nineteenth-Century Activism

Obviously the Grimke sisters' political abolitionism prior to the Civil War then led to the complex post-war process of changing American life from a slave society to a free society. Both Archie and Frank, highly educated with the help of their aunts, became leaders in the Black communities that emerged during the Reconstruction era. The Black free men in particular had to deal with the attitudes of Northerners, especially men, who looked down on them, or saw them as merely a means to achieve salvation in a religious sense:

 

"...most white abolitionists were as blinded by their own self-interests as the Grimke sisters nearly thirty years before had been blinded by their own sought-after redemption. Back then, Sarah and Angelina saw slavery as a sin for white people to vanquish from the land and white deliverance as a just consequence of slavery’s end. Now, in 1862, white men like abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe and Union Army cotton agent Edward L. Pierce saw impending Black freedom as a force to be controlled and directed by white New Englanders.” (pp. 146-147). 

As time went on after the war, the horrifying resurgence of racial discrimination and the slow erosion of the rights of the Black community in the final decades of the 19th century is of course well known. Greenidge's scholarly details about the members of the Grimke family bring this history to life. The details are both fascinating and truly depressing, as well as having all kinds of resonance in thinking of our own troubled times.

The unequal basis of Black and White lives in Philadelphia and other Northern cities throughout the 19th century is not surprising, but the details are enlightening. For example, Greenidge describes the lack of educational opportunities for Black children in the early years of the century:

"As Philadelphia’s rapidly industrializing economy led to low wages and underemployment that forced most Black children out of the classroom, poor white children were saved from ignorance and a lifetime of toil by publicly funded charity schools, designed to set the city’s 'destitute' on a path to productive republican citizenship. As one Philadelphia philanthropist informed Alexis de Tocqueville, who was then on his first tour of the nation, colored children were legally entitled to public education, but “the [white] people are imbued with the greatest prejudice against Negroes," (p. 47). 

Even the reformers who were more open-minded than most White people did not recognize that Black people wanted the same type of education and opportunity that White people did. After the war, particularly, a system that fostered a supposedly practical education for Blacks appealed to the latent racism in many of the most supportive and committed people. 

"At Howard University in Washington, Hampton University in Virginia, and others like them, Native Americans, recently denied citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment; African Americans, recently emancipated in the South; and poor Southern white residents, exploited and degraded by the slaveholding plantocracy, would be trained in 'Christian morality and free labor' as a form of cultural and economic acclimation to a rapidly industrializing America." (p. 213)

This attitude greatly affected the support that the Grimke sisters offered to their nephews, whose education they took responsibility for, but whom they did not treat as real equals: 

"It was in this vein that the well-meaning and sincere Grimke sisters ignored the type of education they had always valued for their own children and urged their Black nephews to consider a postsecondary education that emphasized labor as well as humanistic inquiry." (p. 213). 

As time went on, the discrepancy grew between the aspirations of willing and able Black people to be educated in a traditional way, and the theory and practice of many educators. This included Booker T. Washington, who offered a different type of education for these "different" people. In reality, the former slaves were treated as unequal and less capable:

"... many members of the colored elite agreed with Washington’s prescription that 'harmony will come [between Black and white ] as soon as we forget the supposed injuries of the past.' The rising generation of negroes, Washington and his supporters believed, were best served by personal and community adherence to 'thrift, moral education, and the cultivation of our own businesses.'” (p. 271). 

In The Grimkes, Greenidge offers the often-neglected alternative view held by people like Archie Grimke, that Black and White people both craved and deserved a full set of choices when it came to education and their life work.

There's Much More!

I've only described a few of the ideas and historic streams in this very interesting book. The lives of a number of other individuals are also presented, representing the author's amazing scholarship and painstaking interpretation of what is obviously many historic and primary sources of information. Besides their participation in the abolition movement, the Grimke sisters' role in the women suffrage movement is also explained in detail, including the fact that they were among the first women to cast ballots in an election in a symbolic protest in the 1870s -- though their votes weren't counted!

The life and accomplishments in the twentieth century of Angelina “Nana” Weld Grimke also made a big impression on me, but I am not going to try to summarize this. Throughout the book, I was fascinated by the number of very famous men and women who interacted with all of the members of the family. 

It’s hard to explain how many really important facts and insights about American history that I learned while reading Greenidge's book. The struggle for justice was complex and fraught, and it isn’t over.

From The New York Times Review

“The Grimke sisters became celebrities, publishing essays that shaped abolitionist thinking and reluctantly stepping into a male-dominated public sphere where they were never completely welcome. Their fame derived from both their words and their deeds. They rejected their white inheritance by coming north and joining the movement, gaining moral credibility that few of their peers could match. But in her new book, ‘The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,’ the historian Kerri Greenidge challenges this narrative, showing that the sisters’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights were undergirded by the privileges they reaped from slavery. The lives they built, and their relationships with Black relatives, were poisoned by the profits, violence and shame of white supremacy. …

“Sarah and Angelina urged their Black nephews to forget about the past and focus on the future the sisters envisioned for them. Archie became a lawyer and diplomat in Boston, and, later, a national vice president of the N.A.A.C.P.; Frank became a pastor and leader of the Black church in Washington, D.C. Archie and Frank repressed their suffering and worked their way up the social hierarchy. But neither fully healed from the wounds of their enslavement and the denigration of their mother. The respectability they aspired to was saturated with sexist Victorian morality, colorism, and white ideals of intellect and propriety.”  — “Slavery’s Indelible Stain on a White Abolitionist Legend,” October 29, 2022.

Review © 2022 mae sander

Michigan Votes

Amazing, but yesterday's election may not be nearly as bad as we feared. These are the two big results so far in my state, Michigan. The legislature result seems not yet decided. There are also several pretty good results nation-wide, though many are pending.

Long Live Democracy

Surprisingly, no lines this morning.

 

What I must do today...

"If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention." -- Paul Krugman, November 7, 2022

Source: google search

 

Source: City of Trenton, MI 

Source: Michigan Radio

Long ago and far away!

The book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil was published in 2016, only six years ago, but while I was finally reading it this week, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that it is vastly outdated, particularly the final chapter about Facebook and its role in the 2016 election. The author is deeply critical of the use of algorithms in Facebook to determine what information is presented to which users — and her points were well-taken. However, many more abuses have been disclosed in the years since then. 

Little did anyone dream of the vast conspiratorial misdeeds of the Russian hackers and propagandists, who took advantage of the Facebook algorithms and created an entirely false picture to assist the election of Donald Trump! How painful to read the partial and incomplete insights in O’Neil’s analysis that might have helped if taken a bit further. (Again, I’m happy that one day a few years ago, I decided that I would never look at FB again, and I never did.)

The overall focus of O'Neil's book is on mathematical models, including those that enabled the Facebook horror show. One of the prior jobs of the author had been in the field of data science, particularly as a “quant” who worked on financial models. Before the 2009 economic crash, this area was very trendy. Beyond the financial applications, mathematical computer modeling was growing in power and effectiveness in social, business, and political manipulation in our society. Ultimately, the net result of these Weapons of Math Destruction or WMDs (as she names them) was to make Americans’ lives worse in many ways. O'Neil shows how the combination of irresponsible data collection about individuals and bigoted assumptions built into the software has caused a great deal of harm to the most helpless members of society.

The net effect of WMDs was to grind down poor people by refusing them jobs and insurance policies, to trick people into enrolling in useless private college programs with government loans (coming out with nothing but huge debts), to ensnare people with disastrous mortgages that they could never afford, to cause teachers to lose their jobs because the measures of success were based on false data, and to engage in a terrifying variety of other injustices. And ultimately to concentrate more wealth in the already wealthy sectors of the population. Racial minorities and poor people were the most viciously affected by the secretive computer programs and data-gathering mechanisms that determined their creditworthiness, their voting behavior, their job offers, and more. For victims, even if they knew that these programs were responsible for their suffering, there was often no recourse.

Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic, which began a few years after the book’s publication, was not caused by data modeling. However, many of the social structures and features of American society that figure in O'Neil's book have been changed and disrupted amazingly by the last two years of isolation, impoverishment, hunger, and ultimately close to 1,000,000 deaths. Of particular relevance to the pandemic disruption is O'Neil's description of computer-based job scheduling that meant workers at enterprises like Starbucks would often have only a few hours of sleep between work shifts, or would be unable to plan essential activities such as going to school or organizing child care. The pandemic caused many people to abandon such jobs. 

People can become victims in so many ways! Employer "wellness" programs are a good example. These ostensibly beneficial incentives to lose weight, stop smoking, or adopt other supposedly healthy behaviors were foisted on employees by health insurance companies in collusion with employers. They illustrate another seeming accomplishment of manipulative data science. O'Neil writes: "In fact, the greatest savings from wellness programs come from the penalties assessed on the workers. In other words, like scheduling algorithms, they provide corporations with yet another tool to raid their employees’ paychecks." (p. 178). 

Have things changed now? I’m not sure, but a lot of people who were praised as “essential workers” or even as “heroes” in the spring of 2020 have been questioning the way they are treated by employers and by the computer programs that in a sense enslave them. I found myself wondering over and over -- how did O'Neil's examples function in the changing workplace environment of the pandemic, as people either worked from home or had to take extreme risks with their health. What became of the "wellness" programs when so many people were so unwell? I am also curious about how the big data science-based businesses like Uber, Air B&B, Grub Hub, and others used or misused the vast computer programs and their dubious data sets that O'Neil describes.

I meant to read this book when it was new and widely praised. I guess I waited too long! I’d like to see an updated version — O’Neil’s new book The Shame Machine, published last month, may be that book. According to the New York Times reviewer:

"O’Neil’s previous book, Weapons of Math Destruction, explored how algorithms encode and exacerbate inequality; the “shame machines” in her new book, which include the weight loss and wellness industries, function similarly — fueling bad feeling in order to buoy profits while maintaining an unfair status quo." (source)

Review © 2022 mae sander.

The Workhouse

The Turning Point Suffragist Memorial in Lorton, Virginia, commemorates the long struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States. In November, 1917, the suffrage movement had been pressuring for women’s voting rights and other legal rights for over 60 years. A large number of activists had been peacefully picketing the White House to keep the issue in the public eye. In fact, this was the first time the White House had been picketed by political activists.

From the beginning of Woodrow Wilson’s second term, National Woman’s Party members, known as the Silent Sentinels in distinctive purple, white and gold sashes, surrounded the White House in wordless protest. Their banners attempted to prick the president’s conscience, often charging him with hypocrisy.” (Washington Post, 2017)

From an information placard at the Suffragist
Memorial: a woman protesting “Kaiser Wilson.”

Upon the entry of the US into World War I, the protestors didn’t stop, but police actions against them became harsher and harsher.

Alice Paul, shown here in a statue at the Memorial, was one of the first to be arrested.
In jail in Washington DC, she was abused and force fed.

A mass arrest of protestors took place on November 14, 1917. A large group of women were taken to an unsanitary, abusive prison and workhouse in Lorton, Virginia, now the site of the Suffragist Memorial, which opened in 2021. The first night they spent at the Workhouse became known as the Night of Terror. They were badly beaten, given no food or water for 36 hours, and crowded into small, rat-infested cells. All their clothing and possessions were taken, and they were given filthy prison garments. 

News of the treatment of the suffragists created a turning point in public opinion. Support for women’s right to vote became overwhelming, and on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote.

Statue of Carrie Chapman Catt, a leader of the  Suffragists.

Today, voting rights issues have not entirely been resolved.
The final placards of the memorial mention continuing struggles.

The Workhouse Today

Now at the site…

The prison buildings where the suffragist women were held and tortured was torn down some years ago, but a large part of the old workhouse still stands, and now houses artists’ studios, art classrooms, and galleries.

The arts center is a complex of large brick buildings from the days of the Workhouse.

We viewed exhibits of the instructors’ paintings and ceramics.

Murals decorate the outside walls.

We enjoyed walking on the paths in Occoquan Regional Park near the Suffragist Memorial and also walking around the adjacent Workhouse art center, taking advantage of a beautiful spring day in Virginia. Although I am aware of the general history of the suffragist movement, I was not aware of the events of 1917 that created a turning point for human rights. The placards, statues, and documentation of the memorial are very impressive, especially the panel with the names and dates of every woman who was imprisoned at the site.

blog post © 2022 mae sander.

"Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson, published August, 2020.

Voters in the 2016 election seemed to vote against their interests. "They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most— the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America."  (p. 324). 

The role of caste in driving American behavior is the central idea of Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste. She shows that the American relationship of White and Black people, from the start when African slaves were first introduced, produced and maintained a caste system like that of India. The possession of higher-caste status by all White people meant everything to the less educated, less successful, and less wealthy Whites whose superiority was based only on the caste system itself, and on nothing inherent in themselves. 

Painstakingly, Isabel Wilkerson details the formation of the American caste system, and delineates why it's a much more powerful way to look at our society than using the concept of racism. She illustrates the "pillars" of the caste system, including that it's supported by religious beliefs, it's enforced through anti-intermarriage laws and customs, that one's caste is strongly inherited and inescapable, that it's enforced by terror and cruelty as well as psychological means, and that being a member of the upper caste confers automatic superiority. She provides vivid examples from her own experiences and those of others to show the cruelty and inhumanity of the system and the stress it creates in the members of the lower caste, that is, in Black people.

Hitler modeled his anti-Jewish laws on the laws and customs of the American caste system, Wilkerson points out. Parallels between the persecution of Jews by the Nazi authorities in the 1930s and the persecution of Black lower-caste Americans are painful to read. Wilkerson writes: "Hitler especially marveled at the American 'knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.'" (p. 81). 

Actually, everything in this book is painful to read and I had to force myself to get through it. Admittedly, I wasn't able to finish reading her equally painful earlier book, The Warmth of Other Suns, published 2010, which documented the American caste system in another way. I'm not going to try to summarize the many other interesting topics in Caste, which the author used to make her persuasive argument in favor of this viewpoint. If you think what I've said is weak, you should read the book before you try to refute the point on the basis of what I've said. My summary is very incomplete.

Caste is a very powerful book, and the conclusions about our society highlight a wide variety of American's behavior. The election of 2020 was no different than the election of 2016 when it comes to White voters, about which Wilkerson wrote:

"Why, some people on the left kept asking, why, oh, why, were these people voting against their own interests? The questioners on the left were unseeing and yet so certain. What they had not considered was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it." (p. 327).

Just remember this:

"Through no fault of any individual born to it, a caste system centers the dominant caste as the sun around which all other castes revolve and defines it as the default-setting standard of normalcy, of intellect, of beauty, against which all others are measured, ranked in descending order by their physiological proximity to the dominant caste." (p. 268). 

Critics were enthusiastic about this book:

• In the New York Times, reviewer Dwight Garner called Caste "an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far." 
• In the Washington Post, Kenneth W. Mack, a historian and a professor of law at Harvard, says Caste is "a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it." 
• On the NPR website, reviewer Hope Wabuke referred to Caste: "a masterwork of writing — a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis." 

Each reviewer that I read cited different details in describing the book, which reflects Wilkerson's wide-ranging collection of fascinating history and examples. Reading the reviews after I wrote my own impressions made me feel that my enthusiasm was shared by many more expert readers than myself. I do recommend it!

Review © 2020 mae sander.

Voting

"I focused on images of voters, of all political beliefs, queuing up in circumstances as varied as rain in Georgia, cold in Montana and heat in Arizona. Older people with their walkers standing patiently for hours. Indigenous Americans on horseback riding 10 miles to vote. Parents, their kids on their shoulders. Lines stretching for blocks, nearly as long as the lines of cars at food pantries a few months ago. The vertical shapes of Americans standing in wait to vote one after another, in their masks and, for the most part, socially distanced. An estimated 100 million voters cast their votes early, with rounds of applause often greeting first-time voters." -- Nell Irvin Painter, November 5, 2020.

 

"The First Vote," Harper's Weekly, 1867

Nell Irvin Painter's op-ed in today's New York Times, "It Shouldn’t Be This Close. But There’s Good News, Too" described her feelings about Tuesday's election. Despite all the depressing news, she saw "An upwelling of faith in the epitome of citizenship, voting." Painter also talked about other countries and other times where voting represented citizens' faith in democracy. She linked to the above image of the first vote cast by Blacks in the South after the Civil War, an example of American voting history. She wrote:

"The American historian in me can reach farther back to envision determined voting, to Reconstruction, to the image on the cover of Harper’s Weekly of November 1867, with A. R. Waud’s illustrationof Black men lined up to deposit ballots into partisan urns.

"At the front of the line stands an old graybeard in ragged clothing, workingmen’s tools in his pocket. He is dark-skinned, evidently formerly enslaved. Behind him stands a light-skinned dandy in curls and cravat, and behind him, a decorated Union soldier. These three lead a line of voters of varied classes and darkness of skin."

I found Painter's op-ed to be a very comforting antidote to the pessimism and sadness I felt for the result of the election. There's still no clear winner, but the strong prospect of a Biden presidency with a completely nullifying Senate, where there will be no cooperation and no confirmation of an effective cabinet and executive branch of government, is horrifying. Fortunately it's less horrifying than four more years of the current executive. And Painter's words express hope for the more distant future, perhaps.

I'm grateful for Painter's attempt at optimism. Her book The History of White People taught me much about the history of racism and white supremacy (I reviewed it here).  The book I read this week, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson (reviewed yesterday) relates very much to this work, and when I looked up the author, I learned that Painter was Johnson's thesis advisor for his PhD. I hope to read more works by both authors.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander, image as credited.

Ballot Turned In Today!

 

100 Years of Votes for Women

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.  

"Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." 

– U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIX

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Women's Suffrage amendment to the US Constitution, which provided all women citizens with voting rights. A number of individual states had already granted women's voting rights, beginning in Wyoming in 1869: here in Michigan, women had voted since 1918. The campaign for women's rights had been long and active -- as illustrated by the photo above from the Lansing State Journal.

Even after the passage of the 19th amendment, women of color were explicitly denied the vote by a variety of discriminatory means, and the struggle for votes for everyone continues. In the election this November, no citizen of the US can take his or her voting rights for granted: we still must fight to ensure that every citizen can vote and that each person's vote will be counted. However, today, 100 years after the amendment became part of the Constitution, is a good day to look back on the struggles of the past to achieve the victories that made us what we are now. For a detailed history in pictures, see "Suffrage at 100" in today's New York Times. (Note: this article is behind a paywall, but you can see it if you have no NYT cookies in your browser.)

Blog post by mae sander at mae food dot blogspot.com

“American While Black” by Niambi Michele Carter

"For most of their existence in the United States, black people were noncitizens. Regardless of status, whether free or enslaved, blacks were not deemed members of the American body politic. In fact, they were not inaugurated as full citizens until 1965. Their noncitizen status was cemented in the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Supreme Court decision, which stated all people of African descent— whether free or enslaved— could not become citizens." --American While Black, p. 87.

This book appears on several lists inspired by the recent protests against police brutality against Black Americans. American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship by Niambi Michele Carter (published 2019) seems to me to be full of wonderful insights. I was very interested in the author's approach to understanding Black Americans on their own terms, not by comparison to other groups.

American While Black explores the current attitudes of American Blacks about immigration and how these attitudes came about. The immigration issue is of little political importance in their voting behavior, in contrast to the attitudes of many white groups. Carter discusses how Black Americans' historically developed sense of identity informs the way they view other minorities, particularly immigrants. The discussion is detailed and nuanced, and I don't intend to try to reproduce it, just to acknowledge that it's very interesting and, as promised on the book lists, offered me a lot of new insights.

Carter provides some definitions of commonly used terms that I find quite penetrating:

"White supremacy is the system that favors white people and structures all of our life chances according to skin color, gender expression, sexuality, nationality, religion, and the like. This means all of us can participate in perpetuating the system of white supremacy regardless of whether that system benefits us individually or whether we participate in or believe in racist practice." (pp. 4-5).

"Under colorblindness, racism only exists in the minds of those who see themselves as victims, not as an objective fact. Consequently, what appears to be the result of race— poverty, infant mortality, and high rates of incarceration— is explained in nonracial terms by the (unwise) choices individuals make." (p. 42).

I was especially interested in this point about how Black people view their history:

"It is difficult not to understand how black life is bounded by and to past circumstances, because they are not past events but frame the racial dynamics blacks find themselves living in at present. This is not because blacks are backward-looking victims; rather, this is a demonstration of the power of communal or collective memory and the vigilance required so that we do not return to that place." (p. 140). 

Beginning in the 19th century, Black Americans did not have the rights of citizenship nor the ability to enjoy the product of their labor as slaves. As a result, they could view themselves as stateless people. Continuing through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were a variety of efforts and suggestions to enable American Blacks to "return" to Africa, often with the enthusiastic commitment of Black leaders, as well as with less-well-intentioned white leaders. Carter writes in the context of this suggested emigration:

"Individual agency matters, because that is at the heart of who can be a citizen. In the United States, where citizenship is not defined by culture but an allegiance to certain ideals like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, being a sovereign person means that one is 'fit' for citizenship. In this way, the purest expression of being an American is being able/ free to find a place in the world, literally, and contribute to its advancement. This freedom was denied to all blacks who, during the period under study, had no status as Americans, even if free." (p. 85). 

Combined with the post-Civil-War mistreatment of the freed slaves, the suggestion that Blacks should return to Africa in a way haunts their political consciousness. At the same time, the waves of immigrants, first from Europe and more recently from Latin America and Asia have repeatedly been offered better opportunities for entrepreneurship, for education, and for integration into the white middle and even upper classes. Carter explores how Blacks have responded over time to these new citizens and their enjoyment of opportunities that were consistently denied to the Black population.

Clearly, the book shows, Black people understand that immigrants are their competitors and often willingly participate in perpetuating the unequal status of Black people, yet the author's studies and surveys (described in detail in the final chapters of the book) find that immigration and immigrants are not of crucial importance in the worldview or political view of Black Americans. In some cases, they see immigrant groups as unwitting victims of the same prejudices and abuses that Blacks have suffered. She writes:

I identify several ways that blacks talk about immigration: how race impedes blacks’ abilities to be viewed as full citizens; disappointments over America’s failure to live up to its promise regarding blacks; and the perceived failure of immigrants to understand fully the nature of white supremacy." (p. 134).  

This is a very worthwhile book! I don't feel as if I am doing it justice, as it's full of really interesting insights and details about how immigrant groups have often been absorbed into the white mainstream while adopting white attitudes and prejudices, thus reinforcing the unequal status of Black people. I find this book even more interesting in light of other books I've read recently, especially Carol Anderson's White Rage (blogged here).

This image from a news report of a local Ann Arbor
protest march yesterday seems to me to be relevant
to this review. (source)

Review text copyright © 2020 by mae sander for maefood dot blog spot dot com. 

It's Almost Over!

No, I didn't take my selfie in the voting booth!

Line to enter the polling area at our local Middle School.

The line took around an hour for us, and appeared to be getting longer while we were waiting. The bottleneck was the slow rate at which the clerks could look up the voter registration info, compare it to the voter's filled-out request to vote, and then record the ballot number in two places. Many of the voting booths, as shown, were unused most of the time, because voting took less time than getting a ballot. I have no idea what if anything the authorities could do to improve this situation.

Embracing Lord Cthulhu

"Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real" -- This quotation by the early Christian writer Lacantius appears as the epigraph of the story "The Festival" by H.P. Lovecraft. (The Cthulhu Mythos, Kindle Locations 261-262).
  

H.P.Lovecraft, 1890-1937 (Wikipedia)

Lovecraft is the perfect reading for this week. As the Brits struggle with their racist voting decision, it's comforting to read about unknown aliens from other planets that make unspeakable threats against the pure human species. The worshippers of the unknowable and maybe unpronounceable Cthulhu speak in unintelligible, harsh, consonant-filled utterances. They say: "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn.” (The Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK, Kindle Locations 5148-5149).

The frightening races of interstellar invaders in Lovecraft's various stories have skin of strange colors, maybe green, maybe dark. They might look like undersea creatures or just malformed humans:

"Into the lands of civilization came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude." (Mythos, Kindle Locations 27-29)

Switch out "Nyarlathotep" and put in some actual race of foreigners. It sounds like the "leave" proponents' fantasy. Or maybe like Donald Trump. Build a wall against the swarthy, slender, sinister invaders. Hate the Jews who speak of electricity or psychology.

Writing seventy years ago, Lovecraft was a genuine hater of just about everybody that the majority of British voters expressed their hatred for last week. His extra-terrestrial creep-outs resemble everybody Trump hates. It's not surprising that Lovecraft, an American antisemite, racist, and xenophobe invented a paranoid weird fiction that relates so well to the current paranoia. Of course he wrote during an earlier outbreak of racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism -- but he wasn't commenting on the phenomenon, he was reflecting the spirit of his times. And maybe presaging ours.

"To anyone who’s read all of Lovecraft’s fiction plus even a smattering of biographical material, his venomous racism is self-evident; it’s right there on the page," wrote Laura Miller in Slate in an article titled "It’s OK to admit that H.P. Lovecraft was racist."

OK. Maybe we should just embrace Lovecraft's targets and recognize his prejudices as precursors to the worst feelings of our own time. Instead of identifying with the fearful white Christian small-town Americans who have seen the scary aliens, let's sympathize with the aliens and what they symbolize. Instead of feeling sorry for Lovecraft's lonely ineffective academics that probe the memories of a few surviving witnesses to the minions of Cthulhu, I think I'll just identify with the beasts and dream of an America where minority voters have a real say-so. Cthulhu lives!

"In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” (MEGAPACK, Kindle Location 8158).