Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Blog Against Racism Day

Chris Clarke proposes, and the left blogosphere disposes.

By the way, I’m sorry I’m so late with this entry (it’s almost 10 pm here in Pennsylvania), but December 1 just happened to be Create a Penn State Chapter of the American Association of University Professors Day, as well as Jamie Gets Sick and Comes Home from School Day. So here goes. Get yourselves a good drink and take a deep breath.

Every once in a while I teach James Weldon Johnson’s remarkable 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The plot turns on a lynching: the novel’s narrator, a talented young light-skinned African-American pianist and composer, is touring the South looking for material that he can use for a “classical” arrangement of traditional hymns and sorrow songs when he witnesses a black man being burned alive in a town square. He therefore makes the fateful decison to pass as white, even as he disavows the decision:

I argued that to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose. I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. All the while I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the malicious burning alive of animals.

I can’t possibly do justice to the novel in a short space, but (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) I do discuss it at some length in my forthcoming book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (Some of the rest of this post is adapted from that discussion.) For now, I’ll just point out two things. One, the narrator’s earlier decision to tour the South looking for material that will enable him to become the nation’s first black “classical” composer is itself exceptionally complex, because he knows he has the option of presenting himself as “white” instead. Two, the novel was published anonymously in 1912, which, of course, invited many readers to believe that it was true, and that the narrator was what you might call a “real” person. Johnson revealed himself as the author in 1927, whereupon it became clear that the “autobiography” was not a true story about a black man passing as white but, rather, a novel “passing” as an autobiography. All of which is to say, it’s great stuff, and I recommend it to all of you.

But the topic of lynching, like the topic of slavery and the topic of the vicious post-Reconstruction backlash in the South (of which lynching is an integral part), is not an easy one to address in undergraduate classrooms. It is so vile, and the postbellum backlash so vicious, that many white students—even students who seem to have more or less “liberal” sympathies on racial matters—get tense and defensive when the facts of the matter are laid before them. Some express this by wanting to establish their bona fides with their black classmates, and some express it by querulously wondering whether the novel is on the syllabus chiefly because it addresses lynching. Others have said—privately, to me, because they don’t want to start a fuss among their peers—that they don’t believe that white people in general were responsible for lynching, or that they themselves would never approve of such a thing and don’t see why it’s still a matter for discussion today.

So, in response to all those white students, sympathetic and un-, I have established a couple of ground rules for the discussion of lynching and slavery. First, I tolerate no faux-liberal grandstanding. No one gets any special moral bonus points, in the twenty-first century, for denouncing the obscenities of slavery and lynching. Second, if there is no be no faux-liberal grandstanding, so too there is to be no contrarian or faux-contrarian denial: no one is allowed to pretend that slavery was beneficial to the slaves, and no one is allowed to blink away the fact that the United States witnessed roughly sixty lynchings a year from 1875 through 1925, as lynching became a standard means of enforcing perceived breaches of the color line, and not exclusively those “breaches” that challenged the taboo of interracial sex (as Ida B. Wells reported in 1892, 728 lynchings of black Americans had occurred in the previous eight years alone). The subject of lynching is simply too serious to be blinked away.

But, you say, you’re talking about ancient history here, 1875 to 1925. Your students were born in 1985, for goodness’ sake. Why make them confront terrible human atrocities of a bygone era?

To which the answer is: the siege of Troy is ancient history. The Peloponnesian War is ancient history. Lynching was just the other day. To make the point a bit more vivid, I told one of my classes the story of the time my wife Janet met someone who’d attended a lynching. When we were in graduate school, she used to work as a cardiac intensive-care nurse at the University of Virginia, and one night, as she was tending to a very old and distinguished faculty member who happened to be one of her patients, he confessed to her that in his youth he had gone to a lynching. He said that at the time, he thought it was a terrible but ultimately necessary thing, that these people would not learn unless they were given very clear signals about how and how not to behave around white people. But as he got older he became increasingly convinced that he had been party to a grievous crime, a crime not only against that one black man but against humanity, and he wanted to confess it to someone—because he had never told anyone at the university—before he died.

My students were riveted. You have to understand (I told them) that my wife possesses an uncanny capacity to elicit this kind of soul-baring from people, without any effort on her part. And this was a truly harrowing story, not least because it reminded us that yes, in the late 1980s, there were still people living in the South who had participated in lynchings—never mind the people still living in the South who had killed Emmett Till in 1955, or the people who killed Medgar Evers in 1963, or the people who bombed those four black schoolgirls in Birmingham in 1964, or killed those three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—in Mississippi that same year. We knew in a general, indirect way about that kind of racial violence in the South, of course. But we never thought either of us would meet someone who had witnessed or taken part in it.

Now, I presume (safely, I think) that no one in my classrooms has ever seen or would ever condone a lynching, and I know that many of my students come from families that didn’t live in the United States when Johnson’s book was published. So, I tell my students, the only things you can possibly do “wrong” about such atrocities, at this late date, are to deny them or to pass over the various justifications for them advanced by white supremacists of a century ago. That’s it. You weren’t responsible for them then, folks, and you wouldn’t approve of them now, so let’s not let that be the issue. The atrocities have already occurred. The only question for you is whether you will acknowledge them and come to terms with the fact that they happened, or whether you will join the camp of the Deniers—about these atrocities or any others.

Should there be any doubt about the vileness of lynching or of the justifications for it, I could direct “dissenting” students (who might think, for whatever reason, that I am exaggerating about the pervasiveness of lynching and the popularity of its justifications) to the white supremacist books of the time, perhaps Thomas Dixon’s The Klansman or The Leopard’s Spots, or Charles Carroll’s The Negro A Beast, a best-seller of 1900. I’m sure that this material will shock even the most complacent reader today, regardless of his or her political stripes or spots. But so far in my teaching career, I haven’t had to do that; so far, it’s been a fairly simple matter of explaining to students that lynching was, at one time, so ubiquitous that a writer like James Weldon Johnson would hinge a novel’s plot on it—and would devote a good deal of his political life, as general secretary of the NAACP, to trying (and failing) to get an anti-lynching bill passed by the United States Congress.

For although most of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is actually about music—and my classes on Johnson’s novel are dominated, once they get going, by discussions of the narrator’s musical career, the history of black musicians’ “crossover” success with white audiences, and the history of white musicians’ appropriations, adaptations, and emulations of African-American musical forms—there is no question that Johnson wrote the book, in large part, to try to stem the tide of lynchings sweeping his nation. He did so not by trying to point out, in fictional form, that lynching was simply wrong; perhaps that would be too directly polemical, but then, the book is, at points, directly polemical, featuring a number of discussions of the Negro Question and an extensive disquisition on the class distinctions among African-Americans, which remains compelling one hundred years later. Rather, I think Johnson avoided the “lynching is wrong” line because by 1912, it clearly wasn’t working: too many white Americans believed that lynching was terrible but ultimately necessary, and far too many white Americans believed that lynching was a positively good thing that they should commemorate with celebratory photographs and postcards. There was no way that Johnson could challenge those beliefs directly and win. Instead, crafty writer that he was, Johnson set about creating a plot in which lynching is not merely wrong but also counterproductive, insofar as it stokes the very fears about racial “passing” that made white supremacists lose sleep at night. The book says as much in its preface: “these pages also reveal the unsuspected fact that prejudice against the Negro is exerting a pressure which, in New York and other large cities where the opportunity is open, is actually and constantly forcing an unascertainable number of fair-complexioned colored people over into the white race” (xxxiv). That’s what Johnson wants supremacists and other apologists for lynching to take away from the book: An unascertainable number, oh, my God. And they may even be among us right now!

For the most part, my black students aren’t shocked or appalled by the history of lynching; they already know about it, and they want to talk about the narrator’s decision to become a “black” composer and his later decision to “pass.” The white and Asian and Assorted Other students are OK with this too. But every once in a while, one of them comes up to me and asks whether there weren’t any good white people at the time, the kind who spoke out against lynching and tried to stop it. “Sure,” I say, “and there were plenty of white abolitionists, too. But here’s the thing. Sometimes there just weren’t enough ‘good’ white people within a ten-mile radius. During lynchings, during the era’s white-supremacist riots in Wilmington, Atlanta, Springfield, Tulsa, and so forth, there must have been some good white people around—but they stayed home, and they lost the day.”

I’ve tried to think hard about this “where were the good white folks” question when it’s asked by good white folks, because, of course, I would like to think of myself as one of ‘em too. And so would you, dear reader, if you’re white and if the blood of our common humanity flows in your veins. No decent white person today (and I do think of “decent” as a meaningful qualifier here) imagines him- or herself back in the days of slavery and lynching with a bullwhip or a torch in hand. I’ve gradually come to call this the Huckleberry Finn Scenario: it’s the seductive notion that if we were alive back then, even if we were poor backwoods kids whose only formal education included lessons about how abolitionism was immoral and “lowdown,” we would somehow, all by our lonesomes, come to the conclusion that we should save Jim and go to Hell. The same emotional appeal is at work in a film like Schindler’s List, as well: when we identify with Oskar Schindler or Huck Finn, we do so, in part, because we so desperately want to believe that we’d have wound up on the side of the angels “naturally,” even if we’d had no strong feelings about slavery or genocide to begin with (and even—or especially—if we’d started off on the wrong side).

By all means, then, go ahead and indulge in the Huck Finn Scenario: anything else is intolerable. But know that it is, after all, just a retrospective wish-fulfillment for a better world, and that for much of our nation’s history, there just weren’t enough good white people in a ten-mile radius, or in the halls of power, to get the good job done.

Now, what do I mean when I say that people should acknowledge and come to terms with the history of racist atrocities in the U.S.? Well, many things, but I’ll end with just one: beware of conservatives trying to hijack African-American history for political purposes today. There simply is no comparable history for conservatives: they endured no Middle Passage, they were not raped or beaten by slaveowners, they were not hung from trees or castrated or burned to death. Their little fantasies of “persecution” today are just that, fantasies; but when they are predicated on the history of African-American persecution, they become obscene.

Take, for a minor but entirely symptomatic example, the argument made in 2002 by one Kenneth Lee, a member of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. When David Horowitz had released yet another one of his “studies” demonstrating the liberal domination of academe (this one drawn largely from departments in the humanities and programs in women’s studies, as Martin Plissner pointed out at the time), Lee wrote, “the simple logic underlying much of contemporary civil-rights law applies equally to conservative Republicans, who appear to face clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race.” Even starker than previous blackballings by race: according to Lee, conservative scholars have it worse than did African-Americans under segregation and Jim Crow. (This would mean, in statistical terms, that on the vast majority of American campuses there are fewer than zero conservatives.) It is a fantastic and deeply offensive claim in and of itself, but it becomes all the more offensive if you go back and look at the history of conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action programs in American higher education.

I personally think it would be too much to say that when right-wing American ideologues paint themselves as the new black, they take up the mantle of their ideological forebears—that is, that yesteryear’s white supremacists actually did all the beating and the raping and the hanging and the castrating and the burning, and that their milder and more humane descendants today now construe themselves as akin not to the oppressors but to the oppressed. But it’s not too much to say that any attempt to construe contemporary American conservatives as victims of discrimination “even starker than previous blackballings by race” is a profound insult to every African-American who walked this land from 1619 onward. Acknowledging the atrocities of the past, then, means (among other things) refusing to trivialize and traduce history in this way today.

Posted by on 12/01 at 09:16 PM

I am irritated when conservatives quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., especially the one about not being judged on the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character, when they and their ideological forbearers were adamantly opposed to Dr. King during his lifetime - and for at least a decade after his death. I also wonder why no one ever interviewed the woman that Emmett Till whistled at.

Posted by on 12/01 at 11:16 PM
Nothing to add except: excellent post--thanks.

Posted by rootlesscosmo on 12/02 at 12:33 AM
I’m with rootlesscosmo. A wonderful post, Michael, thanks.

Posted by Matt on 12/02 at 12:56 AM
What rootlesscosmo and Matt said.

Also. Reading this, it occurs to me that I am currently within a ten-mile radius of Stanley “Tookie” Williams.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/02 at 01:01 AM
A very good post. I have read your blog for some time without commenting and want to thank you for such common humanity (which, sadly, is not so common). Where are all the “good white folks”? is not a question for ancient history. I grew up in Boston during the busing crisis of the 1970s and I’m still appalled at what I saw. Even at the age of 12 I understood that tipping over buses with seven-year olds in them was wrong and couldn’t understand why it was happening. Later, a couple kids from East Boston (I think), who seemed just like my older cousins (I grew up in Chelsea before the family moved out to the suburbs) nearly beat an African-American lawyer to death with an American flag. There’s an incident to brood upon. Maybe it’s from these images, and listening to my Uncles coming back from Vietnam talking about “gooks” and “slants” (pardon the vulgarity) that I get the impression that lynching is not such ancient history after all. Again, thank you. Between your post and International Aids Awareness day I have had much to consider this day.

Posted by on 12/02 at 01:17 AM
Reflecting further on your instructions to your class, Michael, I was reminded of seeing O Brother Where Art Thou in Berkeley when that movie came out.

(Mild spoiler follows) At the end of the Klan rally scene, when John Goodman the cyclops gets spanked by the tumbling burning cross, a handful of people in the audience burst into applause. And all I could think was “Thank you for your bravery in objecting to a caricatured fictional representation of the Klan… in a movie theatre in Berkeley.”

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/02 at 01:55 AM
Wow.

Am I the only one who’s tempted to matriculate at Penn State and take some lit classes?

Posted by Orange on 12/02 at 02:08 AM
I wish I was a member of your interpretive community. Can you write someting about subversion in popular culture or what? That is what I expect from a cult stud like you!

Posted by on 12/02 at 02:34 AM
Not such a wonderful post; in fact, rather sentimental and manipulative. What is the purpose of this? To make your fans clap in approval? While slavery may have been an injustice, it was hardly limited to America or to blacks--the Arab slave trade has been in business (and still is in ways) since, well, Mohammed if not before; Japanese imperialism has dominated east Asia for centuries. And as far as no one having it as bad as blacks, tell that to the descendents of the Irish, or Russians, or jews, or slavs, or chinese, and any number of other oppressed races and nationalities. Besides, agreeing that the lynchings were wrong does not imply that caucasians are admitting guilt--the typical liberal sentimentalist loves to imply that this racial guilt carries forth to all caucasians, a nearly Stalinist point of view. It’s as if the American white must feel gulty--why not lay this guilt trip on germans, or italians, or russians? The average academic liberal would much sooner forgive the descendents of Mussolini or Stalin than caucasian Americans.

Posted by Mister Toad on 12/02 at 02:40 AM
Must have been a good post, Michael: Troll dialed his Talking Point Buzzword Squid Ink Generator up to 11.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/02 at 02:52 AM
As far as no one having it as bad as blacks, tell that to the descendents of the Irish, or Russians, or jews, or slavs, or chinese, and any number of other oppressed races and nationalities . . . the typical liberal sentimentalist loves to imply that this racial guilt carries forth to all caucasians, a nearly Stalinist point of view.

It’s hard to imagine how someone could miss the point of the post more completely. But I knew I could count on you. You’re really not a very good reader, and I’m not surprised that you would take a post on lynching as an opportunity to bloviate in this way.

Chris, I’m not sure he’s on 11—maybe he just made 10 louder.

Posted by Michael on 12/02 at 08:28 AM
Chris Clarke is the guy who handed my ass to me after I thought I knew what I was talking about with nuclear physics. Well, I deserved it.

”...there just weren’t enough good white people in a ten-mile radius, or in the halls of power, to get the good job done.”

Apparently in New York there is a very poigmant museum dispaly of slavery in New York City. NYC does not have a stellar past in this regard, not hardly.

It wasn’t just the South. Lynchings were not a Northen phenomenon, yes, but a lot of good people have been needed up North, too, and have often been missing.

Posted by paradox on 12/02 at 08:54 AM
Yass in East Coast chi chi lit. land, to dissent now means to “troll”, that old term of USENET geek speak which the litsters misuse ad nauseaum . And note how the lefty litsters become objective ethicists of nearly baptist character anytime race is mentioned, but shift back to their cultural relativism a few minutes later.

Posted by MT on 12/02 at 08:56 AM
Quite true, paradox. The 1863 Draft Riots being a case in point.

And I believe many of us have had our asses handed to us by Chris Clarke. He’s very gracious about it, though, and always asks nicely if we want them back.

Posted by Michael on 12/02 at 09:00 AM
----Yass in East Coast chi chi lit. land, to dissent now means to “troll”, that old term of USENET geek speak which the litsters misuse ad nauseaum . And note how the lefty litsters become objective ethicists of nearly baptist character anytime race is mentioned, but shift back to their cultural relativism a few minutes later.----

No, actually, to write stupid shit like this is to troll. You may want to glorify your smug little elbows-on-keyboard comments with the term “dissent,” but around here we recognize them as just plain stupid remarks.

And quite apart from your incessant drunken sneering wankerdom, which has distinguished you on many a blog, I’ve had enough of the tired, dishonest two-step in which you accuse people like me of being cultural relativists, and then, when we reply that we are not “relativists” at all, you proceed to accuse us of hypocrisy.

Posted by Michael on 12/02 at 09:09 AM
Did somebody say relativism?

While slavery may have been an injustice, it was hardly limited to America or to blacks

Please.

Michael, thank you so much for this post and another glimpse into your teaching methods. Count me among those who wish they could attend your classes.

Paradox, were you thinking of the exhibit of lynching postcards, Without Sanctuary?

Posted by on 12/02 at 09:44 AM
Not only the 1863 NYC Draft Riots, but at the time of the Revolution, slavery, tho dying out in the north, was legal in all 13 Colonies. There was a move to recruit slaves by purchase from their owners to serve in the Continental Army, w/ promise of emancipation at the end of the war. This was shot down by both northern and southern members of Congress.

Great post!

Posted by on 12/02 at 09:46 AM
I don’t get it. The wingers want to be victims of...whatever (racism, the Holocaust, the DMV, all of them writ small, of course, so as not to interfere w/ their shopping at Target etc.). When they feel implicitly accused of some crime, they whinge and whinge. But should they revel in their victimhood rather than trying to stave it off?

==

Trolls:

Paying attention to slavery in America and its particular characteristics (i.e., Arab slave traders lynched no one in North Carolina) does not mean that we’ve lost the right to condemn it elsewhere. Decrying the ‘Internment’ of Japanese-Americans does not mean we have to applaud the Rape of Nanking. Capiche?

==

MB,

When you teach the Autobiography do your students often call the main character James W. Johnson? That’s the common mistake I discovered when I graded for a Race and Racism course.

Posted by on 12/02 at 09:48 AM
Karl—yep, some of them do, even when they know better. I think the narrative “I” is just so compelling that some readers have a hard time believing it isn’t Johnson’s life story. Though I have to say that I once taught the book in a course on autobiography (partly to make a point about forged signatures, so to speak), and in that class, the Johnsoning was intense. It was as if, even after the ruse had been exposed—three, four times—they still wanted to treat the book as an autobiography. After all, it was an autobiography class. . . .

Posted by on 12/02 at 10:00 AM
No, SneakySnu, that’s not it. It’s open right now in New York City at a municipal museum, I think. I saw the piece on the Lehr News Hour.

It went into very good detail about slavery in the city, yes, but the focus of the work was really the shock many New Yorkers expressed that slavery was so prevalent in their city’s history at all. They had just assumed that slavery had never been there.

For some the loss of idealism was quite profound, and they professed to looking at the city and its citizens of color with new eyes.

I am a California spic (by federal student aid standards of ten years ago, anyway) who looks and talks like a white boy--this North-South feels so removed from me sometimes. I often wonder if I have done enough to stop the quasi-slavery of immigrant labor that produces all of our fresh food--Monterey is only 40 minutes drive from here, horrible stories of evil in the strawberry fields haunting me every season.

Not just the north, but also not just in the past, either. We’re shouldn’t get all snotty on how far we’ve progressed as a people, not hardly.

Posted by paradox on 12/02 at 10:02 AM
Great post, Michael. Thank you.

I have a good friend who teaches a course called Minority Women Writers to 2nd year university students. She consistently comes across the same kinds of reactions as you do with your students, with the addition of “Yeah, but we live in Canada. There’s no racism here.” at which point the students who are of a visible minority merely make eye contact with each other and roll their eyes. Unfortunately, we are not taught (until university level) about such things as laws that were not repealed until the early ‘60s that made it legal to jail women for, among other things, involvement with non-white men.

Posted by on 12/02 at 10:08 AM
I often wonder if I have done enough to stop the quasi-slavery of immigrant labor that produces all of our fresh food

Not all, not necessarily. I know it’s a bit OT, but joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is a great way to get, er, great food and associate yourself w/ small farms, whose labor practices at least have a chance of being decent;* big agribusiness, on the other hand, is almost certainly monstrous in its exploitations. If you don’t belong to one, join one when the next growing season kicks in. It’s a real life-changer. ... and now back to grading.

* For example, you can, as I did, visit ‘your’ own farm to put your mind at rest, assuming no Potemkin Villaging.

Posted by on 12/02 at 10:15 AM
That exhibit on slavery in early New York is at the New-York [sic] Historical Society, Central Park West and 77th Street.

Posted by rootlesscosmo on 12/02 at 10:40 AM
Paradox, your forgiveness of my intemperance is humbly and profoundly appreciated.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/02 at 10:51 AM
What I most liked about this post is how Michael demonstrates the way that discourse should proceed in an academic environment. (Actually, it’s what I like in most of your posts.)

But I did have one moment of pause. You see, my father-in-law has a very stereotypical view of how things work in “liberal academia,” a view that would mostly be upended by this post—except for the discussion of conservatives at the end. What I’d like for Michael to do is justify his primary attack on the extreme right position (that whites, especially white conservatives) have it *worse* than blacks.

That’s simply too easy a position to disprove. These people are, quite obviously, raving loons. But my problem with it as a critique is that it lets those who believe something somewhat *less* extreme off the hook. Those conservatives might argue that, of course, African-Americans had it worse, but the current “persecution” of white conservatives is akin, if to a (much) lesser degree.

I’m willing to entertain that argument, though I think it is not supported by any objective data. But it just struck me that in an otherwise exceptional post, you suddenly jumped all over the most obviously wrong position.

Or have I misunderstood your purpose.

Posted by on 12/02 at 10:57 AM
Oh, good question, Paulk. Sorry I didn’t make the rhetorical break clear before the last three paragraphs of this post. But just for the record, I’ve never introduced the “Kenneth Lee is a loon” argument in a classroom. And I brought it up here, at the end of my discussion of Johnson, only because I’ve spent much of the year writing a book that points out (among other things) how the conservatives-in-academe crew have hijacked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement.

Posted by on 12/02 at 11:20 AM
Thanks, Paradox! I found the exhibit. It’s at the New York Historical Society and is open until March. Here’s the exhibit web site. It looks very good. They already have a second exhibit planned for next year.

Posted by on 12/02 at 12:17 PM
Thank you Michael--interesting post.

Slavery is just not ancient history. I knew, fairly well, a man whose mother had been born a slave. My girlfriend’s grandmother met a woman who had been a slave (of her family). The history is still very close.

However, I think the conversation about lynching is too often overly modern. Lynching as we remember it was all about race--and many lynchings certainly were. But even in 1892, a third of the lynchings recorded in the Chicago Tribune were of whites. It is important to remember that there is a hugely important portion of American culture that saw and sees justice being done outside the law as preferable--that sees legal justice as a last resort if there’s no one else to take vengeance. (Ironically, this idea is now more common in the black community than the white.) And lynching grew out of that tradition; public killings in revenge for certain crimes were common (listen to country music, or any oral history of the hill-country).

In other words, it’s the norms being enforced by racial lynchings that I see as the problem--not the means by which those norms were enforced. If an axe murderer were hung by a mob, I would have very little problem with it. If someone is punished for a relationship with a white woman, whether that is done through the courts by a fake rape case (To Kill a Mockingbird), or by a mob, seems to me relatively unimportant.

Posted by on 12/02 at 12:40 PM
An excellent post, Mr. Berube. A quick answer to the question “where were the good white people” can be found in my own law of human behavior: In general, people are no damn good and right-wingers are the worst of a bad lot. I realize that isn’t the sort of WarmFuzzy attitude many people would prefer, but c’est la vie. If one wants an illustration of my law in action, and to see examples of an all-too-common right-wing attitude, do a Google search on the word lynching and in the phrase field white-bashing. You’ll find page after page of whining, narcissistic self-pity.

Posted by on 12/02 at 01:15 PM
Thanks for the post Michael. I remain very grateful to you for inspiring me to read James Weldon Johnson. An extraordinary writer on many levels.

Posted by on 12/02 at 01:42 PM
Thanks for an excellent post.

And thanks for articulating a method for getting students to talk/think constructively about horrifying elements of the past that are still very much a part of or have a legacy in the present. I have similar problems when teaching “The Prioress’s Tale” (most common response: oh, those medieval people were so horrible to Jews; isn’t it good that we’re not like that anymore) and I may adapt your ground rules to my class.

Posted by Dr. Virago on 12/02 at 02:01 PM
DV,

This young academic just taught the PrT for the first time last month and fully expected a lot of self-congratulation. Oddly, I didn’t get it: I think the Holocaust may have had something to do w/ it. This being NYC, there’s also a lot of Jews in my class, which also may have had something to do w/ it.

My strategy in teaching it was: a) give a 5-minute history of the development of medieval anti-semitism, ensuring that the students knew both that the ritual murder legend was not only very popular in England but that it may have been invented there and that the Jews had been expelled in 1290; b) focus on the overwrought sentimentalization the little boy--as if the Pr doesn’t trust the audience to react correctly--and connect this to the Pr’s mawkish qualities in her GP portrait and also to the collective punishment of the Jews for an individual crime (as this tale *isn’t* actually about a ritual murder); c) suggest that the Xian monk at the end may be the boy’s ‘true’ killer (i.e., the clergeon wouldn’t have died if that mysterious grain hadn’t been taken off his tongue) just to rile them up a bit. It worked just fine, and I can’t wait to teach it again, depending of course on how well the market treats me this year.

Posted by on 12/02 at 02:22 PM
I have a friend born about 1955 who moved to North Florida from wisconsin in the early sixties, when his mother remarried. He gradually found out that one of his stepfather’s good friends had been the guy in charge of lychings. Contrary to popular opinion, lynchings were not spontaneous outbursts, ot not always, but usually were organized by respected community leaders.

Slightly related: William Zantzinger of Hattie Carroll is still alive. In later ife he was well respected and well liked by his peers, despite a fraud conviction in 1991.

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/slant/2004/11/10_200.html

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/article314577.ece

Posted by John Emerson on 12/02 at 03:46 PM
Johnson’s brother Rosamond was a composer, with Broadway hits to his credit, most famously, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” which Judy Garland later sang and T.S. Eliot quoted/parodied in Sweeney Agonistes. James W. wrote poems and lyrics (not to “Bamboo Tree"), most famously a song he wrote with Rosamond, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which has been called the Black National Anthem. A beautiful song. More on it and the Johnsons:

http://www.africanamericans.com/NegroNationalAnthem.htm

Posted by john on 12/02 at 03:47 PM
I agree with everyone who complimented this wonderful post, and wish I could pinch the trolls. Hard. I’m writing, though, to ask how if you started writing this at “almost 10 pm” (the entry starts out: “By the way, I’m sorry I’m so late with this entry (it’s almost 10 pm here in Pennsylvania), but December 1 just happened to be ...”), you managed to get it posted at 9:16 p.m. ! At the end of post it says “Posted by Michael on 12/01 at 09:16 PM”. Is time travel the secret to your prodigious productivity?

Posted by Ann Bartow on 12/02 at 04:35 PM
Concerning the Huck Finn illusion;

My family is from the south, but I grew up in the Mid-west (Iowa). As a good liberal, I told myself that I was descended from a long line of horse-thieves that didn’t really participate in slavery. No one contradicted this, so we’ll just call it a family willed-ignorance, especially considering the history of southern slavery.

Until a few years ago. I (the youngest) was finally told the story of the lost family fortune. An ancestor, at the end of the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression), decided no Yankee was going to tell him how to live his life, packed up all his things (yes, slaves included), and headed to New Orleans where he was going to sail to South America. He was intercpted by the Union Army and had everything he owned stripped from him.

During this same conversation, my uncle related how, when growing up, he saw all the “negros” hanging on the last street car out of town at 5, because the local police chief had let them know they wouldn’t be welcome. This was in Oklahoma, not the so-called deep south.

Speaking of family in OK, they got there for the land rush. Some Native Americans weren’t particularly pleased with this.

The point to all this? My willed-ignorance had been chipped at over the years, but here it fell apart completely. No one in my family has ever admitted to being at a lynching, but, as the story of your wife points out, they wouldn’t would they. So I come from a family that was deeply embedded in the racist structures of slavery. With that knowledge, can I really believe I might have been different if I’d lived back then?

Posted by on 12/02 at 06:30 PM
Is time travel the secret to your prodigious productivity?

Ann, Professor MacGonagall did permit me the use of a time-turner for this one academic year, but only on condition that I never divulge . . . oops.

Actually, what happened is that I posted the first half of this to the EE Control Panel at 9:16, and then continued to work on it for the next 40 minutes or so. When it was finally done, the timestamp still read 9:16.

Chip, thanks for your story, and John, thanks for letting everyone know about Johnson’s musical career, especially “Lift Every Voice.” (He also put together one of the first anthologies of African-American poetry, The Book of American Negro Poetry. A great American and a great public intellectual, that JWJ.

Posted by Michael on 12/02 at 07:28 PM
For a true Huck Finn story, one rural area near my home in small-town Minnesota was settled by Southerners who had fought in the Union Army and decided afterwards that they had no homes to go to. Their tiny church is the only Baptist church in the general area, and when I was in HS (grad. 1964)those guys seemed peculiar to me—neither Lutheran nor Catholic, neither German nor Norwegian. They hunted coons on horseback with dogs, etc..

Posted by John Emerson on 12/02 at 09:57 PM
A “sequel of sensibility” to Johnson’s book is George Schuyler’s “Black No More” (1931), a science fiction novel about a black scientist who discovers how to turn “black” skin into “white” skin.

Schuyler was a labor left fellow at the time, but after WWII, became a rabid right winger who attacked Martin Luther King as the cause of more racial violence. He has been largely read out listings of black authors during “Black History” month, at least from my observations.

Posted by Mitchell Freedman on 12/02 at 11:12 PM
First, to Mitchell Freedman: I teach Schuyler in my WEB Du Bois class, and I know others who teach him as well. I use his essay, “The Negro Art Hokum” as a counterpoint to Du Bois’ “Criteria of Negro Art.” Anyway, I’ve blogged about what I think Schuyler’s place is in the canon of African American journalism history—which is closer to my area of focus:
<a href=http://professorkim.blogspot.com/2004/05/remembering-george-schuyler.html>link</a>.

Second, I’ll join the chorus in commending your post. I’ve worked on two interactive CDs for the <a href=http://www.asalh.org>Association for the Study of African American Life and History</a> related to the period that “Autobiography” was written, and I agree with you that it’s challenging to help students understand the sensibilities of that era. I organized the CD I did this past year around a timeline that spanned from the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895 to the death of Booker Washington in 1915. That meant not only chronicling a lot of lynchings and mob attacks on black communities, but also presenting examples of the racism that pervaded the Academy, cultural institutions, and daily life.

But I think it’s important to note that there were quite a few white anti-slavery and anti-lynching activists. Some of them—Elijah Lovejoy, for example, were killed for their racial idealism. But it was whites who were horrified by lynching who martialed the resources that helped turn the Niagara Movement into the NAACP.

Thanks for a great post.

Posted by Kim Pearson on 12/03 at 12:16 AM
concerning a couple of matters.

really enjoyed this post, and its subsequent comments.

to comment on people coming to terms with lynching in america, i think this is something the charles h. wright museum of african american history in detroit had a life changing (for me at least) exhibit that ran for about 6 or 7 months dealing exactly with this subject, sadly the exhibit ended in feb. of this year.

titled “without sanctuary: lynching photography in america” the exhibit featured some truly unnerving photographic documents of a not so distant american past (hence there were PHOTOGRAPHS of these events). i read that nearly 60,000 people came to check this exhibit out, a number which i think is greater than the usual attendance to the museum’s past and current exhibits, so people are ready to deal with these types of human atrocities.

the exhibit’s purpose was two-fold. not just to “shock” the museum-goer, it intended to create a dialogue about lynching. to facilitate this a forum titled “bearing witness, bearing our souls” was set up that had all kinds of educational programs with films, lectures and panels. here are some of the forum’s questions i dug up that were specifically addressed:

does legal activism remain a force for social and political change?

what is the legacy of violence on current economic, political, and social issues?

was lynching a vehicle of economic exploitation?

can complacency empower corruptible forces?

-------------------------------------------------

unrelated, michael, i am really interested if you could spill some of your thoughts on conservative academics appropriating the rhetoric of the civil rights movement.

i experienced this head-on in my final semester at calvin college, a private, christian, liberal arts college in grand rapids, mi. though many of the profs there, especially in the english dept. (my minor) pride themselves in being “liberal” christians, and therefore completely different (indeed they are much different than a right wing conservative christian) than the typical christian academic. indeed, calvin is much more liberal of a christian college than any other in u.s., but this isn’t what i’m getting at.

my “liberal” christian literary theory prof. suggested exactly (!) this appropriation of civil rights rhet be done in order to bring religious readings back into favor in the much larger “secular” acdeme. i’m forgetting some of the texts we read, but henry louis gates, jr.’s essay “writing, ‘race,’ and the difference it makes” comes to mind here. while we briefly discussed the true significance of this text as a part of the canon wars and multiculturalism’s appearance in the academe, he quickly switched gears to discussing how christian academics, who’s religious readings of literature are persecuted by secular universities by default, can use gate’s and others arguments to gain a position. though a heavy debate ensued, my blood boiled over. it simply made no sense to me, “persecuted” or not, to appropriate their rhetoric for a predominantly white, highly educated community. can’t they come up with some other solid arguments to get “secular” academics to take them seriously? what are your thoughts?

thanks again for the post.

Posted by on 12/03 at 11:26 AM
excellent post, though i was expecting a different finish. pairing the desire to be a good white folk [a desire i have as a white folk] with an acknowledgement of racist atrocities, it seems that a more obvious question is how we are currently complicit in present-day atrocities. think education, prison populations, or most any other distribution of social goods/ills. how are each of us complicit is perpetuating these institutions that do such a good job of sorting and reifying?

Posted by on 12/03 at 01:27 PM
Michael’s description of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man reminded me of Richard Power’s most recent novel, The Time of our Singing. It concerns a family raising three prodigious musicians who each examine their racial background in radically different ways.

Great post. I can’t wait to read your new book.

Posted by on 12/03 at 04:37 PM
To those students who complain that lynching is ancient history, I would ask them to read some of the recent histories of the Balkans. When Tito came to power in the postwar period he enforced a type of racial harmony in Yugoslavia with an iron hand. People whose parents were trying to kill each other found they could live together in relative peace. That truce held for over 40 years, about the same time since the violence of the civil rights movement here in the US. Then Tito died and some Yugoslav politicians decided to build their power on ethnic lines and overnight the racial comity that had existed for over a generation disappeared into one of the worst European bloodbaths of the postwar era.

I work in refugee programs and was interviewing Bosnians for resettlement in the US back in 1997. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I heard people say that they woke up one day and the people that they grew up with and were their friends, attended their weddings, celebrated births and helped them bury their loved ones, suddenly turned on them and denounced them, attacked them and killed their families.

The racial enmity that some feel is finally behind us can become an active volcano overnight. If it happened before it can happen again. The only way to guard against it is to confront it.

Posted by on 12/03 at 07:36 PM
Thanks to John in #34 for the details of the Johnson Brothers’ musical career--I came to the comments to share them, and there they were. (My kids used to sing “Lift Every Voice” at the school they attended).

A few years ago Yale’s Beinecke Library had an exhibit on personal items belonging to them (they must hold some of their papers). Among the extraordinary pieces was a postcard to J.W. from G. B. Shaw, in which Shaw expressed outrage at lynching. Two things struck me at the time--that Shaw wrote sentence after glittering, witty sentence on a small rectangle of cardboard without needing to revise a line; and that they seemed to be on terms of some intimacy, i.e. at least okay friends.

And then there was J. W.’s career as a diplomat: ambassador to Nicaragua? Costa Rica? I forget--but a man of astounding accomplishments.

Posted by on 12/05 at 03:04 PM
More fodder for the slavery-wasn’t-that-long-ago contingent: The last American slave died in 1979...ancient history indeed.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=291903

Posted by on 12/06 at 03:01 AM
Excellent post! However, I would not agree that lynching is “ancient history” or that no one in your class (or in modern 21st century America) has seen or could condone lynching. As David Bradley argues in an essay published in Bernestine Singley’s “When Racism Becomes Real” what was Rodney King’s beating if not a state-sanctioned lynching? Not to mention Amadou Diallo who was gunned down by four of Guiliano’s horrible henchmen in NYC a few years ago? Whenever I read how Guiliano is “America’s Mayor” or I hear how highly his chances are of becoming the next POTUS I hurt deep inside my soul.

Also, I would highly recommend “Without Sanctuary”!

Posted by Ms. Hill on 12/06 at 04:59 PM
What a load of shit. Talk about outrage: smug, comfortable, well-sinecured North American academics elbowing themselves in the honored, deserved, remembered space of victims of lynching, implying, somehow, that they would have done something, if only they had been around, casting themselves as affiliates, comrades of the murdered, and having the gall to imply that their current political adversaries are somehow the ones complicit in the crimes.

You would have done something about lynching if you were around 100 years ago? Right. You would do exactly what you do today: very little; in most cases, nothing.

You want to get involved? There are thousands of lynchings going on every year. Where to start? How about Mexico or Guatemala.

Mexico
http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/feb02/hmrt.html
Guatemala
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR340172005

Women are disappearing by the hundreds in the towns of Tijuana and Guatemala City (we can only imagine the awful total if we summed up the lynched for the entire countries). And they are being murdered not by serial killers – unless we are to consider the macho, meso-american male as a prototype, then yes, they are being murdered by this killer – but in thousands of sordid lynchings (what do you call a murder when it is perpetrated against one class by another class, in a legal environment where governing authorities refuse to intervene? A LYNCHING.), many with witnesses.

How about honor killings? In many countries – Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, oh hell, anywhere we have muslims – women are slaughtered for any real or perceived sexual transgression. LYNCHED. And the spouse, father, brother, SON, gets away with it, claiming defense of honor.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html

How about murderous homophobia? It’s is common knowledge (do you all ever read newspapers) that gays are assaulted on sight in Jamaica, often murdered. The police laugh it off. Reggae pop-star heroes record poisonous rap lyrics encouraging these LYNCHINGS.

“Black and gay and hunted: in Jamaica, lesbians and gays are the victims of violent persecution—often murder. Fuelling this gay-bashing are popular reggae lyrics” http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4708_133/ai_n6258534

And let’s not leave out India, I don’t believe there has existed in the entire scan of human experience a more oppressive, evil social system than Hindu caste system: apartheid on steroids, with a religious ideology wrapped around it. For the sheer number of unfortunate victims, what else can compare. Things might be less severe today, but millions of dalits endure with the knowledge that they can be murdered by upper castes and there is a very good chance that the upper caste will get away with it. LYNCHED.

Lynchings in asia, latin, or African cultures really do not provoke the concern of the great American lefty because there is no white, Christian, conservative patriarch to indict. OK, if the lefty can somehow tie such murders to whatever white, conservative, patriarchal ruling class that has some power then there will be some interest and concern otherwise the victims are on their own. Too bad.

How to get involved? Many of you are teachers, you interact with people from these cultures, students. Get in their faces with this stuff, don’t let them brush it off or explain it aside (they will hate you for this. This is NOT what they expected from a lefty American academic), don’t let them dismiss it as slander or irrelevant, and don’t for a minute presume that your student would not be like that old English professor. That’s a start. I give these people shit all the time.

Posted by on 12/06 at 11:21 PM
You would have done something about lynching if you were around 100 years ago? Right. You would do exactly what you do today: very little; in most cases, nothing.

What about the Huck Finn Scenario didn’t you understand, Daniel? Everything, apparently.

The rest of your comment is even worse.

Lynchings in asia, latin, or African cultures really do not provoke the concern of the great American lefty because there is no white, Christian, conservative patriarch to indict.

This blog is actually written by someone who believes in every last article of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. So take your opportunistic citations of global human rights violations to some blog where they’ll let you get away with this nonsense.

Posted by Michael on 12/07 at 01:24 AM
Michael,

>>I personally think it would be too much to say that when right-wing American ideologues paint themselves as the new black, they take up the mantle of their ideological forebears—that is, that yesteryear’s white supremacists actually did all the beating and the raping and the hanging and the castrating and the burning, and that their milder and more humane descendants

Boy, you can dish it out, but you can’t take it; besides, I wasn’t making a point about YOU personally, but about the general attitude of your blog colleagues.

I do understand you point about Huck Finn; my point is you are dissembling. What you (plural, OK) are doing is quite common, we all do it, I do it; you are admitting just enough guilt (In your case, guilt by association as a middle class white man) so that you can imply “See, I accept, understand and take my measured responsibility for the horrow of American racism, but having publicly declared as such, you cannot think that I would have been actually complicit in or willfully negligent in preventing such horrors had I been around, afterall, why would I admit as much as I do if I am guilty of far worse?” That is what I think is the subtext to your position. This stance makes us feel comfortable; it’s a necessary psychological crutch; It enables us to live with some pretty troubling thoughts and facts. How could Spielberg ever get anyone to see his movie if we didn’t have this device?

The perfect exemple of this rationalization at work can be seen in the current pronouncements of Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Anthony Lake on how they finesse their refusal to pick up the ball when the Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda. They had a moral obligation to do something, but Albright refused to even use the word genocide because if she had then, under law, we would have been compelled to act. They assiduosly went out of their way to avoid having the U.S. do anything, because they feared it would have been politically unpopular; and you know for Bill Clinton popularity is the alpha, omega and everything in between. Today, they will only go as far as admitting that “some mistakes” were made; and the fault was really strutural; it lay with our procedures for examining and responding to crises. And of course, nobody personally is to be blamed. Right.

Such dissembling makes me sick. EVERYONE, knew what was going on. I did; you did. We knew it from the very first days and if action had been taken in those early days the vast majority of those slaughtered would still be living. 2 battalions of marines on the ground would have stopped the slaughter in its tracks, just shooting of few of the ring-leaders on the spot would have sent the savages running into the hills. This is how lynchings and massacres happen.

So, what is the point of dwelling on the horrors of lynching and murder in America, imputing the deeds to antecedents of the Republican party (laughable, really), without deriving lessons on how all should act when similar horrors happen again? I don’t know. They way you brought the matter up and finished it off, implying that today’s Republicans are somehow the legacies of lynchers past seems nothing more than stoking the fires of a 2 minute hate.

I’m curious, I don’t mean malice here, what was the response and thought of your academic colleagues to Rwanda, as it was happening? Was it as indifferent as the general political class, even thought their own affiliates were in charge? Did they pretend ingorance? Could they not just be bothered?

Posted by on 12/07 at 01:09 PM
Well, Daniel, you can dish it out, but you sure can’t take it.

Just two brief responses: one, as to whether I implied that today’s Republicans are somehow the legacies of lynchers past. When I say “it is too much to say X,” I mean, more or less, “it is too much to say X.” I do not mean to imply X. As for whether Republicans—more specifically, conservatives in academe—have tried to paint themselves as the new black, I find your response simply evasive. I didn’t fabricate Kenneth Lee’s remark—and you don’t even acknowledge it.

Two, I supported UN (or, failing that, US-led) intervention in Rwanda. As in Kosovo. Although I don’t know where academe stood in the aggregate, I suggest that you consult the historical record on Rwanda: many people, in a big tent that stretched from the New Republic to the academic left, thought Clinton’s failure to intervene was a profound moral failure. But then, when Clinton did intervene in Kosovo, he got less than zero support from conservatives. So much for your theory that “for Bill Clinton popularity is the alpha, omega and everything in between.” And so much, once again, for your opportunistic citation of global human rights violations.

I posted about James Weldon Johnson’s novel because I teach it. To suggest than in doing so, I am somehow complicit in my silence about other forms of racism, is intellectually dishonest.

Posted by Michael on 12/07 at 01:47 PM
Michael,

OK, I DO agree that any academic - right wing or left wing - presenting whatever collegial difficulties he has as anywhere close to what blacks had to suffer under slavery and what followed for 100 years as ridiculous and stupid.

When I said you, I meant y’all or youse or ya’s, I wasnt’ making any claim about your personal rectitude.

Posted by on 12/07 at 02:31 PM
I do ‘preciate that, Daniel. Oh, and for the record, I would be just fine with intervention in Darfur as well.

Posted by on 12/07 at 03:11 PM
In response to the question posed by John in Comment #34, James Weldon Johnson was a diplomat in Haiti before he went to work for the NAACP. Here is a link to his 1920 article about the American occupation: “Self-determining Haiti” http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/563.html

Posted by Kim Pearson on 12/15 at 08:17 PM
an excellent and powerful book suggestion: 3rd ed. of: Race and the Rise of the Republican Party. Jim

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