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The Good Lord Baldwin Country, and to Hell With Buckley Anyway!

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Justice, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Debate, History, Horror, James Baldwin, Lovecraft Country, Racism, Slavery, The Good Lord Bird, White Privilege, William F. Buckley

“Are white South African or Mississippi sharecropper, or Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom, a system of reality which compels them to, for example, in the case of the French exile from Algeria, to offend French reasons from having ruled Algeria. The Mississippi or Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he’s facing a Negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity.”

God damn that James Baldwin!

He was right about far too many things.

He was right about them in 1965, and speaking as he was in 1965, he is just as right about them today, damn it anyhow. It’s enough to make a white guy raised on stories of progress feel all somehow!

I really do hate that!

You can hear Baldwin’s voice in the first episode of Lovecraft Country. An exerpt from a speech he gave at Cambridge Union back in 1965 plays over a couple scenes this in this episode.

This is as brilliant as it is ironic.

This Baldwinization of Lovecraft effectively transforms the literary themes of a known racist into a meditation on the nature of racism in American history. You can see Lovecraft in the monsters. You can see Baldwin in the protagonists.

YEAH SPOILERS!

Lest one miss the connection to Baldwin’s speech in 1965, one has only to think about a few more of his words;

“We talk about integration in America as though it was some great new conundrum. The problem in America is that we’ve been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African and you will see what I mean. My grandmother was not a rapist.”

Now just think about the plot-line for the male lead in Lovecraft country, a back man (Atticus Freeman – played by Jonathan Majors) turns out to be an heir of a rich white explorer. Far from being a blessing, this proves to be a terrible curse.

Lovecraft Country, is James Baldwin’s critique of American racism transformed into a horror story. Just how much of a transformation that took is another question. It should come as no surprise to find Jordan Peele listed as one of the show’s producers. It wouldn’t be the first time, he mapped the patterns of racism directly onto a horror story and left some of us more than a little disturbed at how easy and obvious the connection turned out to be. It’s also fitting that Lovecraft, in particular, would be the vehicle for this narrative, not just because of the delicious irony, but because so much of Lovecraftian horror resides in the prospect of insanity. In Lovecraft, this horror is about the encounter with horrors such as C’thulhu, in the consequence of knowing one day a monstrous God will destroy everything and there is nothing we can do about it. In Baldwin, this insanity the consequences of racism. It is about the perception of whites threatened by those challenging racism, and about the impact of racism itself on the minds of white people struggling to rationalize our own privilege. As Baldwin suggests, white privilege leads us to think of those who challenge it as insane, and yet that same same privilege cannot skew the reality of those who benefit from it. Racism, as Baldwin describes it, does merely enable one segment of society to oppress another; it twists the minds of each into a distorted of reality.

“I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered – you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.”

You can see the psychological impact of racism all over Lovecraft country. The horrors faced by the central characters in this story are consistently brought to them by white people. For their own part, the world of the white characters in this series appears to be quite insane.

But of course!

How could the white characters in this world not prove insane. They are on the back end of the cattle prod, so to speak, and that, as Baldwin warns us, has its own hazards.

This same theme, the psychological effect of racism, also plays out in yet another contemporary series, The Good Lord Bird. Ostensibly a story about John Brown, the series turns into a meditation on the insanity of slavery, and in particular of its effect on those who benefit from it. There are few well-grounded characters in this story. Most of them are slaves. Even Frederick Douglas comes across as a man spoiled by privilege, one whose sense of reality is distorted by his own fame as an abolitionist, and whose commitments to the abolition of slavery are compromised by that very fame. To say nothing of John Brown himself! As he is portrayed in this series, Brown is an absolute lunatic. We love him, of course, at least in the end, but there is little question about his sanity. He doesn’t have it. No. To find a sensible character in this story, one has to look with the characters held in bondage. The slaves in this story are the only characters with the good sense to look after themselves. The rest are either too busy defending slavery and exploiting it or spiraling into ever more crazy schemes for opposing it. For those held in bondage, slavery in the Good Lord Bird is a force which keeps subjected to it well grounded; it is a force which sends those free of it into ever more bizarre flights of fancy.

The Good Lord Bird follows the story of an adolescent boy, Henry Shackleford (played by Joshua Caleb Johnson). Henry is labeled a girl by John Brown himself and Christened with a new nickname, ‘Onion’. When Brown proves incapable of correction, Henry simply accepts his new identity and thus becomes ‘Onion’ for the rest of the series. Henry knows who he is of course, but this is what it takes to get along in a world driven mad by people high on the privilege of freedom denied to others.

There is something especially interesting about the insanity of Brown and Douglas in the Good Lord Bird. It is as though the series producers believe you would have to be a little crazy to cut so far against the grain of the society in which you live, to seek to act effectively in opposition to slavery, to actually do what it takes to end it. Brown is typically regarded as something of a lunatic or a fanatic in history. (As I recall, this was one of the gripes mentioned by James Loewen in Lies My Teachers Told Me.) But how does one oppose an institution as powerful as slavery without becoming a lunatic or a fanatic. You can mumble, “oh that’s wrong,” or speak of some day overcoming the institution, but systemic oppression is not so fragile as to be threatened by expressions of passive regret. To actually confront the institution is to wage war against so many other things right along with it, even to risk bringing about harm to many people. That would of course include friends, and family, and even those one might seek to help in the end. You’d have to be a little crazy to want to do such a thing. Ethan Hawke is a lot crazy as John Brown in this series, and (for some of us anyway) it is a truly lovable performance.

James Baldwin reminds us that it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see a man confronting slavery treated as a crazy person, not at the time, not the history books, and not now on screen.

Damn that Baldwin!

His ghost is writing scripts for cable television.

But of course Baldwin wrote one other script with his speech back in Cambridge. He wrote the script for his debate opponent. You see, Baldwin was there in Cambridge on that day in 1965 to debate William F. Buckley, Jr. The topic for the debate was the proposition; “The American dream is at the expense of the negro.” Baldwin was to take the affirmative and Buckley was there to oppose it.

Two things are particularly striking about this debate: the absolute brilliance of Baldwin’s own speech, and the utterly pathetic response that Buckley makes to it.

It’s worth noting that two separate publications haunt the debate. (See, I haven’t given up the horror references.)

The first of these writings was an article published in 1957 by William F, Buckley entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” In this publication, Buckley, argued in defense of segregation, suggesting that white southerners needed to maintain segregated institutions and reserve power to whites until such a time as African-Americans (‘negroes’ in Buckley’s article) would prove worthy of it. Now some have suggested Buckley had changed his mind by 1965, but at least in this debate the difference is little more than a courteous veneer. Buckley was always capable of being courteous (though Gore Vidal might have thought otherwise); he was always capable of putting a polite face on his life-log defense of elitism and privilege. The second of these publications was book Baldwin had published in in 1963, The Fire Next Time, which is said to contain a warning that violence could well be the result of continued injustice. Buckley would have described it as a threat. Buckley’s article is the reason he was invited to debate Baldwin. Baldwin’s book is the key to Buckley’s response.

That and Baldwin’s tip that opposing racism must seem like insanity to those whose identity is tied to it.

It’s worth noting that Baldwin makes a point of personalizing the issue of race in his own speech. He claims that he built the infrastructure of the American south, that he himself is the subject of discrimination and racist policies. In effect he makes of himself an indexical icon (as my old professor would have put it), through which to contemplate all of the implications of racism. This offends Buckley a great (as it often seems to offend many today to hear that racism has a negative impact on persons of color). So, Buckley’s first move is to deny it. He suggests that he is going to treat Baldwin as though he were white, and that he will do so, because Baldwin’s race is irrelevant to the matter at hand. He does this in order to deny Baldwin the protections afforded to him as a public speaker making use of a negro identity.

And thus, Buckley’s own speech begins in a world where in Baldwin’s race is irrelevant to the topic of racism; a world in which being black is a privilege, one to which Baldwin is not actually entitled.

But that’s not insane is it?

(Of course it is.)

It gets worse from there!

Buckley does not defend segregation here, nor racism. Instead he dissembles his way through the topic, describing segregation as a ‘dastardly situation’, mocking the excessive concern about racism in American Universities, and suggesting in the end that it is negroes themselves that have failed to advance themselves as a people. In Buckley’s narrative, Segregation appears to be a ghost in the machine, a presence over which no-one takes responsibility, except as it seems, those oppressed by it. If only those gosh-darned negroes and their rotten liberal friends could just get over the whole thing and get on with their lives! As Buckley would have it, the only reason racism is still with us, is because it lives in the efforts of those actively opposing it. You can hear people saying similar things, today of course. It’s just a little more jarring to see someone saying this in the very era in which buses were burned, bombs, were set off, and children spat upon while going to school, all over the topic of racism. …but wait! Dammit! It’s just as jarring to hear it in the era when cops put a knee to man’s neck in broad daylight and on camera, when the Republican Party actively works to deny African-Americans the right to vote, and when white supremacists openly mix their own flags and symbols with those of mainstream American politics.

Shit!

That Baldwin guy just keeps getting righter and righterer!

It’s almost like he’s had some personal experiences with racism or something.

Dammit!

And what about this segregation anyway!?! Buckley’s vision of segregation is a monster worthy of Lovecraft country, one which somehow appears to the majority of us only in hindsight, but which haunts the lives of those afflicted with it. One must think those who complain of racism terribly insane to be afflicted by a demon that exists only in their own politics! Buckley certainly seems to think so. Those telling us “liberalism is a mental illness” today surely do, but of course the brunt of their criticism falls less on liberals than on those in need of remediation. We get insulted; they get to go on living with the with the demon folks like Buckley and his modern descendants will neither claim as their own nor confront in any meaningful way. Buckley did a lot to set ‘conservative’ politics on this course through his publication, National Review. That his vapid waffling response to racism could be considered intellectualism, as it has for so many calling themselves ‘conservative’ has always been a mystery to me. Buckley, never really had anything to say about anything, but he could sure as Hell take more words to say nothing than most any other public figure in modern history. Most particularly, he had nothing meaningful to say about racism or segregation in response to Baldwin.

Buckley concludes his meandering speech by warning Baldwin and those who sympathize with him of an apocalyptic scenario worthy of modern horror films. If, Buckley suggests, folks such as Baldwin insist that the American dream itself is antithetical to the justice which they seek, then he and others who love their country will be forced to fight over it, “on the beaches,” so to speak. Oddly enough, they would be doing so, even for for the benefit of the negro himself, as Buckley would have us believe.

Thus, Buckley ends his speech by imagining, not how segregation might be ended, but how the call for it threatens everything he loves, and how the defense of segregation under the pretense of basic patriotism is in the end, all for the benefit of those oppressed by it.

As beautiful as Baldwin’s speech was, Buckley’s own efforts are sickening.

What’s worse! This debate hasn’t moved a whole Hell of a lot since 1965. In this Debate, Baldwin struggled not to impress the audience with the notion that racism is wrong, but to get people to give a damn about it, to act meaningfully against it. For his part, Buckley struggles to hide it, and to hide the degree to which racism was always central to the world he defended throughout his life. Buckley has a lot in common with an awful lot of people today.

Small wonder that the script for this debate can still be found on your cable television networks.

***

Those present voted 544 to 164 in favor of Baldwin as the winner of the debate. For his part Buckley, bragged that he “didn’t give them a goddamned inch,” or something to that effect.

People can be proud of the strangest things!

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A Certain Value of ‘Greatness’

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Native American Themes, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

America, Crime, Donald Trump, Gender, Indian Wars, Labor, Slavery, Trump, USA

When exactly do you suppose America was great according to Donald Trump?

When do you suppose it was great in the minds of his supporters?

America is not great now, at least not in the minds of Donald Trump, and it certainly wasn’t great when he ran for office. That much is clear from the very nature of his old campaign slogan. “Make America great AGAIN,” certainly means it’s not great in the present age, at least not when he decided to run.

Perhaps Trump and his supporters might think to claim the economic stats he used to parade as success stories in the first 3 years of his administration made the difference and pulled us all the way from something else to greatness. How those economic trends differed from those under Obama is a different question, and whether or not Trump did anything but coast his way to a good look on paper is another. Either way, I could imagine he and his supporters might see in that enough cause to claim putting his label on the nation had made us all great again, but that would be a thin pretext indeed. Regardless, the moment in which this pretext could be claimed is long since gone at this point, and we are back to the same other-than-great world Trump seemed to see in America back in 2016.

***

So, when was America great in the minds of Trump and his supporters?

Could it be when Thomas Jefferson said that “all men are created equal?

Or when Martin Luther King challenged us all to live up to that very principle?

Some folks might say ‘both,’ and maybe so, but that is the answer to a different question. I didn’t ask which message you approve or admire? I asked when do you think America was great in the minds of Donald Trump and his supporters?

Maybe the former, but only if we discount the latter. They might well love the promise of equality and freedom, but only so long as that promise remained unfulfilled for a great many Americans. To the deplorables, the gap between American ideals and our political realities is an essential feature of our greatness. The greatness they seek is always gained at the expense of others.

***

I really don’t see how there could be any doubt in the matter. This man is a bully, and he has a bully’s sense of the world around him. His heroes are bullies. His villains are those that stand in their way. The vast majority of mankind are but cannon fodder by which his heroes distinguish themselves. They are the human sacrifices by which true greatness distinguishes itself from the mere men and women of ordinary humanity. Greatness in the world of Trump is a boot ground into the neck of someone unable to do anything about it.

(Or a knee.)

When was American great according yo Donald Trump and those who support him?

***

When slaves were sold on the market in Charleston, South Carolina, and when the profits from slavery flowed into all of the United States, North and South alike. This was greatness in Donald Trump’s world.

When Confederate Statues went up all across the south, reminding African-American that those who held slaves in bondage were the real heroes of their time, that was greatness in the world of Donald Trump. The suffering of African-Americans in slavery, and in segregation was (and is) a small price to pay for the greatness made possible by the profits of slavery.

…and the second class citizenship which was to follow.

There are those who would return African-Americans to that very second class status in the most explicit terms possible. Trump is a hero to these people. He would deny it of course, but countless White Supremacists have organized in the wake of his rise to power, encouraged by a dog-whistle here, a slow condemnation there, and of course the occasional glaring statement of racist sentiments by Trump or those in his inner circles.

There were those who thought the existence of a plebeian class in America was critical to republic, the price of greatness for those free enough to enjoy it. Clearly, a number of Americans see in Trump’s rise to power the chance to reconstitute that servile class of Americans who don’t quite enjoy their full rights.

For those who share this vision, every confederate statue is a memorial, not just to history, but to a natural aristocracy. Most, I expect imagine themselves the righteous heirs to that aristocracy, denied their proper station by the corruption of liberals and various minorities who are but pawns duped by the white liberal agenda.

It’s a message driven home every time right wingers tell us about the evils of the “Democratic plantation,” or tell us, as Phil Robertson once did, that African-Americans were happier in the days of Jim Crow than they are now living in the shadow of this very ‘plantation.’

For a good portion of Trump’s base, greatness lies in hierarchy, but only when it’s the right kind of hierarchy. In their world, we are all a little happier with slavery or something as close as they can get to it. Equality just means people end up in the wrong places within that hierarchy. For America to be great, each must be in his or her proper place.

***

Lest anyone forget this greatness, the greatness of slavery, it is celebrated in the Star Spangled Banner before every ritual in America’s one true religion, professional sports! This celebration takes the form of the star Spangled Banner, a song which triggers in every good American the obligation to display their loyalty and love of the nation by standing with their hands over their hearts for all to see. Any athletes who take exception to this on behalf of African-Americans mistreated by the police become enemies of America itself, and of its greatness, at least in the eyes of Trump and the deplorables.

That the full song includes a stanza celebrating the return of escaped slaves to their former bondage is perhaps a little more significant than this little-known passage would seem to suggest. That great celebration of freedom is also a celebration of slavery.

A point well made every time Trump and his fans demand obesiance of players and seek punishment for those who hesitate.

***

When Jewish women jumped from the upper floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in hopes of escaping the flames consuming the building and those within it, that was greatness to Donald Trump. It was greatness, because it was the price paid for great profits and a nation of industry unfettered by regulation or those Goddamned unions and all that bullshit red tape that comes with them. Those were days when Captains of industry were free, dammit, free from the death of a thousand paper cuts that require working fire escapes, reasonable work hours, and countless other protections for the safety and dignity of workers. That world without such regulations, that was greatness to the likes of Donald trump. The women who died in that fire? They were the price paid for the captains of industry to thrive, and the success of those men was worth every life snuffed out in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

…and every indignity suffered by any worker ever sacrificed in the name of that greatness.

***

When Custer died for our sins on the greasy grass, THAT was greatness.

A great sacrifice.

And before that when Custer sacrificed the lives of Cheyenne Women and children at the Washita River, that was greatness, a greatness beautified by the music of Garyowen. Garyowen was the song played by Custer as he attacked Black Kettle’s encampment in the early morning of November 27th, 1868. Still reeling from the massacre at Sand Creek, Black Kettle had come to the Washita River in the hopes that he and his people could camp in peace and stay out of the fighting (just as they had tried to do at Sand Creek 4 years earlier). Custer showed them American greatness!

Lest the lesson be lost on any of us, the Trump administration made a point to play Garyowen at their July 4th celebration at the Black Hills this last summer. Most of America would have missed the message sent to Native American activists that day, perhaps noticing only a slight trace of nostalgia for the old west upon hearing the tune without quite knowing how they had come to form that association. For those that knew the tune, however, the message was unmistakable. What made American great was its willingness to slaughter Native Americans, not to respect them or their lands or anything else about them, but to slaughter them.

Accompanied by a catchy tune!

***

This message should have been clear enough earlier in Trump’s administration when he honored the Navajo Code Talkers.

With the name ‘Pocahontas’ falling from his sneering lips.

And the image of Andrew Jackson presiding over the whole scene.

***

Was greatness Abigail Adams telling her husband; “Remember the Ladies?” Or was it John Adams’ response, dismissing her concerns with platitudes about who is really in charge? Does greatness lie in Susan B. Anthony’s efforts to cast a vote in direct violation of the laws of her day. Or does it reside in the fine levied against her for doing so? Perhaps it can be found in Trump’s decision to pardon her? Or in the decision of the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House to reject that very pardon?

Could her greatness reside in the courage to break an unjust law, a greatness only erased by Trump’s worthless pardon?

Or did greatness actually reside in Trump’s pardon itself, a gesture which effectively put Anthony in a league with then likes of Sheriff Arpaio, Roger Stone, or Dinesh D’Souza, all men who have spent their entire lives punching down at those less fortunate than themselves? Some might think these men unworthy of respect. Clearly, they meet Trump’s standards of greatness. I somehow doubt, he’d have thought to put Anthony on par with these feckless whores if she were alive today and ready to give him a piece of her mind. A few a Republicans have indulged in fantasies about taking the vote away from women since Trump’s rise to office. If Anthony really does count as great to Trump, it is for a cause that neither he nor his supporters seem eager to support themselves. I don’t think Trump has suggested taking the vote away from women himself, at least not in public, but it’s easy enough to see how others might see it in Trump’s willingness to trash any woman who stands up to him in public.

…a point driven home withe every humiliation Trump unleashes on any woman who dares to stand up to him in public.

…or when facile deplorables make a point to remind us of the women who Trump always finds to speak on his behalf.

…as he punches down at others.

…other women.

***

I could go on of course, but you get the point. If America was ever great in Trump’s eyes, it was precisely when America’s greatness was clearly obtained at the expense of others, and that expense was itself celebrated openly in full view of bystanders and surviving victims alike.

For both Trump and his supporters, it must be said, the cruelty is always the point. If there is anything about America that they well and truly love, that is it.

Cruelty

That is what passes for greatness in the land of Trump.

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Also Not a Contest: Slavery

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Justice, Politics

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alt Right, Indentured Servitude, Ireland, Irish Slavery, Labor, Race, Racism, Slavery, Trans-Atrlantic Slave Trade

It’s always been odd to me, seeing how the history of American slavery makes some of my fellow white people uncomfortable. You can see their discomfort in the various ways folks try to minimize the significance of slavery. Sometimes, it’s enough to put slavery in the past, to grant that it was an horrible crime, but to imagine that crime taking place so far in the remote past and so completely resolved with the official end of slavery in that remote past as to be completely free of any political implications today. It’s a bit like the gambit, folks often play with the history of Indian-white relations – all the horrors of the past can be acknowledged, at least in the abstract, so long as you can contain their significance within the history books (and preferably kept well away from any of the more recent chapters). At other times, folks seem to come up with more elaborate schemes to pare down the topic of slavery until it fits into their personal comfort zones.

When I was in college, this kind of pop-racism generally took the form of an argument that Africans started slavery. They did it too, maybe even first, so the argument would go, and of course there was (and is) an element of truth to these claims, but it’s a truth poorly served by its rhetorical packaging. It would be fair to say that slavery existed in Africa (as it did Europe, and indeed most of the world) prior to the founding of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Just how much those prior-forms of slavery explain the booming industry that would come is another question. All too often I used to hear people pushing this narrative and think they wanted far too much from the point than it would bear. What they wanted was a kind of absolution, a story that diminished the responsibility of Euro-American peoples for the tragedy of the slave trade. At the very least, they wanted to share the blame with some other groups.

And I always wondered why some of these people seemed to feel personally implicated in the matter? What do you get out of this, I would find myself asking? How does it help you if this story goes to the discredit of someone else’s ancestors? The answer, I think, is (predictably enough) racism. For those who see the world through the lens of race, the disgrace of their ancestors is a disgrace to them personally, and a case against the moral character of their own kind is a direct personal attack. I think this is also the key to common refrains about ‘white guilt’ and ‘liberal guilt’. I’ve never seen liberal politics as an expression of personal shame, but I do think some of our critics are incapable of seeing liberal politics in any other terms.  Such people cannot right the wrongs of the past or work to overcome inequalities in the present; they must instead demolish their own consciousness of those wrongs and rationalize any inequalities they see in the present. It’s the just world hypothesis at work in a racist mind.

In recent years, the pop-racist response to the history of American slavery seems to have evolved a bit. The latest trend seems to be countering stories about the enslavement of Africans with those about the enslavement of Irish men and women, but I should say the trend isn’t even that focused. Time and again you can see people show up with stories about Irish slavery in response to contemporary concerns about African-Americans. Write a blog post or tweet a quick message about police abuse of African-Americans in the present-day and somebody may well just show up to tell you about the history of Irish slavery. It’s as if the prospect of Irish slavery isn’t just a stock answer to any questions about the enslavement of Africans; some folks find it useful as an answer to questions about literally any injustice experienced by African-Americans today. Once again, there is a grain of truth to the narrative, and once again, those producing it clearly want more from the story than the facts of the matter will furnish them.

What proponents of the Irish slavery narratives are talking about is the practice of sending Irish men and women to the Americas under terms imposing temporary servitude upon them. Most of these were indentured servants who agreed to a term of service in exchange for passage, but at least some were prisoners whose terms of service were imposed upon them as a means of punishment.

Okay, so we know all this.

There was a time when perfectly liberal college professors were happy to spell out the horrible conditions of indentured servitude, along with the abuse of Irish in this and other contexts. I used to work with a professor who made quite a point to ensure students learned just how terribly indentured servants could be treated. None of this was part of a racist agenda, and none of it was leveraged against the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Far from fielding a rationale for minimizing the horrors of that slave trade, this was like the opening chapter of a long sequence on the horrors of the full slave trade that would come. Acknowledging both horrors (and many others) used to work just fine.

But that was then, this is now.

What is new? On the surface, what is new here is the use of the word ‘slavery’ to describe what was done to the Irish, but here as always the devil resides in the details. No, I am not linking to any of this literature, but proponents of the Irish slave narrative have worked hard to embellish every embelishible point; inflating numbers, adding stories about the defilement of white women forced to breed with African men, and of course complaining that liberals have hidden the trials of the Irish while pushing the trans-Atlantic narrative in order to keep African-Americans at the forefront of identity politics. With support from racist corners of the internet, some maintain the Irish story is greater in all respects. Who would deny it? Only a liberal, right?

Okay, I deny it.

More importantly, so do vast majority of historians doing work on the subject. Scholars have questioned many of the details put forward in the Irish slave narrative, but the central theme seems to be this, that at its heart, the Irish story really is a story about indentured servitude. Indentured servitude was by no means a benign institution, but it simply isn’t comparable to the chattel slavery associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Most simply would not use the term ‘slavery’ at all to describe indentured servitude, even when it is imposed as a criminal sanction. And of course a good deal of the push-back of these narratives consists of efforts to unmask the clearly racist agendas of key proponents. This isn’t just a mistake, it’s a mistake a lot of committed white racists want people to make.

…which leaves me feeling all somehow.

I’m happy as Hell to see the comparison between indentured servitude and the trans-Atlantic slave trade shredded, and then shredded again. What does somewhat concern me is the equation of ‘slavery’ with the specific form of chattel slavery that took place in the trans-Atlantic trade. Simply put, we do commonly use the word ‘slavery’ in contexts that do not compare in the numbers or the horrors of that specific history. History books often speak of slaves in ancient civilizations many of which fell into that status through financial ruin, or debt. The literature on Indian-white relations is full of stories of ‘slaves’ captured and trade about through raiding practices, and of course the Spanish systems of the encomienda were never described as slavery. When in 1850 California passed a law enabling others to press California Natives into forced labor, that law was actually written up as if it were meant to protect those very Natives. And of course the system of debt peonage found in the post-war south (among many other places) could in practice pass for slavery.

Hell, that was often the point!

…to say nothing of the use of prison systems for purposes of reducing free blacks to forced laborers under the pretext of punishment for crimes, real or imagined.

The subject of slavery has always been broader than the specific history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. We should not allow malicious people to equate every instance of forced labor with the scale of atrocity behind that trade, but neither should we restrict our own use of the word ‘slavery’ to that very trade. Abusive labor practices shade easily into forced labor, and once that threshold is crossed, real atrocities become much easier.

What specifically doesn’t work about Irish slave narratives is the direct comparison with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It doesn’t match the scale of atrocity in that trade, either in numbers, or in the quality of treatment for the majority of those involved. This doesn’t mean that indentured servants, Irish or otherwise, were treated well, and it certainly doesn’t mean that people captured or pressed into forced labor in other times and places shouldn’t be a concern. What it does mean is that we shouldn’t let people use the suffering of their own ancestors as a means of diverting attention from that of others.

 

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Slavery: Still Sexy After All These Years! (Or Yes Quentin, There is a Reason it’s Called an ‘Exploitation’ Flick)

23 Thursday May 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Movies

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Django Unchained, Fiction, Film, History, Movies, Quentin Tarantino, Race, Sex, Slavery

imagesJust what is the relationship between the events occurring inside a film and those occurring the world in which we live? I will not say the ‘real world’, because of course part of the problem here is that the ‘worlds’ in which we live are saturated by myriad narratives, preconceptions, and cultural artifacts which shape our understanding of events in ways few of us can fully understand. So, when we see something happening in a movie, it is important to grasp that this too is one more of those narratives, one more thing that shapes the meaning of events in own own lives. Just how it does that, well now that is a tricky question.

It’s a difficult question with a number of plausible answers, but I think we can rule out one answer at least, the one that says; ‘nothing’. Quentin Tarantino would seem to disagree, at least he does when he’s angry and dodging interesting interview questions. In a now infamous rant, Tarantino took the position that there was no relationship between on-screen violence and real world violence, refusing even to elaborate on this position or to explain his reasons for taking it.

(Oh yeah, SPOILERS!)

To be fair, it was the interviewer, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, that fielded the stance in a sort of complex question (at 4:30 in the clip below), but for all his belligerence Tarantino does not disavow the position attributed to him. Guru-Murthy claims that his own research has produced little in the way of an explanation from Tarantino, just a consistent repetition of this stance. It’s a common enough claim in any event, often serving as a defense mechanism, both for those that create guilty pleasures and those of us who enjoy them (and yes, I do count myself among the guilty). So long as there is no relationship between fantasy violence and real-world violence, one is free to explore the one while taking no responsibility for the other.

But of course the world isn’t that simple, and as Guru-Murthy also points out, Tarantino was happy to link his latest film to the serious issues of slavery, even taking taking credit for starting a dialogue about that subject. He also takes credit for the cathartic violence he puts on screen, but has little to say about the ‘real’ violence perpetrated by the villains against their slaves on that very same screen. But are we really to believe Tarantino means us to feel emotional investment for Django’s acts of revenge while sitting guiltless through the torture and slaughter of innocents throughout the film? Does the elaborate detail of ‘Mandingo fighting’, the ‘hot box’, and the vicious execution of a slave torn apart by dogs leave the viewer without any sense of complicity for the “brutality of the violence of the day?”

Tarantino’s own writing belies this approach. His villains are too clever, their speeches too fascinating, their point of view far too prominent in these moments to dismiss. The victims of this violence remain largely silent. We know that the Mandingo fighters suffer and regret what they are forced to do, we know that Django’s love interest is defiant, and that she suffered greatly for it, and we know that the man torn apart by dogs could not bear to fight again; none of these characters really say much in the movie. They do not introduce interesting plot twists; they do not dazzle us with fascinating speeches. They suffer just as we would expect them to, providing us with no insights at all into the world in which they live.

Those that inform us about this movie are the killers. DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie explains quite clearly what he expects of his slaves before setting the dogs loose. Dr. King Schultz (played brilliantly by Christoph Waltz) introduces us to the fascinating world of bounty hunter, one who would see a man shot in front of his child but who balks at seeing another torn apart by dogs. And of course we understand Django’s motives; his goals are the driving force of the movie; it is his killings which provide us with the final pay-off, the glorious conclusion of the film.

It is consistently the logic of those enacting violence which Tarantino fleshes out for us in this film, and as always, he does it ever so well. The victims are there to suffer, and to provide a pretext for the ‘cathartic’ violence that is to come. In short, Django consistently draws us into the viewpoint of the killer; the movie does this when the killer is a villain, and it does it again when he is a hero. This is the myth of redemptive violence presented in a special way that allows us to have our cake and eat it too. We can enjoy Dicaprio’s sadism just as we will enjoy his downfall. If there is a moment of regret in a scene, or a brief period in which we might wish for the suffering to simply stop, well that moment passes in due time, transformed as it were into the rationale for yet another killing. In Django, we understand the killers, the victims are simply silent.

But villains gotta be villainous, don’t they?

Of course they do, but what is lacking in Django is a genuine counter-balance, any real sense of what is at stake in this story for anyone who is not a killer. When our principal reward at the end of the story is the death of the bad guy (DiCaprio or Jackson, …or so many others), we are never far from the mindset of the killer. In the end, Django leaves a wanted man, accepting this fate without so much as the blink of an eye, his wife drawing a rifle as they ride off from the scene. Two lives now wholly engulfed in violence. If this is a victory, it is at least partially a victory for the world of villainy.

…which brings us back to the initial question, just how does this story relate to the realities of violence in everyday life? I honestly enjoyed much of this movie, as I did with Inglorious Bastards. (Yeah, I know about the spelling, take that Quentin!) But I always feel a little uncomfortable with Tarantino films, precisely because I can’t escape the feeling that I am witnessing something a little creepy; it’s a bit like watching a teenager doing something truly inappropriate in public. Whether it is sheer joy with which Tarantino employs the n-word just a little more than his faux-realism rationale would warrant, or the raw celebration of violence which is present in every film he makes, I cannot help but to think the limitations of Tarantino’s stories are the limitations of the world in which he lives, the world of narratives informing his sense of sense of the world off-screen. And I cannot help but think he is inviting us to normalize those limitations and accept a world of cartoonish violence as a moral standard of sorts.

It is not as though the world lacks for people who think this way off-screen.

One can see it in that interview above as well, when Tarantino tells us that Django deals with the ‘Auschwitzian’ characteristics of slavery. (I guess it’s a word now, …why not?) Honestly, I don’t know what he meant by saying that Americans have dealt with the Native American holocaust, but he clearly seems to think this movie is saying something about the realities of slavery, so much so that when people talk about the film, Tarantino takes that in itself to be a meaningful dialogue about slavery. And yet there is little about this film that could shed light on the nature of slavery as an historical institution.

Tarantino’s choice of comparison is telling, because the story of Auschwitz is largely the story of cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and this is Tarantino’s vision of slavery itself. In one of the most interesting (and insightful) speeches of the film, Dr. Shultz tells us quite frankly that he deals in dead bodies while slavers deal in live bodies; bother are economic institutions. So, why then do slaves first make an appearance in this film walking a great distance barefoot in the cold? Sure, one could probably come up with a plausible explanation based on historical possibilities. But the more plausible answer is that Tarantino wanted to show us the raw cruelty of the institution. More to the point, he did not wish so much to tel us something about slavery as to use slavery as a pretext for telling us something about cruelty. Tarantino presents this story of raw cruelty for us again in the sadistic foremen whom Django will kill part way through the movie, and again in the institution of Mandingo fighting. He presents it in virtually everything that DiCaprio’s character and Samuel Jackson’s character say and do. In this film slavery is not an economic enterprise, it is the conspicuous consumption of sadists, an extravagance of cruelty for the sake of cruelty.

One should add that it is a highly sexualized cruelty that one sees in this film. While Tarantino denies that rape appears in the film, its presence in the narrative is prominent. Django is quick to tell us that his wife will be used as a comfort woman, a prospect apparently confirmed by the words of another villain later in the film. Throughout the plantations in this film, black women appear in full southern dress, lounging about, the clear implication being that they are there for the pleasure of the owners. And of course when Django is captured, it is his genitalia which first get the attention of his would-be tormenters. The slaves portrayed in this film exist largely for the purpose of providing the villains with cheap thrills. And while this sort of thing was certainly not absent in the real history, its significance has completely eclipsed those of plantation agriculture in Tarantino’s narrative.

Slavery insofar as it appears in this movie, is little other than a sadistic fantasy. It is a source of pleasure for the villains, and fleeting moments of pain for the victims about whom we learn so very little. And perhaps we could sweep all of this under the rug and just call it entertainment were it not for one thing; Tarantino himself wants to tell us this movie is about slavery.

A part of me wants to say that it simply isn’t.

But of course that too would be inaccurate. The movie is about a vision of slavery bearing little resemblance to the actual institution, but perhaps one with a disturbing resemblance to Tarantino’s own thoughts about race, violence and sexuality. More disturbing still is the very real possibility that this film tells us still more about the general public’s understanding of the relationship between these features of American society.

***

I suppose all of this brings us full circle to the cathartic violence that Tarantino is talking about. On one level, that would be cathartic violence against the perpetrators of slavery as Tarantino envisions it. On another level, if I am right that Tarantino is getting off on the sadistic possibilities available in a world of slavery, that he is inviting his audience to enjoy the same possibilities, then the catharsis is perhaps a bit more personal. It is the moment in which one erases his or her investment in the sadistic themes presented here through the actions and words of the villains. It is a moment in which one finally rejects the villain despite his cleverness, and perhaps it is a moment in which one rejects one of the ills of history (at least insofar as it is almost dealt with in the form of that villain). The destruction of the villain thus becomes our own ritual purification.

I have my doubts as to where that leaves us in the end.

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California Admitted as a Free State, …Oh Wait!

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, History, Native American Themes, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

American Indian, California, Civil War, History, Narrative, Native American, Semantics, Slavery, Story-Telling, teaching

Okay, so we just started a section on slavery and the civil war in my American history class. One thing that always irritates me here, or maybe it just amuses me, I don’t know… Anyway, I think about it whenever I cover this subject. Every textbook I have ever used on American history explains that California was admitted as a free state under the terms of the Compromise of 1850.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is a little known law passed in California that very year, ostensibly for the protection of Indians. The law imposes a $50.00 fine on anyone forcing an Indian to work against his will. So, that should be good, right?

Actually, no.

The law also contains the following provisions:

When an Indian is convicted of an offence before a Justice of the Peace punishable by a fine, any white person may, by consent of the Justice, give bond for said Indian, conditioned for the payment of said fine and costs, and in such case the Indian shall be compelled to work for the person so bailing, until he has discharged or cancelled the fine assessed against him…

and

Any Indian able to work and support himself in some honest calling, not having wherewithal to maintain himself, who shall be found loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging, or leading an immoral and profligate course of life, shall be liable to be arrested on the complaint of any resident citizen of the county, and brought before any Justice of the Peace of the proper county, Mayor or Recorder of any incorporated town or city, who shall examine said accused Indian, and hear the testimony in relation thereto, and if said Justice, Mayor or Recorder shall be satisfied that he is a vagrant, as above set forth, he shall make out a warrant under his hand and seal, authorizing and requiring the officer having him in charge or custody, to hire out such vagrant within twenty four hours to the best bidder, by public notice given as he shall direct, for the highest price that can be had, for any term not exceeding four months; and such vagrant shall be subject to and governed by the provisions of this Act, regulating guardians and minors, during the time for which he has been so hired.

Oh there is a lot more to the act, and plenty of reassuring clauses that appear to keep people from exploiting natives, but it should not take a lot of imagination to read between the lines here and see how this story actually went down. To say that this law opened up the native labor-market to exploitation would be putting it mildly. …too mildly.

In essence, the law made it illegal to enslave an Indian, at least on one’s own initiative, but if someone was caught being an Indian on a city street, the city could bond him over to you for a price. Oh yes, folks would have to go through the trouble of slighting the moral integrity of the Indian first, but how difficult do you think it would be to find a white guy willing to do that?

Not very.

It’s not the most efficient form of slavery one could devise, but it is slavery non-the-less, and that is why it always bugs me to see textbook after textbook announce that California was admitted to the Union as a free state under the terms of the compromise of 1850.

…in the very year they created a legal procedure for enslaving Indians.

Oh I get it; this kind of issue simply falls outside the scope of the narrative in question. It was not even on the horizons of those debating the major issues of the day in Congress. So, if one is recounting the events leading up to the Civil War, then this piece of information does not really change that story much. Neither does the existence of a viable slave-trade in the interior Southwest. If one is focused on the question of slavery as it was framed in the national politics of the day, then yes, California was certainly admitted as a free state.

Or is that the problem, the terms of that debate?

The bottom line is that ‘slavery’ is just a word, and you can choose to use it or not as easily as you can any other term regardless of the realities of the labor conditions in question. So, historians can skate right past these instances of captive labor (much as the great figures of the era did in their own approach to the issue) while focusing on the institutional forms of slavery that were the main issues of the day. But of course that same sleight of hand is necessary to cap off the story of the Civil War in the standard way, describing it as bringing about the end of slavery in America.

To give closure to the issue of slavery in our national storyline, one has to ignore the use of debt-peonage in conjunction with Jim Crow Laws, or at least classify them as a whole new kind of problem. Using the word “slavery” in the chapters leading up the Civil War and dropping it afterwards creates the illusion that the new social problems are significantly different than the old ones. This approach suggests that the problems associated with slavery were somehow resolved with the closing chapters of Reconstruction, perhaps not to the satisfaction of all concerned, but resolved nonetheless. And Jim Crow then becomes a whole different kind of problem, as do a host of similar practices.

Just like the California Law for the protection of the Indian.

***

Note: The law can be found in the California Statutes from 1850. It is also included in the primary documents for the following textbook:

Albert L. Hurtado, Peter Iverson. Major Problems in American Indian History: Documents and Essays. Second Edition. (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

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