Monday, June 29, 2020

Brevity Sinks A Good Thesis






Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents by Margaret Kimberley is an important book that is just far too short for such an important topic.  

Kimberley’s basic thesis is that no president, not a single one, has been good for the advancement of African-Americans.  Certainly, the presidents up to the civil war are low handing fruit: slave holders, northern men who compromised with slaveholders to hold the union together.  This is a shameful history; and with the exception of stealing land from Mexicans, Indians, and staving off British influence in North America – no topic was as important as slavery was to the United States  before the Civil  War. 

But Kimberley’s brevity opens her to charges of cherry picking.  She picks two or three openly racists policies, actions or utterances from a president, and rarely, one positive policy, action or utterance of a president, related to Africa Americans, and moves on.  

This technique is damaging.  People who would rather not admit that the United States is a white supremacist state can just dismiss this book as too narrowly focused.  Kimberley’s brevity also eliminates the chance of even  nuance.  Take Lincoln.  Kimberley uses the example of his support of a scheme to settle blacks on an island off Haiti to show he had no intention of keeping Africans in America.  She believes this shows his inherent racism.  But does it?  He may just as well be trying to mollify conservative  northerners who feared large numbers of freed slaves in their cities and towns.  This scheme was advanced at the same time as the  Emancipation Proclamation.  Whether Lincoln supported the Haiti scheme, or merely used it as a political tool, is not debated by Kimberley.  For her it is a proven fact.  But the topic is debated by scholars  and has been for years.   It is far from a settled matter.

Presidential motivation is the authors fixation.  Kimberley cites, again and again, that presidents only courted black votes for reasons of expediency, and not through moral zeal.  This is most likely true, but could this not be said of every president on nearly every issue?  What president continues to pursue policies that he or she knows are not popular, and will hurt his  political future?  Did FDR, a wealthy white man, want to enact the New Deal, and its socialist-type initiatives, from conviction, or was he forced to do so by a clambering, unemployed electorate and a fear of communism?  This is yet another criticism that someone who does not wish to view America as a white supremacist state can deploy.  How do we know the real motivations for a president’s policy decisions?  When policy a true of racist motivation or a political ploy?

Sadly, Kimberley provides too little agency to Africans in American.  She renders them a kind of naive blank slate, hoping that a president they  just voted into office will keep his promises and better their conditions, which never happens.  They just hope things will get better by uncritically listening to white men seeking power.  This is unfair.  People of African descent in America have always had some form of power, and used it shrewdly for their benefit.  They were real people and not simply victims.

But perhaps the most harmful element of this book is the ‘is it good for black people question’ she returns to again and again.  This is similar to the question that my fellow Jews ask, half in jest, is it  good for the Jews?  But the question, when raised about an entire group of people, has little value.  Some Israeli Jews, especially in the current government, see Trump as good for the Jews.  He supports settlement, annexation and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  Many Jews in American, especially progressives, view Trump as bad for the Jews.  He supports white supremacists who are brazenly and violently anti-Semitic.  So, is he good for the Jews?  This depends on who you ask.

The same applies to African-Americans, who are not homogeneous, and  have varying opinions of what is good or bad for them, depending on when, where, and how they live or lived, their gender identity, and their income.  So her yardstick in measuring presidential value via African Americans is too blunt.  Kimberly’s book once more suffers from its compression; rather than expanding her notions to tackle these complex issues, she has gone for brevity. The work, therefore, suffers. This could have been a large, important book about the intersection of race and the executive branch in its many manifestations – instead it reads like a poorly reasoned polemical booklet. 

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

How To Be an Antiracist



How To Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, is setting much of the tone of how race is discussed in America, and therefore is an important book.  In order to understand the new terms and parameters of the discussion of race in America, Kendi’s book is key.  He makes important points. 

Most of us know that race, as a biological category, is meaningless.  Since the sequencing of the human genome science helps us to understand that there is very little genetic difference between so-called races; in fact, there is far more genetic diversity within groups, like Africans, than there are outside of groups.  If we don’t know this, we should.  Race is a social construct.

That social  construct was recently created.  It was 'crafted' by the Portuguese in the 1400s to justify the slave trade in Africans.  This, in turn, leads to Kendi's major thesis: racists policies create racists ideas, and not the other way around.  Also, racism is not caused by ignorance of racial groups, a common idea, but by those in power who are very aware of the group they are trying to suppress through racist policies.

These are Kendi’s main ideas, and he runs them through various scenarios.  This book, part policy statement, part memoir, presents concepts in a clear manner.  Some will find his arguments circular.  Sometimes they are.  Others will think he is too repetitive.  This happens too.  Some will find his largely binary scheme too confining.  Perhaps this is the case.

Regardless,  this is an important book.  In the right hands, it can begin important and meaningful conversations about a topic that haunts our nation.


Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Today's Voices





PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 is a surprisingly accomplished collection of work. Confession: I skipped the editor’s introductions, which may be important, but I did not want to have any framing device to read these works.  

Solid throughout, there are, for me, some standouts: “The Rickies,” “The Manga Artist,” “Tornado Season,” and especially, “Bad Northern Women.”  This last story has a particularly unique style and rhythm, and is a voice we rarely hear and very much need to hear it; I eagerly await more work from Erin Singer.

The range of stories here truly represent the voices of our time, tackling the challenges of this strange American moment.  This is a worthy book all around.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy





Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, by James S. Hirsch, documents what would be called in  a pogrom in Jewish studies.  In 1921, the Greenwood section of Tulsa, where a fairly affluent black community lived, was destroyed in a day and night of carnage by armed white people, both acting officially for the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma, and unofficially as rioters and looters.

Until recently, this event, which probably left three hundred people dead, and thousands displaced, was not widely known.  When I read about it in the 1990s, I had never learned of it;  thankfully, that is now changing.  Probably the most crucial historical issue of the massacre is mass graves.  Almost all scholars of the Tulsa Race Riot agree that more African Americans died than the official tally.  Stories of mass graves in at least three sites in Tulsa have long been rumored.

White Tulsa is finally facing its legacy, to some degree.  In late 2019, ground anomalies were found in two areas of Tulsa long rumored to hold mass graves.   This summer, an excavation will take place (if all remains on schedule).   As we approach the one-hundred year anniversary of the massacre, learning more about the final resting place of its victims is long overdue.

This book is informative and necessary.  The one flaw is a wave of typos, as if parts where not closely copy edited.  Some of them ruin the flow of the narrative.  Clown is used for down.  Sims for seems.  Cut for but.  There are many others.  They are words closely related to the intended word, as if someone was asleep at the wheel.

Monday, June 15, 2020

Collapse and Rebirth




Last time I read about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations the Sea People, in a cue the barbarians moment, wreaked havoc on more settled empires and plunged the eastern Mediterranean into a dark age.  Highly literate cultures like Mycenaean were overrun by less civilized Dorian Greeks; illiteracy and poverty spread, fortress cities emerged like medieval castles, and bards like Homer kept the culture of Mycenaean alive orally through tales of the Trojan War.

Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, shows how these older notions are too simplified, based on theories rather than fact, conjecture rather than consensus; as in the study of all ancient culture, there are far more questions generated than settled answers about the last years of the Bronze Age.  

Cline brings us up to date. Rather than a single answer, the global culture of the late Bronze Age went down from invasions of the Sea Peoples (whoever they were), internal revolts, climate change, drought, earthquakes, and demographic shifts.  Cline also, rightly, reminds us that such a thing as a dark age is too gloomy a moniker.  The collapse of the Bronze Age ushered in the Iron Age, where a small group of confederated tribes called Israel filled the power vacuum in Canaan.  We still live with the impact of their stories today; without the destruction of the Bronze Age behemoths, this would not have happened.  The Homeric tales ushered in the great age of the Greeks.  These stories became their foundation texts, and until recently, along with the bible, the anchors of so-called western civilization.  For the new to grow the old must often die.

Monday, June 8, 2020

Readin' & Writin'




The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park, by Jack Lynch, is a playful and informative treatment of how we speak, write, spell, and pronounce English, and how we have tried, and most often failed, to impose order on the English language.

Lynch brings us through the early history of the language.  It is hard for us to imagine when English did not have a standardized spelling.  But there was a time; at the vernacular stage of English, when Latin and Greek were used for education, English was not considered a priority.  But later, as English was used in more rarefied circles, it was felt that it needed dictionaries and grammars like classic languages.

The author works through several layers of the history of attempts to tame the English language, especially the perennial battle between descriptivist and prescriptivist sides of the language. 

Lynch has written an entertaining and enlightening work on what could be a very dry subject.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

The Madness of Through



The Oxford English Dictionary records all the following as legitimate historical spellings of the word through in the manuscript era, not counting any of the forms it labels “scribal errors”:

dorow, dorth, drogh, thorgh, thorght, thoro, thoro’, thorogh, thorou, thorough, thoroughe, thorow, thorowe, thorowgh, thorowh, thorro, thorrow, thoru, thorugh, thorughe, thoruh, thoru3, thorw, thor3, thour, thourch, thourgh, thourth, threu, threw, thro, thro’, throch, throche, throcht, throgh, throght, throu, throuch, throucht, throughe, throuw, throw, throwch, throwe, throwgh, throwghe, throw3e, thru, thruch, thrucht, thruff, thrugh, thrughe, thruht, thru3, thrw, thrwch, thurf, thurgh, thurghe, thurght, thurow, thurrou, thurrowe, thur3, trogh, troght, þerh, þorch, þorgh, þorghe, þorh, þorogh, þorou, þorou3, þorow, þorowe, þoro3, þoru, þoruh, þoruhe, þoruth, þoru3, þorw, þorwe, þorþ, þor3, þour, þourgh, þourh, þourw, þour3, þour3e, þro, þroughe, þrou3, þruh, þurch, þuregh, þureh, þurf, þurgh, þurght, þurh, þurrh, þurth, þuru, þuruh, þurw, þurþ, þur3, þur3e, þur3th.

Lynch, Jack. The Lexicographer's Dilemma (pp. 169-170). 

Bloomsbury Publishing