stereotype & society

McCain Unveils Unexpected Running Mate

"Sarah Palin Hand Puppet," Archie Bishop © 2008

Presidential Candidate Must Again Answer for Pastor's Remarks

While many Americans thought that Barack Obama's March 18th speech on "race" might encourage us to cross historic divides and begin a discussion that can move us beyond the racial, ethnic and religious distrust that keeps us from our common goals, a pastor's incendiary remarks have once again poisoned the atmosphere. Read all about it.

Obama Speech Explores Stereotypes and the Toxic Social Divisions They Maintain

On Tuesday, March 18th, in Philadelphia, presidential candidate Barack Obama addressed issues of race and stereotype in ways rarely heard in American political discourse. Unlike most of the political bilge that we hear, the  speech in Philadelphia actually acknowledged people's capacity to think, comprehend profound social issues, and reflect on troubling aspects of our human condition. 

Whatever your thoughts on Obama's candidacy,  Stereotype & Society's editors encourage you to read the text (below) and invite you to respond, not to the man who gave the speech, but to the ideas, issues and historical questions that it raised. Your comments are welcome at the end of this post.

It is not any one person's responsibility to confront America's history and future. It is not one person's mission to imagine a world where entrenched social divisions can be breached for the common good. It is all of ours. 

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” 

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me.  And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

 

Cheney Warns Against War in Iraq

The general perception of Dick Cheney is one of a clandestine conniver and cold-blooded war monger. His years as Vice President, his callous disregard for human rights, and his blood-for-oil policies certainly give foundation to this view.

In 1994, however, Cheney gave an interview in which he was asked whether the U. S. should have gone on to invade Iraq after "Desert Storm." Surprisingly his
response to the question offered a lucid if apocalyptic analysis of what would have resulted if the United States had made the mistake of invading Iraq.  Prescient and amazing. Have a look. 

Thanks to  Steven Gorelick for pointing us toward this extraordinary document, a stunning example of a notorious killer breaking type and actually considering consequences. 

To Read or Not to Read?

In recent weeks a brouhaha has been boiling up over the publication, for the first time in English (Little, Brown Young Readers; Reprint edition in the United States), of one of Hergé’s famous comic strip Tintin books, Tintin in the Congo (Tintin au Congo). 

Written and drawn in 1930-31, originally in black and white, serialized form, it appeared in a Brussels newspaper’s weekly youth supplement, Le Petit Vingtiém. The story tells the tale of Tintin, an imagined boy reporter for the supplement, who travels with Snowy, his opinionated canine sidekick, to the Belgian Congo, still a colony of Belgium.

Due to controversy over its sub-human depictions of the Congolese people, and some of the extremely violent acts that Tintin perpetrates against African wildlife he encounters (he stuffs a live rhinoceros with dynamite and blows him to smithereens), the 1930-31 version was replaced by a redrawn, colorized, and somewhat sanitized, though still highly racist, version in 1946. Still, it never appeared in English until now.

This year is the 100th birthday of Georges Remi, the cartoonist who gained world-renown using the pen name Hergé, the Tintin author. In honor of the occasion, the first English-language translation of the original black and white version of Tintin au Congo is being published. 

In response, the British Commission for Racial Equality issued a strong protest, demanding that the Borders chain remove the book from their stores in Australia, Britain, New Zealand and the United States.  Borders’ reaction to the protest was to announce that the book would not be stocked with other children’s books, but would still be available in the “adult graphic novel section,” along with other—often semi-pornographic— illustrated fiction.

The choice was a telling, if unconscious, one; an implicit admission that racism, like pornography, is a guilty pleasure suitable for adults but not for children.  Whether adults are more in control of their race hatred than children is highly questionable, but the question remains.  What to do with the book?

The original comic version of Tintin in the Congo, appeared in the children’s supplement of a conservative Catholic Belgian newspaper, Le Vingtiéme Siecle. The editor of the was Father Norbert Wallez, a right-wing reactionary who proudly displayed a personally inscribed photograph of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, on the wall of his office.

According to Nilanjana S. Roy, writing from New Delhi for the Business Standard, July 20, 2007, Hergé was taking marching orders from Wallez, his mentor and boss.  “He suggested to Hergé that his next adventure [the previous one, his first, was an intrigue-filled visit to the Soviet Union—editor] should educate Belgians about the values of colonialism.”  Roy continues, “The Congo was a Belgian colony at the time, and Wallez told Hergé to depict the many ways in which civilization had been brought to the unenlightened natives.  As one may imagine,” Roy adds, “this is not a popular or even acceptable perspective in our times; in 1930, however, Wallez’s sentiments were almost unexceptionable.”

Hergé would eventually distance himself from Tintin au Congo and its condescending and violent colonialist perspective, explaining that his own ignorance, and an influential editor, had motivated the unfortunate storyline. “All I knew about the country was what people said at the time: ‘Negroes are big children. Happily for them we are there.’”

Given this, and the book’s monkey-like depiction of Africans, a call to ban the book is not surprising—though book banning is mostly the activity of tyrants and fanatics.  (Then again, an English translation of Mein Kampf remains in print and continues to place fairly well in the Amazon ranking system.)  The issue is, should children—or adults for that matter—be shielded from the toxic and murderous legacy of colonialism, or should they be educated as to the ways that systems of culture and knowledge have too often provided amusing and lubricated corridors for the proliferation of racist and other repugnant ideas. The Belgian occupation of the Congo was murderous and marked by the massacres of entire villages, reducing the indigenous population by half.

In writing our recent book, Typecasting: The Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality, we encountered and documented, the history of ideas of human inequality, and Tintin in the Congo is part of a for-the-most-part unknown or hidden tradition that needs to be known and dissected, not hidden from view in the “adult section.”  It is tough stuff to look at, and demands surgical examination, but banning and/or hiding it in the "adult section" only contributes to the lurid fascination that racially or sexually hateful materials  often provoke when examined furtively, or among a coterie of devotees who accept these values as their own.  The light of day is a friend, particularly when it is directed thoughtfully.

Since its publication in Britain (it will appear in the United States in September), Tintin in the Congo has jumped onto the bestseller list at Amazon and is being prolifically back-ordered in the U.S.  It won’t go away. 

We hope that S&S readers will share their thoughts on how to create a forum about the book, and other artifacts of European conquest, that will help to build a greater sense of human community, that will encourage all of us to be able to see through the eyes of others.  Without that, book or no book, we will remain in deep shit.

NOTE: The online publication, The Red Pencil, has some interesting back and forth about how teachers should think about presenting the book to students. You might want to have a look at a piece by Vivek. A follow up piece is of interest as well.

With Tintin, it wasn't just Africa that received a racist treatment. The series is a panoply, worthy of scrutiny because it gives one a vivid and sense of the influence of entertainment on children's ways of seeing.

The Many Stripes of Stereotypes: Ota Benga Revisited

On November 7, 2006, we published a post that included the following:

"In 1906 the American Museum of Natural History, in cahoots with the New York Zoological Society placed the survivor of a Belgian massacre of a Congolese village in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo. The man, Ota Benga, was released following protests by African-American ministers, but the zoo's director and the mayor of New York continued to insist that the exhibit had been an enterprise of significant educational value."

Now, the following story has been syndicated by the Associated Press:

Housing Pygmies at Zoo Sparks Uproar

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 14, 2007

 

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) -- A group of Pygmy musicians performing at an annual festival were temporarily put up in a zoo by Congolese officials, attracting tourists and prompting a protest from a human rights group.

Authorities said they were trying to make the indigenous musicians feel comfortable. But after a flurry of media coverage, they moved the visitors to a high school dormitory late Friday. The Pygmies are now being housed with musicians from elsewhere in the Republic of Congo, while foreign artists performing at the Festival of Pan-African Music were lodged in hotels.

The Pygmies' presence in a tent on the zoo grounds had attracted tourists, who came to stare and take pictures, the Congolese Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement Friday.

''(We) vigorously protest the discrimination, exploitation and bad treatment of these 20 indigenous people,'' the rights group said. ''Since their arrival in Brazzaville on July 4, these people have been sleeping exposed to mosquitoes and the cold ... whereas the other delegations have been housed in hotels.''

Pygmies, not all of whom are below average height, are believed to be the earliest inhabitants of Central Africa. They live in the forests of Congo, its larger neighbor the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in other countries such as Central African Republic, Cameroon and Burundi.

Officials said they offered the accommodation on the forested zoo grounds so the 10 women, nine men and one baby would feel more at home.

''It's not a case of discrimination,'' said Yvette Lebondzo, the director of arts and culture for the Republic of Congo. ''We lodged them in the park near running water and a forest simply because that will remind them of their usual surroundings -- which is the forest.''

''I think our intention was noble toward our brothers who came directly out of the forest and have never seen a city,'' she said.

Security barriers prevented reporters from being able to speak to the Pygmies before they were moved from the zoo.

''We would like to reassure people that our intention was simply to put them at ease in an environment that resembles their ecosystem,'' said Dieudonne Mouyongo, who directs the festival.

Founded in the 1940s, the Brazzaville Zoological Park was plundered during the country's civil war in the 1990s. Lions, elephants and monkeys were killed for their meat.

It now has no big game -- only 13 monkeys, one jackal, two crocodiles and birds, zookeeper Jean Pierre Bolebantou said.

He said he does not understand the fuss over the Pygmies.

''They were happy to find here an environment similar to what they knew in the forest. They have already shown us several medicinal plants,'' he said.

New Beauty Ideals Celebrate Large Women

The following is a letter written by Dorothy Harrigan to the editor of the People magazine, regarding an article about successful models who are ostensibly on the plump side compared to the standard “American” norms of beauty. People chose not to run the letter, but it is hear now and will appear, along with many others, in the next edition of Rejected Letters to the Editor (which will appear later this month).

Dear Editor:

Re “Modeling’s Heavyweights!” in the May 7, issue of People.

It’s interesting that in order explore a purported change in American women’s body confidence, you automatically look to models as the accepted index of beauty.  The models you point to aren’t just any models, they are “Heavyweights!”  What does this say about us that we consider these women to be above average weight?  The women presented in your article, if not rail-thin, still embody unreachable, digitally enhanced physical ideals.

These women have nothing to do with the average weight or actual women in the country or even the world.  Since we have always held up certain types as ideals, not much has changed here. We used to measure a person’s nose, or “facial angle” to find out his or her worth.  Now it is a person’s weight—above all—that matters. 

Anorexia and other eating disorders are still a major problem for young women. Photographs like these—depicting supposedly “heavyweight” beauties—are not encouraging or healthy for a young girl with body-image problems to see.

Of course you present this as a story about beauty inside and out.  For every woman you describe as “beautiful” you back up that statement with an adorable quirk about them, or a snippet about their charity work.

Let’s call a spade a spade.  These celebrities are nothing more than racehorses being trotted out for the world to see and measure itself against.  This issue of your magazine claims to represent the new ideal, but it’s the same old thing.  Just as noses and foreheads were associated with pure lineage and intelligence hundreds of years ago, weight is now accorded the same virtue and credit. Form without substance is the Achilles Heel of American society in fashion, politics, etc. Why perpetuate it?

Sincerely,

Dorothy Harrigan
Brooklyn, NY

Behind the Scenes: 'King Kong'

Following a stint as a counter-revo- lutionary "soldier of fortune" that, by 1920, earned him a stretch in a Soviet prisoner of war camp, Merian Caldwell Cooper, went to work producing  far-fetched and, for the most part, staged "documentary" films for Paramount. "Chang" (1927) is worth putting onto your Netflix queue for a taste of Cooper's peculiar approach to the documentary form.

By 1933 Cooper had forsworn the life of a sensationalist documentary filmmaker and soon became a big time director and producer of fiction films. The movie that established his celebrity told the story of Carl Denham, a sensationalist documentary filmmaker—based loosely on himself.  The film, of course, was "King Kong." It made Cooper rich and famous and he went on to become a Hollywood power-broker at RKO. The world view presented in "King Kong," however, was already taking shape in young Merian's fantasy life during his childhood. 

 

As a boy, Merian Cooper was deeply influenced by Paul B. du Chaillu’s 1861 book, Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa, which left a profound mark on his imagination.  Informed by centuries of colonialist travelogues and bolstered by the "findings" of racial science, Du Chaillu’s was the quintessential tale of the “Great White Hunter,” told by himself, in which his domination of human and animal wilds were recounted with great drama. In the engraving from the book, above, Du Chaillu assumes a relaxed pose as he casually he observes an exorcism.

Du Chaillu's adventures inspired Cooper’s personal journey as a self-styled adventurer and as a filmmaker. Du Chaillu’s book was filled with fabulous and vivid misinformation, including ostensible sightings of Troglodytes and other European “observations” seen in descriptions of Africa going back for centuries.

Of particular interest to Du Chaillu was the Gorilla, whom he anointed the true king of the jungle. Some natives, he related, believed that certain gorillas contained “spirits of departed negroes.”  One local account told of a gorilla abducting “two Mbondemo women.” While one of the two escaped, the gorilla was said to have taken liberties with the other, before she was able to flee.

There were also tales of gorillas routing and killing natives warriors, imprisoning others.  When the gorillas finally released their prisoners, “the nails of their fingers and toes…[were] torn off by their captors.”

Tales like these entered American folklore, largely as a result of being translated and transformed for the screen in Cooper and his partner, Earnest Schoedsack’s 1933 blockbuster, "King Kong."

"Ol’ times there are not forgotten. Look away, look away, look away…"

The other day I received a personal letter inviting me to explore the possibility of moving to The Ford Plantation.  Built on the Olmstead designed grounds of Henry Ford’s 1,800 acre Georgia estate, I would become one of only 400 “special” homeowners in “a private gated community and sporting club on the site of antebellum plantations.” Quite the opportunity!

For a growing number of Americans, gated communities represent a way of life that is safe from the dangers that they see lurking everywhere in the un-gated environs of our society. Most such enclaves feature the promise of high-tech surveillance technologies and private police forces trained in “quick response,” but this one is built on a more venerable model of social order: slavery.  Since gated communities offer residents the promise of dwelling in an environment where the only dark skins to be found are those of a servant class, why not offer safety-seekers the opportunity to live in the mythic luxury of the O’Hara’s antebellum Georgia plantation “Tara,” immortalized in Gone with the Wind?



It’s the perfect place for would-be cavaliers, and their brood, to imagine themselves living in a bygone world where people (i.e. “darkies”) knew their place. Nine-millimeter pistols and electronic fences have no doubt replaced the whips of erstwhile slave drivers but the scenic camouflage is designed to evoke an earlier time, when a simpler way of life prevailed.  To punctuate the authenticity of this nostalgic theme park—along with all the modern amenities—Ford Plantation even sports a “big house” as its centerpiece. One un-named source reports that former slave quarters will be remodeled into boutique shops, to meet residents’ consumption requirements and to ensure their peace of mind.



As an act of civic duty, and to ensure that all people have an equal opportunity to enjoy the privileges of Ol’ Massa, we invite S&S readers to apply to become one of the fortunate four hundred, so they too will all have the chance to move behind the comfort of the gates. Hey, this is America! 

Please request application forms from:

Keven R. Shaney, President and CEO
The Ford Plantation
12511 Ford Avenue
Richmond Hill, GA 31324
877-735-8367

All photographs are taken from The Ford Plantation brochure. Text is our own.

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's passing is a great loss for the human community. Thankfully he left giant footprints behind, and his rare voice will remain among us and and in the lives of our children's children.

We loved reading his books when we first discovered them in the 1960s and continued to admire his mind, his uncommon commitment to human justice and his belief in the importance of speaking out, saying "NO!" even in the face of a culture of fear that has gripped our society for far too long. In his work and his words, his ongoing message was "Enough, already!" This is the mark of something rare in our world: integrity.

It was one of the great pleasures and honors of our lives to know that some of Kurt Vonnegut's departing written words were dedicated to telling people that it was important to read our book, Typecasting. For both of us reading these words was a transcendent moment, a treasure.

We, like the millions of others who felt he was a kindred spirit, a voice for so many, will miss his incisive vision and his wry smile.

Elizabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen