13 posts tagged “mash”

“He is the Moses of race hatred in the United States.”
Gedalia Bublick, of Madison Grant

Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant

Jonathan Peter Spiro

Defending the Master Race by Jonathan Spiro is probably the most important work of History that I have or will read this year. Much like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed last year, this book is one that will take some time to get through but will help a person to understand why a whole period of American history (and in some cases, world history) happened the way it did. Defending the Master Race is a biography of Madison Grant that serves as a primer in the origins, influence, application, and legacy of “scientific racism” in the United States and, in the last chapter, Germany. In one of the final chapters, Spiro makes the connection between Madison Grant's writings (particularly his highly influential book, The Passing of the Great Race) and National Socialism explicit.

“German Eugenicists eagerly established close ties with the Grantians in the 1920s. They were full of admiration for the success of their American counterparts in restricting immigration, passing anti-miscegenation laws, and implementing coercive sterilization ask. German journals provided timely updates on developments in US eugenics and regularly translated the articles of the Americans.” P. 356

“Adolf Hitler's closest scientific advisers were avid fans of Madison Grant and accepted all the major tenets of his scientific racism. Hitler himself, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘the highest aim of human existence is... the conservation of the race,’ sent Grant a letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and telling him that ‘the book is my Bible.’ Mein Kampf is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race, in particular the chapters entitled ‘Race and People’ and ‘the State’, which encapsulate all the aspects of Grantian thought.” P. 357

“In 1936, when the Nazi party published its official recommendation for essential reading in the fields of human heredity, it mentioned only two books by non-German authors: Gobineau’s Inequality of Human Races and Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race.” P. 357

“Madison Grant warned Harry H. Laughlin in 1934 that while ‘most people of our type are in sympathy with the German eugenical measures,’ political considerations meant that ‘we will have to proceed cautiously and endorsing them.’” P. 365

I often tell my students that “ideas have consequences” and this is a classic case of that truth. Spiro makes it clear that the objective of Madison Grant's life was a mission of conservation. He wanted to protect animals, trees, landscapes, and gene pools. Growing up in New York City in the later 1800's, Madison Grant could see “his city” being “taken over” by immigration and insisted that his “people” were being buried in an avalanche of mediocre to poor genetic material. As someone once put it, “a snob is someone who acts like he begat his ancestors.”

“In 1892, Madison and his brother Deforest, who had just graduated from Yale, helped to found a slightly different type of club: The Society of Colonial Wars, a fraternal organization with membership restricted to ‘men of good moral character and reputation' whose ancestors had attained distinction in the wars of the colonial period.’”

One should note that Madison Grant was not alone. Indeed, U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt was a huge fan of Madison Grant and his writing.

“As a frustrated [Theodore] Roosevelt told his friend Owen Wister: “they [the public] seem unable to see that it is simply a question of the multiplication table. If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaum's and Rabinsky's have eight, or nine, or ten -- it is simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?’”

It is somewhat amazing to think that Theodore Roosevelt, a man who we have up on Mt. Rushmore as being one of our greatest Presidents, had this to say about Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race, a book that Adolf Hitler referred to as “his Bible”

“This book is a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize. It shows an extraordinary range of reading and a wide scholarship. It shows a habit of singular serious thoughts on the subjects of most commanding importance. It shows a fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentality and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail. It is the work of an American scholar and gentlemen; and all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you for writing it.” P. 158

It is not difficult to see why Theodore Roosevelt found such a kindred spirit in Madison Grant. Some 20 years before Grant wrote his treatise on scientific racism, Theodore Roosevelt had written in his book, The Winning of the West of the necessity of racial wars.

Necessity of the Conquest.

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the western miners and cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end
shape their own destinies.

Righteousness of the War.

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and
Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,--in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

Both men were deeply impacted by the theory of Darwinisn and by the men who so soon after Darwin carried his theories out to what they regarded as their logical conclusions. Darwin himself had not engaged in a great deal of policy speculation but he did see that his theory would soon be finding logical expression in human societies. “We civilized men build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick;” he wrote,

“we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment... thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” p. 122

Grant would later name a his association of anthropologists who believed in scientific racism after Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of the Eugenics movement. According to Spiro,

“Positive eugenics would encourage the fittest members of society to have more children, while negative eugenics would discourage the propagation of the unfit. Eugenicists of lesser refinement than Sir Francis [Galton] would later refer to the positive and negative aspects of their program as ‘breeding and weeding.’” P.120

“Grant never felt that his background in zoology disqualified him from taking up the study of man. To the contrary, he declared that man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe, not in kind but only in degree of development, and therefore an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an extended knowledge of other mammals.” p. 100

“The Aryanists who had the most influence on Grant where three of the most intriguing figures in the Western canon: Arthur Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Georges Vacher De Lapouge.” p. 103

The race wars that Theodore Roosevelt was praising and predicting in 1894 when he wrote volume three of the Winning of the West were being “scheduled” at least by 1899, the year that Ripley's Races of Europe, Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century, Lapouges L’Aryen and Haeckel's Riddles of the Universe were all being published. (Interestingly, 1899 was the year that Jack London began publishing novels as a means of popularizing the Darwinian ethos.)

Perhaps one of the most interesting and troubling themes that one sees throughout the discussion of Madison Grant and the eugenics movement is the merging of religious and scientific impulses. Many, if not most, of the scientific racists came from religious backgrounds and many from Puritan ancestries. One senses that same predilection to eradicate evil and bring about a millennial world, albeit with very different methods. Similarly, one finds in the key evolutionists and eugenicists a tendency to see their movement as a religious one. A few quotes suffice.

“Haeckel claimed that in the wake of the Origin of Species, evolution had replaced religious dogma to become ‘the sure foundation of our whole world system.’ “Allis ist Natur. Natur ist allis.” P. 123

“Since the inferior races are, he said, nearer to the mammals -- apes and dogs -- than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.” P.124

“Reformers who are serious about improving the human race, and not just about acquiring reputations as do-gooders, would do better to devote their efforts to eugenic programs that strove to eliminate defective germ plasm from the population.” P. 125

“Eugenics offered the post-millennial hope that, through good breeding, the victory of the righteous would be assured in the perfect kingdom could be established on earth. We sense this in the American Eugenics Society's proclamation that the discovery that man is able to guide his own evolution by means of eugenics 'is the most momentous of human achievements, ranking ahead of the discoveries of fire, speech, tools, and writing.'” P.135

“Eugenical truth, declared Grant's disciple Robert E. Wiggam, ‘is the highest truth men will ever know.’ He explicitly referred to the genetics laboratory as ‘the new Mount Sinai’ and announced that the findings of eugenics were ‘the 10 Commandments of science.’” P. 135

“The hero of this secular faith was Sir Francis Gaulton.”

Over and over, this idea that scientific racism was simply another expression of Puritanism and that what was going on was not so much a replacing of religion with science as much as a transformation from one religious world view to another. Consider the place that “preaching” and sacrificial atonement play in the following sentence:

“Grant preached that the fate of the race outweighed that of ‘only few particular humans who were of no value to the community’” p. 136

Indeed, the leaders of the Eugenics movement saw it as a cause worthy of tithing to and a means for wealthy people to bring about a “kingdom of God”.

“Eugenics was the supreme preventative medicine; it was the preeminent philanthropy. As Davenport insisted, ‘vastly more effective than $10 million to charity would be $10 million to eugenics. He who, by such a gift, should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility and suffering would be the world's wisest philanthropist.’” P. 137 (The leaders that Spiro mentions as being most influential are Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Benedict Davenport (Eugenics Center at Cold Springs, NY), and Henry Fairfield Osborn (American Museum of Natural History)

Jonathan Spiro argues that The Passing of the Great Race is an extraordinary overview of Western history as seen through the eyes of a scientific racist.” P. 145. Anyone who has ever read the speeches of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels or even excerpts from the biology textbooks that were being served up to children in Nazi schools will see the effects of Madison Grant's logic. “We can now see that the social workers and their ilk have done ‘more injury to the race than Black Death or smallpox.” says Grant,

“ . . . Scientists have long understood that nature cares not for the individual.... she is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type.”

“In clear, sober language that is indistinguishable from the official dogma of National Socialism,” writes Spiro, “the charming Park Avenue conservationist instructs us that the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.’” p. 151. “Anticipating the rise of fascism, he predicts that the spread of scientific literacy will enable us to see that ‘the basis of the government of man is now and always has been, and always will be, force and not sentiment.’” P. 156

Throughout the writing of Madison Grant and his contemporaries, one finds this celebration of the banishment of sentiment (and compassion). Even the patron saint of birth control, Margaret Sanger, participated in the frenzy of “objectivism” asserting that “sentimentalism was dysgenic”

“Sanger agreed with Madison Grant that sentimentalism was dysgenic, and denounced society’s misguided policy of ‘indiscriminate charity’ towards ‘the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock.’” P. 192

Wars of the 20^th Century, here are your architects.

On page 185, Jonathan Spiro mentions the “Fitter Families competitions” that the Eugenicists inspired. Ironically, just last week, my dad was showing me a newspaper article from 1922 when my Uncle Paul was born that indicated that he was a winner of this contest in Vermont that particular year.

When the book returns to the subject of scientific racism and immigration policy, we are again returned to the days of early Puritan New England where the Puritan clergy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were banishing people to Rhode Island for not being theologically “pure” and attempting in any way possible to exclude the Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular.

“From the Society of Colonial Wars to the American Eugenics Society, Grant had sternly controlled admission to all his clubs, and now he was intent on doing the same with his nation. His unflinching and determined effort to preserve the Nordic character of the United States involved three legislative steps that progressively and severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: the literacy test of 1917, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. It was an undertaking that one scholar has referred to as America's most ambitious program of biological engineering.’” P. 197

“Grant authoritatively explained to the president that ‘the old theological views in regard to the unity of the human race and its relatively recent origin some 6000 years ago is giving way to the knowledge that man as such dates back two or 300,000 years, and that consequently the line of cleavage between the so-called races of mankind is fundamental and cannot be modified by any change of environment in a life time of a nation.’ Therefore, speaking as a ‘scientist,’ Grant asked him [President Taft] to stand up to the steamship companies, the industrial interests, and the immigrant organizations and ‘preserve the Native American stock’ by taking a brave stand in favor of immigration restriction.” P. 200

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the way that Spiro analyzes why the idea of scientific racism gained such traction so quickly and why it lost it so quickly as well. He spends some time examining the “group think” tendencies of the Eugenics movement and notes how a small group of elitest individuals set up numerous different organizations that made them look like they were on the cutting edge of many different scientific movements when in fact it was realy the same set of Oz-like propagandists behind the scenes of each and every one. “Grant cited Laughlin who had based his analysis on Bringham’s statistics,” writes Spiro,

“which were in turn based on Grant's calculations of the racial composition of the European population. What seemed, in other words, to unaware observers, to be a plethora of independent studies by reputable scientists was actually a series of self-referential claims... that constantly fed upon itself.” P. 227

I was reminded of the conclusions of the Senate Investigation on Pre-Iraq War Intelligence as I was reading this.

Conclusion 3. (U) The Intelligence Community (IC) has long struggled with the need for analysts to overcome analytic biases, that is, to resist the tendency to see what they would expect to see in the intelligence reporting. In the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, the Committee found that intelligence analysts, in many cases, based their analysis more on their expectations than on an objective evaluation of the infomation in the intelligence reporting. Analysts expected to see evidence that Iraq had retained prohibited weapons and that Iraq would resume prohibited WMD activities once United Nations’ (W)inspections ended. This bias that pervaded both the IC’s analytic and collection communities represents “group think,” a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970’sto describe a process in which a group can make bad or irrational decisions as each member of the group attempts to conform their opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. IC personnel involved in the Iraq WMD issue demonstrated several aspects of group think: examining few alternatives, selective gathering of information, pressure to conform within the group or withhold criticism, and collective rationalization.

The Committee found that the IC had a tendency to accept information which supported the presumption that Iraq had active and expanded WMD programs more readily than information which contradicted it.”

For example, the IQ tests that were taken during the enlistment of soldiers during WWI. “Karel C. Bringham’s Study of American Intelligence was a major achievement in the history of scientific racism.” says Spiro, explaining the way that eguenicists, anti-immigrationists, and scientific racists “cooked the books” to get the results they wanted.

‘Few works in the history of American psychology,’ writes Leon Kamin, ‘have had so significant an impact.’ Henry H. Goddard declared that the analysis of the Army mental tests was ‘probably the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever required about itself.’” P. 219

But if you look at the questions that these tests were asking, you discover that they are really tests of the takers interest in white American “Nordic” culture.

And yet these tests became the evidence that was driving the epistemological conviction of Senators Congressmen, Presidents, doctors, and white racist everywhere. Even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken in by the propaganda. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his Buck v. Bell decision, a case that determined the legality and morality of involuntary sterilization of “unfit” potential parents.

Eugenicists like Grant were ecstatic that they were winning the “commanding heights” of the culture to their views. “Continuous decimal elimination, should become a part of eugenics creative civilized people,” Henry Laughlin argued. His plan involved taking the bottom ten percent of the population (by some definition that I am sure made it unlikely that he would be in it) on a regular basis and sterilizing them. To the scientific racists, decisions like Buck v. Bell meant that they were on course to become the high priests of a new religious world view.

“Justice Holmes, in fact, explicitly viewed his decision as a blow against religious fundamentalism in the United States, and he proudly wrote to Harold Laski that ‘the religious are in a stir over Buck v. Bell. Replying a few days later, Laski encouraged Holmes to stay the course: ‘sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all the fundamentalists.’” P. 23

Perhaps he was joking but it is not unusual for jokes to become, in time, policies, and even doctrines. Spiro writes:

“It is difficult not to notice that the leaders of the American Eugenics Society, like high priests demanding ever bloodier sacrifices for their cults, were, as Mark Heller says, ‘possessed by a compelling urge to castrate the unfit.’ It is wondrous to witness the vehemence with which such childless figures as [these] set about attacking the genitals of the lower breeds.” P. 240

“The readers of The Passing of the Great Race were informed that ‘in the modern scientific study of race we have long since discarded the Adamic theory that man is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden.’ According to Grant, whites and blacks evolved independently of each other, and only ‘old-fashioned’ thinkers still maintained that all human beings belong to the species Homo sapiens.”

Chapter 13, “The Decline of Scientific Racism” is an analysis of why the scientific racism of Madison Grant had such a short lifespan in the American consciousness. To summarize, it failed because it was so successful. After the 1924 immigration Act, Americans figured they had solved the problem and forgot about the theory that had defined it as one. Secondly, the war in Europe took so many white men overseas that millions of African Americans migrated north to work in the war industries and the improvements in their educational and occupational lives quickly led to test scores that made the white racist propaganda look ridiculous. Thirdly, Spiro also mentions that there were hundreds of Jewish (and other ethnic groups?) students graduating from American Colleges and demonstrating the lunacy of Grant's assertions to intellectual superiority and dominance. Fourthly, the field of Sociology began to publish numerous studies to show the ignorance of those who had argued that cultures were the result of genetics, not human initiative. Fifthly, the field of psychology began to critique the ridiculous notion that a test of American pop culture was an adequate means to test intelligence. Next, the science of genetics made tremendous advances detrimental to the racists cause, taking the science out of “scientific racism”. Seventh, the Great Depression of the 1930's served as a great equalizer. It hit the pocketbooks of old stock and new immigrant alike. And an ideology that said that suffering populations should be eliminated seemed a bit stupid in a society where everyone was suffering. Eighth, Spiro notes that the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920's cut American immigrants off from the populations and cultures they left, making it abundantly easy for their kids to assimilate into American culture with far more ease than the racists had thought possible. Additionally, the rise of Naziism and the reports of brutality and discrimination in Germany made the the whole idea of scientific racism stink foul in the nostrils of a people who still retained enough of their basic decency to know that something was “fishy in Denmark”. Lastly, scientific racism failed because so many of its leaders had never chosen to marry and have children. The list of those leaders of the movement who felt themselves too pure for mere mortals to marry and conceive children with is so long as to be bizarre. The cause of this self-imposed celibacy among so many of the movement's key leaders is worthy of investigation.

“Eugenics, concluded the New York Times at the end of the [last Eugenic Congress], ‘seems to have become a disguise for race prejudice, ancestor worship, and cast snobbery” P. 341 and “when copies of Madison Grant's new book, the Conquest of the Continent were stacked on the shelves at bookstores at the end of 1933, they remained there.” P.344

William Langer, of Foreign Affairs referred to the book as “Science submerged by opinion.”

Sadly, the movement that Americans were interested in casting off, was being heartily accepted in Germany, a place where Madison Grant and company were hailed as prophets of a new age. “A commonly heard slogan during the Third Reich was ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.’” 378. I suspect that this was an accurate description of every idea Madison Grant ever had.

Spiro notes that there were Nazis who used portions of Madison Grant’s work in their trials at Nuremburg.

Question for Comment: Who do you think bears more responsibility for the damage done as a consequence of the adoption of a “dangerous idea”? The people who create them, popularize them, or implement them?

Beloved

Toni Morrison

The last few days, in between exams and final papers, I have managed to read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Needless to say, you won't get the final word on a Pulitzer Prize winning book from me. But I mean to outline a few things that Morrison speaks to me.

One of the themes of the book has to do with how long it can take to process abuse and trauma. All of the characters in Beloved have been traumatized and physically and emotionally abused by slavery. In that sense, Beloved is a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, gnawing away at the lie in the National consciousness that slavery could be a humane institution. Morrison makes it clear that it destroyed lives, whites and blacks.

Every person that came out of slavery was a survivor and every one would have to have pieces of them put back together. With any luck, they found people that could help them, some related, some not:

"“Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the 30 mile woman. “She is a friend of mine.  She gather me.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” P. 273

What is particularly interesting to me is that the WAY Morrison writes, you have to put pieces together yourself. You, as a reader have to do what the characters have to do. Work out what happened and what it means. Sometimes, you are inside people's heads. Sometimes, you are watching what happens to them through the floorboards. Memory and "rememory" are incessently present, as if the memories of these slaves are scabs that have to be peeled off to be healed, and peeled off again to be healed again, - all one can hope for is that in each round of the painful process, a little less gravel will be found in the wound. Morrison makes use of a set of characters that had lived on a "humane plantation" to make it clear that even there, abuse, psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic was rampant.

"“We could move,” [Sethe] suggested once to her mother-in-law. “What would be the point?”  Asked Baby Suggs. “Not a house in the county ain't packed to its rafters with some Negro’s grief. . . . In all of baby's life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.

. .  . what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.” P. 23

... And the emotional impact would take generations to work out, not just in the time it took to announce an Emancipation Proclamation. So many of the character in this novel have scars - they have broken trusters and frozen passions. In so many ways, their ability to form bonds and to love was crippled. And clearly, as one of the characters so eloquently puts it, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Trauma taught slaves that they should put as many emotions into hibernation as possible:

"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle -greensleeves, and thought how little color there wasn't the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way baby did.  Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl.  After that she became as color conscious as a hen.  Every dawn she worked in fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest.  And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or yellow squash.  Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color.  There was something wrong with that.  It was as though one day she saw a red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."

It taught them tobond to nothing and no one:

“Risky, thought Paul D., very risky.  For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.  The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well mabe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.” P. 45

“So you protected yourself and loved small.  Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see a loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept.  Steal shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up.  Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, Beatles, a kingdom of ants.  Anything bigger wouldn't do.  A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia.  He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.” P. 162

Clearly, everyone got disconnected by the institution of slavery and needed help getting put back together. Sethe needs Paul D to provide a sense of saftey. Paul D needs Sethe to affirm his ability to create a place of safety - something he could never do for anyone before. It is because of him that she begins to see colors again:

" . . kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D. came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled barren 124 really was.

He was responsible for that.  Emotions sped to the surface in his company.  Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot.  Windows suddenly had view.  And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.” P. 39

It is because of her that Paul D begins to assemble his disconnected self, unpacking the emotions that he had for so long slammed shut in the tobacco can that sits where his heart used to be.

“He would keep the rest where it belongs: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.  It's lid rusted shut.  He would not try it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents that would shame him.  And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him. . . . working dough.  Working, working dough.  Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.” P. 73

As I said, all of the main characters are having to suck out the venom of slavery from their veins and memories. Even the saintly, Baby Suggs, holy:

“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heart strings to.  There is no bad luck in the world but white folks.” (P. 89) . . . but . . .  "Bit by bit, at 124 and in the clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself.  Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free itself was another.” P. 95

Perhaps one of the most moving and powerful passages in the book is a sermon (Call'in) given by Baby Suggs, holy in the camp meeting, Calling these former slaves to combat the abuse they experienced with love.

“Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard.  Yonder they do not love your flesh.  They despise it.  They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out.  No more do they love the skin on your back.  Yonder they flay it.  And all my people they do not love your hands.  Those they only use, Tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.  Love your hands!  Love them.  Raise them up and kissed them.  Touch others with them, add them together, stroke them on your face as they don't love that either.  You got to love it, You!  And no, they ain't in love with your mouth.  Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again.  What you say out of it they will not heed.  What you scream from it they do not hear.  What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give the leavins instead.  No, they don't love your mouth.  You got to love it.  This is flesh I'm talking about here.  Flesh that needs to be loved.  Feed the need to rest and to dance;  backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong-arms I'm telling you.  Know my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.  So love your neck; Put a hand on it, and grace it, stroke it and hold it up.  And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them.  The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too.  More than eyes or feet.  More than lungs that have yet to draw free air.  More than your life holding womb or your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.  This is the prize.” P. 88-89

One of the greatest traumas that slavery inflicted on people caught in its web, as Morrison portrays it, was the ways in which it drove slaves to inhumanity themselves. In Beloved, Sethe kills one of her own children to keep it from being taken back into slavery. Forgiving whites was one thing but how did one forgive themselves for the many ways that slaves had to compromise themselves?

“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D says to Sethe when he learns of what she did, “and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” P. 165

Can one forgive a person for doing something like that? Can one forgive themselves? Baby Suggs, holy is left in a moral paralysis over it.

". . . she could not prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice.  One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed.  The white folks had tired her out at last.” P. 180

Paul D puts his finger right on the heart of the dilemma when he says "that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.” P. 271 I can only assume that he is referring to God who, if the Gospels say anything, knows exactly what it is like to kill a child to save a child."

I close this review of what I got out of this book with a passage that expresses ever so clearly how we eventually create in reality what we project in imagination:

"White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.  Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.  In a way, he thought, they were right.  The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled jungle grew inside.  But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other livable place.  It was the jungle white folks planted in them.  And it grew.  It spread.  And, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it.  Touched them everyone.  Changed and altered them.  Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.  The screaming baboons lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” P. 199

The world owes a debt to Toni Morrison, holy for helping us all work through our Traumas.

Incidentally, the house number in which the story takes place is 124. Sethe has four kids and the third one is dead which is why the three is missing I suspect. It has been "disremembered" 

Question for Comment: In the novel, Beloved, Baby Suggs, holy insists that the work of reclaimg our sense of dignity and self worth must come from within us. We cannot wait for someone to affirm our worth to us. And yet, it seems, that no one in this novel recovers without the love and affection and support of others. When you look at the distance between where you are and where you would like to be in terms of loving yourself, do you see a need for more internal initiative or external help in the process?

This week I have been facilitating a Global Module with a group of students in North Carolina. We have been talking about Global Poverty, our experiences with it and our understanding of its causes. I thought I would order a Netflicks movie on the subject and so today I watched the Documentary HOME by Jeffrey Toggman. SEE TRAILER HERE.

What became evident to me is that the causes for poverty are both external and internal. There are roadblocks that helper have to help get out of the way for us and roadblocks on the inside of our heads that have to be removed before we will take that help. I don't want to spoil the movie for you but it is fascinating to watch the process by which someone who has never ever ever been given help tries to deal with the psychological crisis that being helped creates.

I am reminded of a passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus asks a man who has been lame his whole life if he WANTS to get well. And instead of saying "yes, I do" the man starts to give reasons why he CAN'T get well. In someways, a soul can adapt to a wound and even to a painful life. It is like a back that goes out and doesn't get adjusted and the muscles all conform to the abnormality. To a person like that, a chiropractic adjustment FEELS like a dislocated spine.

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?

"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me."

The Singer/The Song/The Finale (The Singer Trilogy 1-3)

Calvin Miller

The U.S. Demographic Visualizer

http://demo.idvsolutions.com/apps/censusdemo/flash/map.html

It is interesting to see the different ways in which American society is not really an "American" society. There are many Americas. I submitted the following discussion post to a class today. It makes me wonder, do we ALL agree to distinctions being made in an ad hoc way? Are we all hypocrites in some way?

"Our society likes to find ways to make distinctions between groups
of people."

What is interesting is that so many of us can find ourselves in the
position of pots calling the kettle black on this. There are some rather
weird inconsistencies. For example, social conservatives would say that
it is WRONG to draw a distinction between a baby and a fetus but would
definitely draw such a distinction between a heterosexual couple and a
gay couple. A liberal might argue that it is WRONG to draw a distinction
between a heterosexual couple and a gay couple but that distinctions
between wealthy people and Middle income people MUST be drawn for tax
purposes. 

etc. etc. 

Do we ALL do this? are we all guilty? Are any of us really consistent?
Thanks for getting me thinking. 

The following was posted by a student in one of my classes today. It occurred to me that maybe I should start a separate blog for some of my favorite student posts.

Q:

Have you ever had experiences with people holding what Steele calls “a grievance identity”? Details? Would you consider Steele’s criticism of grievance politics to be callous?  How does the learning you have done this semester impact your answer to that question?

A:

For those that didn't get a chance to read "The New Segregation" the author, Steele, uses  the term “grievance identity" to represent his observation that minorities today are forced  into roles in society that are defined by who they identify as the enemy.  For instance the  author, a black man, claims that being a black man with a strong cultural identity requires  that he hold a grievance against white men, support its alienation, and uphold his groups  sovereignty.  His conclusion is that this is about power not justice and that it a result of identity forming out of anger against oppression.  

I have had many experiences with people holding what I would call "a grievance identity."   Its always easy to remember your first encounter with something that strikes you as different, outside your comfort zone, or beyond your previous experiences.  My military career provided the environment for many of these experiences.  As a white kid (17)  coming from a small rural town in Norther Vermont with no black or hispanic population I  had almost no multi-cultural exposure before arriving at Basic Military Training.  It just so happened that I was also the only white kid in my training flight.  Everyone else was either black or hispanic. Lets just say that it was clear that I did not exactly fit in.  I received two death threats within the first 12 hrs.  One because I asked a big black kid  (Seth) where he was from and what his father did for work and one because I laughed  when my bunk mate fell off the top bunk. Let's just say that I didn't sleep well for several nights. It was made very clear by almost everyone that I was not welcome, based purely on what my skin color represented. They called me "pillow", and somehow you just know when a name is derogatory and when it is endearing. Those who did try to talk to me or where caught talking to me those first few weeks where reprimanded by others not to talk  to "pillows".  There was a clear rift in the group.  Urban black and Urban hispanic.  I was not welcome in either and represented for most of them their oppression.  But, it was one of those life changing experiences.  I had never before experienced such a degree of  dislike, disrespect, and general ill will by a group of people, and all for no justifiable  reason other than I was white and represented a world that these young black and  hispanic men where angry with.  They begrudged me my humanity in affirming their identity.  Their groups where bound on the common grievance they had against what I represented.  My reaction to this actually surprised me.  Rather than becoming angry at them I became embarrassed of what I represented in this new group dynamic.  Luckily there wasn't much time for thinking about this and at the end of the day little energy left  for words. We survived each other because we barely survived the days training. What made us different eventually became overshadowed by what we had in common (our military experience) and a new group identity formed out of our shared experiences.   Seth still calls me "pillows", but its derogatory connotation has long sense been replaced by a history of mutual respect and support.  A year ago I talked with Seth and he told me that I was the first white guy he ever asked for help and the first white guy that ever actually helped him.  In the 12 years since the day he asked me for help that thought had never crossed my mind.  I'm glad Seth doesn't allow his anger to define his identity any more, and I'm glad I don't feel embarrassed when made the subject of other people racially focused anger. 

I personally don't think that Steele’s criticism of grievance politics is callous.  I think he presents a revealing and respectful perspective on modern American politics.  Yesterday, on NPR I heard a report about some public schools in America that chose to become gender segregated.  The idea is that girls and boys learn differently.  But, everyone they interviewed who supported this approach sounded angry about their daughter being frightened to ask question because boys where in the class or sons who where embarrassed to participate in class because they are worried about what the girls are thinking about them in class.  It sounds like grievance politics to me.  They interviewed an old lady who criticized this by stating that men and women are different enough as it is, and that schooling them differently isn't going to teach them how to get along, which is what they need to know.  I think thats a respectable statement, and it follows along with one of the things I learned this semester.  Diversity is important.  The more people with different backgrounds, culture, race, experiences the more value arises out of working together.  This class has been a good example of that.  We struggled with our differences amongst ourselves and with the Jordan students, but the end result was something that is arguably better than what we had before. 

- Ethan

Question for Comment: How do you create a safe place for diversity in your life?

Frontline: The Dark Side

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

Born Rich

The boys and I are about to delve into a study of capitalism and in the interest of plowing up the soil to prepare for that discussion, we watched the movie PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS the other night (about the lives of the poor and homeless) and the documentary BORN RICH today (about the lives of the kids of wealthy heirs).

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to inherit 20 Billion Dollars on your eighteenth birthday, this would be a good movie to watch. Among other things, both movies reveal how important it is not to assume that you know something about a person because they seem to belong to a group of people that you think you know.  Rich people feel pain, sometimes their wealth makes it MORE likely that they will experience it. Sometimes, their wealth makes it so that the pain is even more pronounced because it cannot be hid ... indeed, others in society LOOK for it.

Similarly, Chris Gardner, the basis of the Pursuit of Happyness movie, barely managed to climb out of the hole that people's inability to see his talent left him in. I remember living with some billionaires once and listening to them yell at each other about whether they should or shouldn't build a bowling alley in Washington D.C. I tend to think if you are not happy, money gives you something else to argue about.

As for me? I just had a chimney replaced. I took down the old bricks and the new chimney, just from the roof up ... and the liner cost $2500. It feels like I just bought a widescreen plasma TV to put on my roof. But one of the kids in this video could easily have spent that much on alcohol in one night. The same kid who said that he went to Brown University and only attended eight college related commitments in an entire semester ... and still was asked to come back.

Clearly money talks. Sometimes too much. You can tell that money does not wreck everyone's lives, just as poverty doesn't ... but it makes it easier for either the poor or the rich to get wrecked. As the Hebrew Proverb puts it,

Question for Comment: Where do you most feel the stresses of too little or too much of anything in your life?

The Wave

Todd Strasser

Frontline's A Class Divided: I can't watch this footage without thinking how insane we all are to send our kids off to school. Do we have any idea how pliable their brains are? I can't watch this without thinking about the students in the DECLINING BY DEGREES documentary I saw the other night and how they were already thinking about grades and about learning. One young man in particular explained that he didn't bother reading assignments because he could get 90's without doing so. The learning was irrelevant. The grade was important. Were we all this pliable? Are we all this pliable?

Shocked and angered by Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliot, an Iowa schoolteacher who is whte, decided to teach her thrd-grade pupils a lesson on racism. Elliot divided the whte students according to their eye color. She forced the "blues" to wear armbands and to sit in the back of the classroom. She also belabored the blue-eyed chldren's failures, pointing out each mistake as it was made. Meanwhile, Elliot lavished praise on the "browns" and gave them special privileges. She ignored the brown-eyed chldren's errors, praising each of their individual accomplishments.

Elliot's treatment of the children immediately changed their behavior. "I lowered my expectations of the blue-eyed
children and they lived down to those expectations." After the blues' repeated mistakes, Elliot sneered, "See? You're all that way. I knew this would happen!" Conversely, the brown-eyed children made progress in many areas including math and reading. The green- and hazel-eyed chldren -the neutral third party -shunned the blue-eyed children in the classroom, in the lunchroom, at recess, and at the water fountain. "I watched those thud graders -all white and all Christian -who had never been exposed to different races become blatantly racist," Elliot says.
Elliot's 20-odd years of blue-eyed/brown-eyed antiracism instruction has acquired such notoriety that she has received both scorn and in some cases admiration of her fellow townspeople. She and her husband have been snubbed by friends, whle her chldren have been beaten and spit upon. However controversial and unscientific this experiment may be, Elliot's examination of racial prejudice still demonstrates, as graphically as any empirical data, racism's ability to invade and occupy impressionable minds."

Iowa Schoolteacher Demonstrates Racism as Learned Behavior
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 8. (Summer, 1995), p. 36.

In another related article, I came across the concept of "cumulative discrimination" "Discrimination at one decision point, the article notes, "may influence discrimination at future decision points." It is an obvious concept that now has a word to describe it.

Tracing the Economic Impact of Cumulative Discrimination
Rebecca M. Blank

The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, Philadelphia, PA, January 7-9, 2005. (May, 2005), pp. 99-103.

Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk

The Documentary of the night was Declining By Degrees: Higher Education At Risk. I would write more about it but after a 12 hour day today in my higher education job, I don't have a lot of energy. A.  portion of the documentary is about the lives of the adjunct faculty who often teach 8-9 classes a semester to make a living. Wasn't hard to relate to that. A portion was about universities full of students who can't be bothered to read their assigned texts. Wasn't hard to relate to that. A portion was about University basketball teams and how coaches are paid many times more than the University Professors and even Presidents; athletes that spend 80% of their time practicing; professors who say that for $65,000 it is insulting to tell them they need to teach kids how to write; college students who don't study more than an hour a night; professors who have to decide between promotion and educational quality.

All of this makes "sense" to me as colleges become more market driven and students are making choices about where they are going to go to college, often doing so on the basis of non-educational factors like work-out facilities, sports teams, landscaping, and dorm luxuries. As one President described it, "It's an arms race and we are going to win". Meanwhile cuts in state funding and increases in tuition are beginning to drive a selection process that places students, by means of an economic "sorting hat" regardless of merit (unless they are at the very top), in a caste system of schools based on their financial situation.

It is hard to know how to go about complaining. The documentary makes it clear that so many students are not applying themselves, are using college as a patio on which to drink and party. There is NO WAY that I want to fund their irresponsibility. No way. And yet on the other hand, you have exceptionally bright kids who are working their buts off to make it through who are being forced out or into Community Colleges.

I need to get some sleep. I have a long day of teaching ahead of me tomorrow. Its almost 2:00 in the morning. 

Question for Comment: How would you best prepare a smart kid to get a free college education?   

A controversial new anti-Koranic video was recently produced and banned in Holland. It demonstrates the problem that Islamic people are having everywhere.  It is called FITNA. I will let you go find it if you want. It essentially superimposes specific verses from the Koran advocating violence against unbelievers with images and sound files of Islamic extremists advocating the same in contemporary society.

Interestingly, the film was mentioned by a student in the Netherlands who is taking one of my online classes right now. This week, we are studying McCarthyism.You can, I think, see the connection:

"Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!" Geert Wiliders.

This guy so reminds me of Dr. Pfander in my Masters Thesis:

"AMSTERDAM – Faction leader for the Freedom Party Geert Wilders is not considering making any apology to Saudi Arabia for his recent comments on the Koran. He said this on Sunday in response to a report in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, which wrote that the Islamic country has complained to the Dutch government about the comments.

A spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs in The Hague said on Sunday that the Saudi ambassador had in fact done so “informally.” There has not been any official complaint however, he said.

The newspaper claims that the Saudi embassy in The Hague demanded that Wilders recant his comments and apologize to Muslims. The MP said he would not even consider it.

“Are they completely mad? It is scandalous that a country that does not recognize freedom of speech is telling me what to do. They had better learn that as an MP here you are allowed to say what you want.”

Wilders said earlier this week in an interview with newspaper De Pers that Muslims should tear out and discard half the Koran if they want to live in the Netherlands."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787609/posts

Would the Dutch tolerate the forced censoring of large portions of the Christian Bible in the Netherlands? W hat is the difference? I suspect that Christians have, whether they admit it or not, come to the place where they no longer think that King  David's conception of God was entirely accurate. Muslims are still, apparently having that argument. I suspect that it is very unfair to produce a video that pretends that they are not and FITNA may be that video.

Questions for Comment: have you ever read the Qur'an for yourself? How does one balance its advocacy for jihad with its advocacy for peace? Is it in a different category altogether from the scriptures that Christians appeal to?