Michael Derrick Hudson, Yi-Fen Chou, and the Problem of Authenticity

Michael Derrick Hudson is a very minor American poet. In 2015 he had 15 minutes in the spotlight because of an interesting little exercise in ethnic inauthenticity.

Wikipedia has the story:

Hudson wrote a poem titled "The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve" and claimed to have submitted it to 40 literary magazines under his own name. Hudson also claimed that after nine rejections, it was accepted for publication in Fall 2014 with four other poems by "Yi-Fen Chou" by Prairie Schooner, a literary journal affiliated with the University of Nebraska. . . . Hudson used the name of a Taiwanese immigrant who attended the same high school as him and had been working as a nuclear engineer in Chicago at the time of publication.

Hudson's poem, under the pseudonym, was considered for inclusion in the 2015 edition of the Best American Poetry anthology series to be guest-edited by Native American poet and novelist Sherman Alexie. Alexie selected the poem among the 75 poems published in the anthology. 

But this is where my favorite part starts. Because when he learned about the selection, Hudson immediately wrote to Alexie and told him about his use of the pseudonym. If you know anything about Sherman Alexie, you will not be surprised to learn that rather than changing his mind about the poem, he published it together with his correspondence with Hudson, making the whole thing public.

Sherman Alexie is an American Indian (with multiple tribal ancestries) whose writing is distinguished – in my mind, anyway – by a heavily ironic attitude toward all American pieties, including all Native American pieties. He is particularly effective when he mocks white stereotypes about Indians and Indian pieties about themselves at the same time, as in "How to Write to Great American Indian Novel." Even when he writes what seems like an angry demand for Native restoration, as in "The Powwow at the End of the World," you have a sense that he feels ironically detached from this as well.

Wikipedia again:

In a blog post Alexie discussed his criteria in selecting poems, stating that he would "carefully look for great poems by women and people of color" who had been "underrepresented in the past," After learning of Hudson's pseudonym, Alexie admitted that he "paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet's identity." Instead of removing the poem from the anthology, which he stated would primarily be "because of my own sense of embarrassment", Alexie said he kept it rather than to expose himself to a lie that "would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity." He emphasized that "In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it. And to deny my love for any of them is to deny my love for all of them."

Not to set my own literary taste above Sherman Alexie's, but I think the poem is terrible. Anyway.

The predictable sort of people said predictable things about this. NPR found a self-proclaimed spokeman for Asian American writers who said this:

At the Asian American Writers' Workshop, if you are a person of color, we believe you have a story only you can tell. But if you're a person of color, you may have at one point felt that you were not normal. You aren't white.

And you all know how I feel about this. First, the utter lack of basic empathy; if there are living people who have never felt like they were "not normal," then I have never met them. Oh, you white people, you never suffer or feel you don't belong. Blech.

But, really, who cares?

Sherman Alexie isn't an interesting writer because he is an Indian; he's just interesting. I radically do not care about the ethnicity of the people whose books I read. I thought Invisible Man was tedious, but I love Notes of a Native Son and Song of Solomon, because James Baldwin and Toni Morrison are straight out great writers. 

It makes no difference at all to me who wrote "The Bees," I just don't like it.

I do not believe in ethnic writing. Modern poetry, novels, and memoirs are highly stylized creations that make sense only within a particular literary tradition that mainly comes from England and France. When you join that tradition and learn to write according to its rules, you pretty much leave the rest of your identity behind. If you are Toni Morrison or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you can use your awesome powers to bend the tradition a little toward different ways of speaking and thinking, producing something that is both beautiful and a little strange. But I mean it when I say "a little." 

Cancelling the Anglo-Saxons

There is a lot of angst among historians over the word "Anglo-Saxon." As in this screed from Canadian historian Mary Rambaran-Olm:

The scholarly field that investigates early England supposedly draws its name from the people studied, although the labels ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon studies’ are fraught with inaccuracies. Today’s field represents more than just literature and linguistics, as archaeologists and historians (material, art, and otherwise) are all under one large umbrella. Historically, Anglo-Saxon studies itself has reinforced superiority of northern European or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ whiteness. Today we see the word misused extensively as a label for white identity despite it being inaccurate. . . . While some scholars outside the US argue that the term’s misuse is an American problem, it is also noteworthy that some British scholars—some of whom identified themselves as ‘English’ or more gallingly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on academic listservs and across social media—and their institutions remain so intimately wedded to this inaccurate term. The contested term is not neutral. In fact, one cannot be neutral in the face of racism. Scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities.

To be fair, yes, "Anglo-Saxon" is a modern term that was rarely seen in early medieval Britain. (Three times, according to this essay.) But the same could be said for "Welsh" and "Irish." If I were teaching a course on this period I would title it "Early Medieval Britain," because only about 30 to 40 percent of the genes of modern British people come from the invaders sometimes called Anglo-Saxons, which means there were a lot of other people around. But some of the people opposed to "Anglo-Saxon," including Rambaran-Olm, prefer "English" or "England", which are equally rare before about 1000 AD and equally exclusive of many residents of the island.

And, to be fair in another way, "Anglo-Saxon" does have a long history of use in racist discourse. But do you know what other word has a long history of use in racist discourse? "White." The author of our screed feels that while the racist term "Anglo-Saxon" is so awful that it must be banned, she is obsessed with "whiteness" and injects it into every other sentence. How is "white" any better than Anglo-Saxon? This is one of my main beefs with woke anti-racism, that so many of its advocates are as obsessed with race as the KKK. 

But wait, there's more. As the term was used by racists, Anglo-Saxon never just meant "white," nor did it mean "northern European whiteness." It meant "white northern European Protestant." Among those it pointedly excluded were Irish and Jews. It seems weird for a British historian not to know that Anglo-Saxon rose to prominence, not as a term for discriminating white from black – "white" worked perfectly well for that – but as a way to cast undesirable whites out of the charmed circle. In her world, there are only "whites" and "people of color," and anybody who is white but wants to claim a legacy of oppression is a fraud.

I have lived long enough to marvel over all the things that people like Mary Rambaran-Olm seem to have forgotten. I have written here several times that nobody cares any more about the pioneers of second-wave feminism, the women who stormed the corporate world and fought for equal pay. These days they're just priveleged white people, or, if they make any noise, Karens. And how could any British historian not pause to remember that just fifty years ago Northern Ireland was torn apart by a near civil war between Protestants and Catholics, spawned in part by discrimination against Catholics harsher than anything "people of color" endure in England today? Plus, you know, the Holocaust.

Too many modern anti-racists are exclusively focused on the gap between "white people" and everyone else, as if that were the only axis of oppression in history. People who care about justice need to look up from their petty obsessions and extend their care to all of  humanity.

MIT Admissions after the End of Affirmative Action

Asian: up from 40% to 47%

White: down from 38% to 37%

Black: down from 15% to 5%

Hispanic: down from to 16% to 11%

American Indian and Native Hawaiian: down, but still 1%

Note that all ethnicities are self-reported by students, and they could check more than one box.

Sources: last year, this year

Henry Wiencek, "The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White"

Henry Wiencek (born 1952) is an architectural historian and preservationist who has written books with titles like Mansions of the Virginia Gentry. As he told the story, one day in 1992 he was visiting a historic house – Cooleemee, in North Carolina (above) – and interviewing its owner. That owner, Judge Peter Hairston, was a font of knowledge about his family's past:

History poured from him in torrents, as he talked of the family's exploits in the Revolution and the Civil War. The judge's grandfather had fought by the side of Jeb Stuart, his cousin and brother-in-law. He served later with another cousin, General Jubal Early, whose mother was a Hairston. He lost friends and relatives in the battle at Manassas, at Williamsburg, at Shiloh. . . . The judge showed me his most precious heirloom, which dates back to the family's origins in this country. It was a crude wooden trunk, hewn from a single log and fitted with hinges and a lock made of iron. The trunk was covered in deerskin, and the inside was lined with faded, worm-eaten newspapers. The first Hairston to come to America, known as Peter the Immigrant, had brought it with him on the journey from Scotland to America. (6)

But Wiencek is a northerner and a liberal, and whenever he visited such houses he always wondered about the people who had lived and worked there as slaves. When he had asked about the former black residents at other southern mansions he had received only blank stares or polite demurrals. Oh, they moved away, we don't know where they are. But when he put that question to Peter Hairston he got a very different answer: why, sure, lots of them still live around here. Many are named Hairston. If you want to know more, "I'll call my old friend Squire Hairston and ask him to come over." (10)

This was Wiencek's introduction to a fascinating American family with two branches, the Black Hairstons and the White Hairstons. Both are the kind of southern clans that hold regular family reunions for which they rent out whole hotels, and they are very much aware that they are related to each other. Wiencek spent much of the next seven years meeting the Hairstons, visiting their homes, and researching their history, and the result is this impressive book.

Before the Civil War the white Hairstons were one of the richest families in the South. They controlled a chain of plantations that stretched from Danville, Virginia, fifty miles southwest to Cooleemee, and branches of the family had set up satellite kingdoms in Mississippi and Tennessee. For four generations they were dominated by hard-hearted, voraciously acquisitive men and women who eschewed luxury in favor of saving their money to buy up more land and slaves, of which they eventually controlled more than 2,000. To keep all that property in the family they regularly married their cousins, leading to anomalies like the woman known as Anne Hairston Hairston. They also had a habit of keeping their family property tied up in obscure legal arrangements – for example, by never probating wills, leaving estates in legal limbo for decades – so that even a family member who wanted to sell land or slaves might find that he lacked the authority to do so. When Wiencek asked Judge Hairston if his grandfather had freed any slaves, he got an irritated answer to the effect that even if he had wanted to, he could not have, because so many other people were involved. At the time that sounded to Wiencek like an evasion, but he later discovered that it was likely true. Meanwhile, of course, various Hairston men were fathering broods of mulattoes with their slave mistresses, so the future Black Hairston clan was growing.

Of the many fascinating stories Wiencek tells about those years, I have to pass on one. In the 1820s a certain Robert Hairston migrated west to Mississippi to set up a new plantation; according to family lore, he took with him 1,000 slaves in a great train of coaches and wagons. That is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it conveys the scale at which the Hairstons operated, and how they were seen and remembered. But Robert Hairston was also remembered for other things. First, he treated his favored slaves as if they were free, giving them farms to manage and letting them make their own marriages and so on. (John Hope Franklin, one of the first major black historians of the U.S., wrote about this class of people, whom he called "slaves virtually free.") Second, he pretty much avoided white society in favor of his slaves. This was a phenomenon noted across the South, called "going black," except with a different word. So, of course, he took a black wife, named Elizabeth – not legally, not even the Hairstons could manage that, but in every other way, even giving her a gold wedding band – and had a daughter with her. 

When Robert Hairston was dying he called to him the one other white man he trusted, his nephew Major Hairston, to record his will. That will liberated his daughter, then called Chrillis, and left her his entire estate. That act would have made a black girl one of the five richest people in Mississippi, so of course it did not happen. But Major Hairston was determined to fight for his cousin's rights, and the case went up the the Mississippi Supreme Court and around and around for years. As Wiencek followed the case he wondered what had happened to Chrillis. At one stage in the proceedings the court ordered that Robert Hairston's slaves be divided up among his white kin, and Robert's common law wife Elizabeth was assigned to his estranged white wife, Ruth. She, of course, wanted nothing to do with her rival, so Major Hairston stepped in and bought her. But there was no mention of the daughter until Wiencek hit upon a note saying that Chrillis had died. He was deeply saddened and wondered if she had been murdered. But when he mentioned this to one of his Hairston acquaintances he was told, "no, she didn't die, they just spirited her away to another plantation. Come on, I'll introduce you to her descendants." Wiencek is even shown a photograph of Chrillis. And also one of the man who fathered her children: Major Hairston. In the genealogies kept by White Hairstons he was listed as "unmarried," but while that was legally the case it was factually inadequate.  He had kept the family tradition by marrying a cousin, except that this cousin happened to be a black former slave.

The Ruins of Oak Hill Plantation, a Hairston Property in Virginia

There are many other stories: about the horrors of slavery and the even more shocking depradations of Reconstruction, the indignities of Jim Crow, the rampages of the Klan, the miserable treatment of black soldiers during World War II, and on and on. It would be a grim tale except for what happened later. Because since 1900 or so the trajectory of the White Hairstons has been steadily downward, while that of the Black Hairstons has been steadily rising. Wiencek has some great material on the Faulknerian descent of the White Hairstons, who lost their mansions and their land through mismanagement, profligacy, and a foolhardy belief that they would always remain rich and respected because they deserved it. Judge Peter, the only Hairston who did hold onto one of their plantations, used to be heard muttering about his kin, "They're gonna lose it, they're gonna lose it." (109) And they did. 

Among other characters we meet a certain Watt Hairston, born 1876. Watt owned the second motor car licensed in the state of Virginia, plate number 2. 

The town of Martinsville passed speed laws specifically against him. The story is told that the constable waved him down one day as he was zipping into town flagrantly above the speed limit. The constable fined him $5 on the spot. Watt handed him a ten, "so I won't have to stop on the way out." (49)

He later died in an accident, becoming one of Virginia's first drunk driving fatalities.

Meanwhile the Black Hairstons were taking advantage of every opportunity that opened up as Reconstruction faded and the Civil Rights movement got under way. Some of the Black Hairstons acquired land and held on to it, becoming successful farmers; one even purchased the farm of some White Hairstons after they went bankrupt. One was the first black to register to vote in the county where Cooleemee stands. Attending Black Hairston reunions Wiencek meets many members of the upper middle class, from ministers and school superintendants to a NASA mathematician. One of the main characters of the book is Jester Hairston, a gospel singer and choir director who also had an acting career, appearing in TV shows from the 1950s to the 1990s and at least 29 movies. In the 1960s the US State Department made him a "Goodwill Ambassador" and sent him to West Africa with various American choirs, performing with African choirs in churches and concert halls. The movies he appeared in stretched from The Green Pastures (1936), in which Hairston played a chorister, to Being John Malkovich (1999). Most of the parts were the sort of things a minor black actor got in those days: a witch doctor in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955), the butler in In the Heat of the Night (1967), Jim Bowie's faithful slave in John Wayne's production of The Alamo (1960). But the acting money allowed him to do the work he loved, training choirs and preserving the music of the plantations.

What makes The Hairstons such an impressive book is the way Wiencek interweaves the horror and strangeness of the past with the uplifting camaraderie of the present. Today many of the White and Black Hairstons know and respect each other, and the genealogists among them share stories and documents of their shared family history. Their story makes it seem possible for black and white Americans to move forward together without forgetting the past.

The Anson Street Ancestors

Site of the Anson Street Burying Ground

In 2013, a construction crew working in Charleston, South Carolina uncovered a cemetery. This turned out to hold the remains of 36 people, mostly of African ancestry. They were almost certainly slaves. This event inspired the creation of the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project, which has led a wide range of social, religious, and historical events and investigations. 

Among other things the Project staged an event in 2019 when a Yoruba priest came over and assigned African names to all the nameless people they refer to as Ancestors.

The Project decided to carry out DNA and elemental analysis of the remains to learn as much as possible about the Ancestors. This choice is why I am writing about the project, because the question of how to balance the desire to know with the desire to be respectful to the dead is huge in archaeology right now. American Indians have generally opted for respect and have blocked any scientified study of remains. However, many African American communities are opting for knowledge.

As I wrote here last year about the Catoctin Furnace burying ground, paleogenetics is providing a way for African Americans to pierce the veil that surrounds their ancestor's African origins and years of slavery. The US census never recorded the names of slaves, and many of the records that do list slaves by name, such as wills and probate inventories, use only their first names. (Until after 1820 or so many had no last names anyway.) After they achieved their freedom many black Americans tried to forget about their years of enslavement, so they passed on no stories about those years. The end of slavery also led to a vast geographic reshuffling, as millions of people moved away from the plantations and toward cities or just to somewhere else. It has therefore been impossible for most African Americans to trace their ancestry back past 1865.

Paleogenetics can often make that possible. The Charleston study has not identified any living descendants, but the Catoctin study found 2,000 people who might be related to the bodies in that cemetery. The genetics also provides a way to connect people in the Americas to the parts of Africa from which their ancestors came. One of the Anson Street Ancestors was almost certainly Fulani, an ethnic group from around Senegal, and may of the others could be traced to particular regions in Africa. One was majority African but nearly half Native American. The published material on the project seems to be deliberately vague about the dating of the cemetery, but from what I have seen it probably dates to the later 1700s.

Key to both the Catoctin and Anson Street studies has been for investigators to work closely with black communities and do only the studies they support. This may limit what can be done, but without people's support it would never be done at all. Paleogenetics is, I think, a wonderful tool that opens up vast new areas of knowledge. For its potential to be realized it must be done in a way that makes people feel empowered and enlightened rather than just used as research subjects.

Scott Siskind, Elizabeth Hoover, and What it Means to Belong

The New Yorker ran a weird story by Jay Caspian Kang a few weeks ago about Elizabeth Hoover, the latest "Native American" professor to be unmasked as entirely white. Scott Siskind was disturbed by it and wrote a long response. Siskind's essay is good in that he probes at important questions about identity in America; we put huge cultural and some legal emphasis on ethnic and other identies that mostly lack any clear definition, and that creates pain and suffering. But he misunderstands what it means to belong to a traditional community.

I'll let Siskind summarize the story:

A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.

As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues in the US, then got a PhD in anthropology, where she studied Native American affairs, then got a professorship at Berkeley teaching about Native American culture. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. . . .

At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least to others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.

After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:

We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled.

At which point Hoover's life fell apart.

Siskind has a long history of siding with victims of the cancel mob, so he immediately identified with Hoover and felt that attacks on her were unfair. I had the same gut feeling; by the moral code of a gentle modern soul like Siskind or me, the attacks on Hoover are barbaric. But I know enough about traditional communities to understand what happened here.

First, after a short discourse on what race means in our world, Siskind notes that the key variable seems to be "lived experience":

Although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.

Siskind's main mistake is assuming that this post-modern sort of definition applies to a traditional community like an American Indian tribe. What defines membership in such a community is not "lived experience" in some generalized sense; it is personal, family ties to other members of the community.

This comes across very clearly in the New Yorker story. When Hoover tells Mi'kmaq Indians that she is Mi'kmaq, they don't ask how many pow-wows she has been to; anybody can to go a pow-wow. They ask, "Who are your kin? Where are they?" As Siskind suspects, this is where Hoover's story fell apart. Confronted with these questions, she looked, found that she had no such connections, and realized that by the Mi'kmaq definition she was not and could never be one of them. If Hoover's family legend had been true, she might have found some of her relatives, and if they had welcomed her (as they probably would have) she could have begun the process of becoming a member of the Mi'kmaq community.

There is a ton of anthropology about how this works, and I read a significant swath of it while writing my dissertation. Consider that in many languages, there is no common word for "friend." You call your best friends "brothers" or "sisters" and your secondary friends "cousins" and your more distant friends "kinsmen." That is the paradigm under which many Native American tribes have historically operated.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with blood; many Native tribes have strong traditions of adoption. But if you are adopted into a tribe, and really want to be thought of as a member, you have to work at it. First, you work on really joining the family that sponsored you, and then you work your way out into the broader community. If you don't build up those personal ties, your formal membership will not count for much. (Unless somebody in the tribe wants something from you.)

To most Indians, whether you wear Indian clothes and take an Indian name and dance at pow-wows is of no real importance; Indian wannabees have been doing that for a century. What counts is your personal, family ties to community members.

(For tribes with membership rolls, formal membership is also important, but in the first place those lists were really built up from family ties, and in the second your formal membership will not avail you much if you don't know anybody else in the tribe.)

The second point I would make concerns the viciousness of the attacks on Hoover:

Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".

I could never participate in such a shunning. Which is another way of saying that I have no strong community allegiances at all.

Real world communities only endure if they viciously defend their boundaries. Think of the scorn that many groups have heaped on wannabees and poseurs, or, in reverse, they lengths to which people will go to fit in to their chosen group, changing their speech, clothing, etc. For our tribal species, community membership is of extreme importance.

One of the ugliest such fights going on in the world right now is between trans women and so called "TERFs", feminists who want to police the boundary of womanhood and keep out the poseurs and the wannabees. There is nothing mysterious about this; if you think membership in your group is important, you pretty much have to defend its boundaries, and TERFs are not at all unusual in their willingness to be cruel about it. 

Or consider how many Americans who think of "American" as an import category feel about people sneaking across the border.

Yes, race in America is really weird right now. I am dismayed by the whole apparatus of "Native" scholarship and the like, which I find bizarre. Universities are western institutions rooted entirely in western values, and their attempts to accommodate Native American or African "perspectives" are always going to be fraught. I find it offensive to say that no white person should teach Native culture or African history. I place much of the blame for stories like Elizabeth Hoover's on the academic valuation of ethnic belonging, which I don't think has any place in a university setting.

But as long as people value their ethnic groups, they are going to police the boundaries of those groups, and so far as I can tell Elizabeth Hoover really was on the other side of the line than she claimed to be.

The Escape of Lewis Lee

Lewis Lee was a light-skinned mulatto slave who was born around 1830 in Fairfax County, Virginia. He had been raised as the body servant of an old man he seems to have admired, but when that old man died he passed via inheritance to a family he did not get along with. They hired him out as a hotel waiter, giving him none of the wages he earned. As William Still wrote in his famous 1872 book about the Underground Railroad, one day in 1859 Lee decided that he had enough:

Slavery brought about many radical changes, some in one way and some in another. Lewis Lee was entirely too white for practical purposes. They tried to get him to content himself under the yoke, but he could not see the point. A man by the name of William Watkins, living near Fairfax, Virginia, claimed Lewis, having come by his title through marriage. Title or no title, Lewis thought that he would not serve him for nothing, and that he had been hoodwinked already a great while longer than he should have allowed himself to be. Watkins had managed to keep him in the dark and doing hard work on the no-pay system up to the age of twenty-five. In Lewis' opinion, it was now time to "strike out on his own hook;" he took his last look of Watkins (he was a tall, slim fellow, a farmer, and a hard drinker), and made the first step in the direction of the North. He was sure that he was about as white as anybody else, and that he had as good a right to pass for white as the white folks, so he decided to do so with a high head and a fearless front. Instead of skulking in the woods, in thickets and swamps, under cover of the darkness, he would boldly approach a hotel and call for accommodations, as any other southern gentleman. He had a little money, and he soon discovered that his color was perfectly orthodox. He said that he was "treated first-rate in Washington and Baltimore;" he could recommend both of these cities. But destitute of education, and coming among strangers, he was conscious that the shreds of slavery were still to be seen upon him. He had, moreover, no intention of disowning his origin when once he could feel safe in assuming his true status. So as he was in need of friends and material aid, he sought out the Vigilance Committee, and on close examination they had every reason to believe his story throughout, and gave him the usual benefit.

Notice the resentment at being allowed to keep none of his wages. In the 1830 to 1860 period it was common for such workers to keep part of any money they earned when hired out, which they could spend or save up toward purchasing their freedom, and this question shows up over and over in slave narratives. Abraham Lincoln made it the certerpice of his attack on slavery, which focused on the right of all workers to be paid for their labor.

Lee's owner placed an ad offering $10,000 for his return, but that ad was reprinted in an abolitionist newspaper along with a mocking poem written from Lee's point of view. Two of the seven stanzas:

Can one-fourth of my blood a slave make of me?
One your courts bind you not to respect,
Still, three fourths of my blood declares I am free,
And your claims to my service reject. . . .

You advertised me, let me advertise you,
That “JEHOVAH no attribute hath ,
Can side with oppressors,” His justice is due,
And man-stealers inherit his wrath.

Lee remained a free man in the North. But after the Civil War he settled for a while in Washington, DC, and then in 1870 he returned to Fairfax County and purchased eight acres of the plantation where he had been born, living there for the rest of his life.

Against Race

Via David Brooks' Sidney Awards, I discovered a powerful article arguing something I have long believed: that the only way to eliminate racism is to eliminate race. Subrena E. Smith and David Livingstone Smith are a mixed race couple, both professors, both committed to equality but high dubious of the way (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) we are trying to fight it. In The Trouble With Race and Its Many Shades of Deceit they write:

We want to make it clear that we fully endorse the aims of DEI programs. But we object to how they are carried out, for, as noble as these aims are, there is a fatal contradiction at the heart of much of what goes on in them, a contradiction that threatens to undermine the entire enterprise. Although the purpose of anti-racist training is to vanquish racism, most of these initiatives are simultaneously committed to upholding and celebrating race. One can see this quite clearly in the work of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, well-known voices in the anti-racist movement. Both of them presume that we can oppose racism while leaving the concept of race intact.

But in the real world, can we have race without racism coming along for the ride? Trying to extinguish racism while shoring up race is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. It can only make matters worse. To get rid of racism we have to get rid of race.

As I never get tired of pointing out, race has no biological reality; people from east and west Africa are more different from each other than Chinese are from Welsh. Race is a social construct, and it is not a neutral one:

Race was fashioned for nothing that was good. History has shown us how groups of people “racialize” other groups of people to justify their exploitation, oppression and annihilation. . . . Race is and has always been an ideological weapon. It was shaped and honed to give advantage to one group of people by oppressing others. It has birthed genocide and chattel slavery, underpinned lynching and mass incarceration, and has been used to excuse exploitation, degradation and poverty. This sordid history shows how racism has not been added to the fabric of race, but rather is woven into it.

Here the Smiths deal with what I regard as the only serious objection to eliminating race, at the theoretical level:

A further objection against abandoning racial identities is that they can be politically useful for galvanizing solidarity among oppressed people. For example, when Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) proclaimed “Black power!” he united African Americans under the banner of racial pride. Nevertheless, we have observed the ways that racial solidarity extracts a price. An appeal to race may unite people within a group, but it also segregates them from others. And however emotionally compelling and politically expedient, racial solidarity is built upon a lie, since there are no races.

At the practical level, of course, there is a more immediate objection, which is that most people believe in race and think in racial terms, and that is not going to change any time soon. So for the people tasked with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, maybe race is something they do have to consider. But any such short-term measures should always be weighed against the long-term harm of promoting racial thinking, because that is the real enemy of a just human future.

The History and Afterlife of Malaga Island

Malaga Island is a small island on the coast of Maine, south of Bath in Casco Bay. It was an obscure place, and then in 1908-1912 it was briefly a rather famous place, and now it is a famous place again for the opposite reason.

Sources differ on when the Malaga Island community got started. Some accounts say the first modern resident was Benjamin Darling, a freedman from the West Indies who bought Horse Island nearby in 1794, and whose descendants seem to have lived all around the area. Other accounts say the community was founded by Henry Griffin after the Civil War. But whenever it got started, by 1880 the island was home to 27 people; by 1900 the population and grown to 40. Most were black, but one family, that of Scotts-Irish fisherman James McKenney, was white. The islanders were poor, but, most observers say, not much poorer than their neighbors. They fished, dug for clams, gathered berries, and raised small gardens in soil made from sand, dung and compost. A few worked off island.

Photographs like this one certainly don't make them look especially impoverished; their houses and clothes seem pretty normal for rural Maine. According to the archaeologists who have lately been poking around the site, they had the same sort of stuff as their neighbors.

But some of them were poor enough that they sometimes applied to their town for relief; poor relief; like most other governmental functions, was in Maine the job of the township. Some citizens of the town of Phippsburg resented this. Bad enough, they thought, that black people insisted on living in their town, but that they wanted relief was intolerable. 

The 1890s were a tough economic time in Maine. The traditional industries of wooden shipbuilding and fishing declined, and not much had come along to fill those places. Phippsburg started a long campaign to prove that Malaga Island had never really been part of their township, and therefore that they were not responsible for its inhabitants. In 1905 they succeeded, and the state had to take direct control of the island. 

As I said, this was a rough economic time for Maine, but there was one bright spot: tourism. People from New York and Boston began flocking to the Maine coast every summer. The islands around Casco Bay were scenic enough, and the local authorities were trying to drum up vacation business. They decided that the unsightly poverty of Malaga Island was an impediment to economic development.

Eason Family in Fron of their House

And then the do-gooders got involved. This was at the height of the Progressive movement, and I am retelling this story mostly to ask some questions about the whole business of making other people's lives better. Public health experts from Boston and New York looked at the people living on Malaga Island and saw a sad situation: dirt, ignorance, illiteracy, substandard housing, unmarried couples raising children out of wedlock.

They associated these problems with isolation. This was the same era when we got the stereotype of inbred hillybilly clans in isolated mountain hollows, for which Progressives suggested the same remedies they would be suggesting for Malaga Island: forcibly ending their isolation by public schooling, public health, and other state measures, if necessary driving them out of their tiny "inbred" communities and out into the world. (I have never seen any evidence that mountain communities were particularly inbred in 1900.)

This was also the height of the American Eugenics movement, and some people thought the root of the problems on Malaga Island was in the mixing of races. At this time people began describing the inhabitants, previously considered just plain black under the one-drop standard, as "mixed race." 

In response to all of this a group of progressive Christians founded the Malaga Island Settlement Association to bring aid to the island. In 1909 they constructed a school on the island. The teacher, Evelyn Woodman, was on the one hand committed to helping her students, but on the other had a habit of asking for help by decrying how bad their situation was. This turned out to be a dangerous approach.

In 1911 the governor of Maine made a much publicized visit to the island, "calling attention" to the problems there. A reporter for the Boston Transcript covered the visit in a story titled, "Ignorance, Shiftlessness, Filth, and Heathenism—A Shameful Disgrace That Should Be Looked After at Once." By "heathenism" he meant, first, that the inhabitants didn't regularly go to church, and, second, that some of the couples were not legally married.

(If you ever wondered why leftists of the 60s and 70s defended unwed motherhood so loudly, it's because attacking unmarried parents was an old theme in America, and taking their children away in the name of cleanliness, order, child welfare, and Christian morality used to be routine.)

The eventual result of the dual pressures on Malaga Island – the desire to prettify the neighborhood for tourists, and the desire to improve the lives of the inhabitants – was a campaign to somehow get rid of the place. The local leadership backed an ownership claim to the island pressed in court by one of Phippsburg's founding families. In 1912 a judge ruled for the family and affirmed their ownership of the property. They then evicted the 45 inhabitants. The state demolished the buildings and even exhumed all 17 graves, moving them to the mainland. One whole family was committed to the state's School for the Feebleminded. After passing through several private owners, the island was acquired by the Maine Coastal Trust as a wildlife preserve.

Various people declared this to be a great victory for humanity. But then, very quickly, the story was hushed up. Its rapid disappearance makes it look like some folks were ashamed about what had been done. It was certainly shameful, but I mention this to make the point that some people thought so in 1912. Americans were every bit as divided in 1912 as they are now.

So far as people can tell from 2023, the first public complaint about what happened on Malaga Island was made in 1980 by a newspaper reporter who said people refered to it as "a story best left untold." Then nothing for another decade. There were a few notices in the 90s, and then around 2000 people began to take a greater interest, and over the past 20 years there has been a deluge of publications about Malaga Island and the events of 1912. In 2005 a young adult novel about the Malaga Island story was a Newberry Honor Book.

Which is great; this is exactly the sort of historical event I think people ought to reflect on. But, of course, most accounts one sees these days make no attempt to be balanced; in our discourse this is just a crime committed by a racist state, wielding Progressive rhetoric to destroy another black community.

So let me ask this: if we see children being raised by illiterate parents who had no interest in sending them to school, living in shacks without plumbing or electricity, what should we do? What if the parents are mentally retarded? 

This is not a theoretical problem, but happens in America every day. Today most writers seem to think that the authorities were exaggerating the problems on Malaga Island as an excuse to evict the inhabitants, and maybe so; as I said the pictures make it look like a pretty normal place. But that doesn't mean that nobody is America has raised or is raising children in a way you and I would find appalling. It is now fasionable to think that the people from Malaga sent to the School for the Feebleminded were just being oppressed in another way, but the only testimony we have is from the state officials who thought otherwise.

Most accounts of Malaga Island play up the racism angle. It seems to me, though,exactly like what Progrressives did to white folks throughout the mountain South, evicting them from homes designated "substandard" to build dams or national parks or whatever else the Progressives thought the country needed to progress.

This same issues come up in the history of the Scottish Highlands, where the culture of the crofters was destroyed partly because middle class Victorians thought conditions in highland homes were simply intolerable. They come up over the question of Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Who is responsible for children, and their future? Is it just and always the parents, or does the state have a role?

If a way of life looks, to us, horrible and awful and intolerable, should we intervene to save children from growing up that way? 

What if the people are starving, as the Highland crofters did in 1846-1851, requiring millions in aid from city folks? Do people who have asked for assistance on that scale still have a right to go on living as they did?

Yes, there is something cruel and dismissive about the dismantling of Malaga Island. It's a perfect American horror story, set at the intersection of racism, tourism, and real estate speculation. But it seems to me that the whole business of helping other people is often mixed up with assertions of superiority, and that a superior pose can easily be turned into an attack on a people and their way of life. This happened in the Highlands, and on Indian Reservations, and in many other places. It probably still happens. Black intellectual John McWhorter just wrote a whole book aruging that woke anti-racism is an attack on black people, portraying them as weak victims who can't survive wthout white help.

We can, of course, imagine better, less authoritarian ways to help people than evicting them from their homes. But I am not comfortable with foisting all the crimes that have been part of creating the modern world onto racism, classism, and governmental evil. Sometimes, people who really want to help end up doing harm; on the other hand, maybe some ways of living are not very nice, and you can understand why people want to take children away from that sort of world and raise them in a gentler and safer place.

**********

Excellent article by high school student Margo Pedersen.

Good newspaper article.

Historic images of Malaga Island, from the state museum.

Hour long radio show from WMPG and the Salt Institute, A Story Best Left Untold.

John McWhorter on Language, Race, and Class

John McWhorter in the NY Times, from an article about why Blacks and Hispanics do much worse on New York state's standardized test for social workers: 

One source I’ve always valued is a book published in 1983, “Ways With Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms,” by the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, who compared how language was used with children in a middle-class white community, a working-class white one and a working-class Black one. She found that in conversation, questions were wielded differently depending on the community. A key difference was that in middle-class white ones, children were often asked disembodied, information-seeking questions as a kind of exercise amid general social interaction. Heath wrote:

“Mothers continue their question-answer routines when the children begin to talk and add to them running narratives on items and events in the environment. Children are trained to act as conversation partners and information-givers.”

In the middle-class subculture Heath describes, children unconsciously incorporate into their mental tool kit a comfort with retaining and discussing facts for their own sake, as opposed to processing facts mainly as they relate to the practicalities of daily existence. The same kind of skill development that’s fostered by reading for pleasure or personal interest — as opposed to reading for school lessons — a ritual which preserves and displays information beyond the everyday.

Heath found that while the printed page is hardly alien to the working-class Black community (which she gives the pseudonym “Trackton”; her pseudonymous white working-class community is “Roadville” and her pseudonymous white middle-class community is “Maintown”), and questions themselves are certainly part of how language is used within it, particular kinds of questions about matters unconnected to daily living were relatively rare. A paper published in 1995 by the National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia cited Heath and notes that “the Trackton world is warm, buzzing with emotion and adult communication, an environment to which the child gradually adapts by a process of imitation and repetition.” However, it adds, “the language socialization of the Trackton child is,” in contrast to Maintown, “almost book-free.” One Trackton grandmother described part of the dynamic to Heath in this way: “We don’t talk to our chil’rn like you folks do. We don’t ask ’em ’bout colors, names ’n things.”

Yes, Heath’s book was written some time ago. Certainly, Black kids don’t grow up not knowing their colors or that things have names. But that quote does get at something in a general sense. Importantly, Heath’s study was objective and respectful. She isn’t a culture-wars partisan. Her point wasn’t that Black culture, or working-class culture, is unenlightened or that Black people or working-class white people are in any sense inarticulate. Neither she then, nor I now, say there is some flaw in Black or working-class white culture.

The issue is, rather, how we square what worked for the past with what will work for today. No culture can be faulted for lagging a bit on that. Working-class Black culture was born amid hard-working people in segregated America for whom higher education was, in many, if not most cases, a distant prospect, and language was used to operate in the here and now. 

This makes sense to me from my own personal experience. My sons have had, um, checkered educational careers. But I don't think you would know that from talking to them, and their test scores were always much better than their grades. They grew up with me constantly engaging them on intellectual topics, and trying to turn discussions of stuff they are into toward more general considerations. For example, one of my sons used to be very good at an online team battling game called League of Legends. At that time everybody distributed their teams in the same formation, with the same five roles played in very similar ways. I pressed him about why everybody plays that way, and steered this into a discussion of domain-specific expertise and why it is sometimes overturned by outsiders. (Or by AI, as with AlphaGo.) That kind of training makes a huge difference in how people end up testing.

I think it is important to remember, when you are talking about any specific educational situation, that class is usually more important than race. Within Maryland, 90% of the test score difference between school districts can be explained solely by the average family income, which means that money must be about nine times more important than race. And while the median income for black families is gradually converging with that of whites– for Hispanic families this is happening rapidly–the differences in family dynamic that I am talking about are changing more slowly. It seems to take generations for changes in how people work, and how much schooling they get, to influence how they talk to each other.

That being said, there might still be a problem with standardized tests as a way of evaluating workers. For lawyers, I would say, pass the test or walk; we have plenty of would-be lawyers, and if you can't think abstractly, and understand the kind of language lawyers use in talking to each other, you're not going very far anyway. But for other professions this might not make sense. In Maryland you have to pass state-run standardized tests to become a licensed cosmetologist, massage therapist, or plumber. I think we can all imagine people who would be very good at those jobs without any sort of abstract thinking skills. There ought, I think, to be some alternative way for people in such professions to get certified, perhaps via practical exams. 

About social workers, I am not sure. Certainly a lot of what they do is operate government bureaucracies, and being able to communicate abstractly might help there. I suppose I would need to know more about the test to form an opinion.

Higher Education in Florida

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is moving full speed ahead with his attack on higher education as it now exists in the state. For starters, DeSantis (a Yale grad) doesn't think much of college in general:

In June, DeSantis lauded work experience over “a magic piece of paper which likely would have cost too much anyway” when he signed a law allowing state agencies to substitute work experience, including military experience, for college degrees in hiring.

“Give me somebody that served eight years in the Navy or the Marine Corps. That education is going to be much more beneficial and pertinent than someone that went $100,000 in debt to get a degree in zombie studies,” DeSantis said.

And so on. This comes after a law passed last year encouraging state universities to offer students jobs where they could earn money and acquire work experience that could be counted for course credit. De Santis also pushed another law requiring universities to survey their faculty and students about their political views, and to ask students if they feel able to express their opinions in class. The law doesn't specify any consequences, but DeSantis has repeatedly said that he plans to cut the funding of "socialism factories." A leak of internal papers showed that DeSantis also considered proposing that tenure be abolished in the Florida state system and all control over university hiring and firing be transfered to the central office in Tallahassee. 

But it is the "Stop WOKE Act" that has gotten the most attention. This law, which applies to any sort of training that anyone in Florida is required to take, either in school, to obtain a license, or as part of mandated corporate training, says that no such training may "espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel" an individual to believe any of the following:

1. Members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally superior to members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.
2. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
3. An individual’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her 59 race, color, sex, or national origin.
4. Members of one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex, or national origin.
5. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of, actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.
6. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.
7. An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or er race, color, sex, or national origin.
8. Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness,  neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, sex, or national origin to oppress members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.

Some of this is at least understandable. I find the notion that anyone now living bears any responsibilty for slavery to be absurd, and it irks me when activists complain that all talk of hard work is a cover for racism. (If you don't think that happens and matters, just have a look at the debate over selective high schools in New York.) But I would not under any circumstances support passing a law like this to defend my opinions.

The danger with this law, and all similar laws, is that a hostile judge could apply them to almost any statement about race, slavery, immigration, or a long list of other topics. Suppose I present data to a class showing that immigrants are more likely to found new companies than native born Americans, and a student complains that this made him feel bad about being native born. Am I in trouble? What if I point out that almost all the Africans traded to North America were actually enslaved by other Africans, and a black student says that made him feel bad about his race. Am I in trouble? What if I say that anxiety disorders are more common in women? Or that suicide is more common in men?

How could I possibly know in advance what statements will cause students to experience "discomfort"?  And what is it with Republican populists obsessing over everyone's feelings? Forget balancing the budget, but we're going to fight like hell against anything that makes our voters feel bad.

As I have written here several times, it is hard to say anything about many historical topics that won't make somebody mad.

Vague laws are bad laws, because they allow the state to harass their enemies while ignoring whatever their friends are doing. Vague laws are bad laws because they leave us in fear as to whether we are following them or not. We should fight all of them, regardless of how that makes anyone feel.

Letters from Ex-Slaves

At the Washington Post, a collection of letters from ex-slaves to their former enslavers. Here are excerpts from one that was dictated by an ex-slave living in Ohio to his employer, to be sent to his former owner in Tennessee. It was later published in a local newspaper.

I want to know particularly what “the good chance” is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane, and Grundy, go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master.

Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.

Black Washington Welcomes the Emancipation Proclamation

From a National Park Service Report on the Black refugees who came to Washington, DC during the Civil War:

Unquestionably, the Emancipation Proclamation was an enormous step which definitively marked the Union Army as a liberationary force (soldiers, in fact, began carrying small copies of the Proclamation on cards to distribute as they occupied Confederate territory), but it did not apply in all cases. . . .

Certainly, freedpeople throughout the capital region celebrated these milestones. In the school at Camp Barker on New Year’s Eve 1862, “the whole congregated multitude of contrabands, young and old, awaiting upon their knees at midnight the signal of the moment between December 31, 1862, and January 1, 1863” marked the arrival of the Emancipation Proclamation. When January 1 arrived, the African American minister Henry McNeal Turner was preaching to an open-air congregation at Israel Church when “such a multitude of people in and around my church” prompted him to suspend his sermon and run “up to the office of the first paper in which the proclamation of freedom could be printed, known as the Evening Star.” There, Turner jostled his way to the front of the crowd, and when the first printed copy shot off the press, he was one of three men to grab for it. He missed the first and the second but snatched the third and ran down Pennsylvania Avenue, waving his copy. As freedpeople caught sight of the sheet of paper “they raised a shouting cheer that was almost deafening.” Members of the crowd lifted Turner up onto a platform where he began to read the text, but was too overcome. A companion took over for him, and as he read, “men squealed, women fainted, dogs barked, white and colored people shook hands, songs were sung,” cannons fired and a roar rose from the area of the White House. “Great processions of colored and white men marched to and fro and passed in front of the White House,” where Lincoln waved out the window, concerned, Turner speculated, that if he ventured out, the animated crowd “would hug him to death.” Two years later, when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865, one hundred guns in a battery in Franklin Square fired a salute, and dignitaries all over the city made speeches. One such speech was delivered by the African American minister, Henry Highland Garnet, who spoke from the desk of the Speaker of the House to a large, racially mixed crowd in a Capitol from which African American spectators had been barred when the war began.

Chaz Guest

Chaz Guest (born 1961) is an African American painter much admired by optimistic black celebrities like Oprah and the Obamas. Above, a recent self portrait, which is my favorite of the works I have found.

Guest was a competitive gymnast in his youth and his college career was mostly about getting good enough grades to stay on the team. After he graduated he had no clue what to do with himself. (Ghost, 2018, from Guest's web site)

Interested in fashion, he tried the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC but couldn't cut it. On the advice of an acquaintance he tried fashion illustration and ended up working for a fashion magazine in Paris. Another acquaintance saw his work and said, "you should try painting." (American Boy, 2008)

So he took up painting, with no training beyond the fashion illustration class he took during his brief stint at FIT. Somewhere along the way Guest picked up a great love of Japanese culture; in most of the photographs you can find online he is wearing a kimono. He taught himself to draw with a brush and ink, Japanese style, which you can see in works like this one.

Even though he has been a success, I think Guest's lack of training shows; I think there are lots of painters around who can render faces better than Guest can. Where he excels is at telling a certain kind of story, one that is about race in America without being divisive, angry, or depressing. This is Running Past Himself, which obviously refers to old images of escape from bondage but according to the painter refers to the struggle all of us fight to escape from our inner demons.

The Planning, 2021, part of a series titled Buffalo Warrior.

Art critic Gary Brewer: interviewed Guest during his recent LA gallery show:

Talking with Chaz Guest was a rich and engaging conversation about storytelling and images. We spoke of how to create characters and narratives that address the history of race in America, but in a nuanced language that spoke to this specific history and transcends it to speak of people throughout history. We spoke of hardship and enslavement, resistance and freedom. When I mentioned that his character “Buffalo Warrior” was a black superhero, he said that he did not see him that way, “ He is a Universal Citizen of the Earth and a fighter for all. I do not see him as black, I think of him as tall, dark and handsome.”  

Some of the Buffalo Warrior paintings are superhero comic-ish, like this one, and apparently there is talk of a movie about this character.

Another reason Guest's latest show is getting a lot of attention is that actor Michael K. Williams, who played Omar on The Wire, sat for Guest just two weeks before he died of an overdose in October. Williams' face appears in some of the Buffalo Warrior paintings, including the one above, The Lonely Night. Guest recently summed up his career like this:

I decided not to use my time trying each day to be a part of the art establishment. I thought that the work would have to speak for itself. If I just painted from my heart, my roads would be easier.

The Ambiguity of Desegregation

 Following preservation debates as I do, I have long been impressed by the loyalty that many Black Americans feel toward their old segregated schools:

May Day is my mother’s favorite memory from her time attending the segregated school in the mismatched buildings at the corner of Stokes and Alliance streets. During my own childhood, she and my father, the late Joseph Williams Sr. — both members of Havre de Grace Colored High School in northeast Maryland, Class of ’51 — told stories to my sisters and me that bordered on legend. Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes once lectured my dad’s English class and gave him a book of poems. I envied their experience: I attended a suburban, predominantly White high school in the suburbs.

My parents rarely spoke of the hardships that went along with education in the Jim Crow era, like the secondhand desks and tattered textbooks, the basement science lab or the grassy vacant lot with homemade bleachers serving as the school gymnasium. “I loved being there,” my mother says. “I was proud to graduate from there. The cohesiveness and the closeness made you feel like you belonged.”  . . .

The school and its long, proud history have been resurrected and returned to the community as a museum and community event space, thanks to an alumnus’s determined daughter. Havre de Grace Colored High School has joined a growing national list of formerly segregated institutions finding new life. Ongoing or recently completed grass-roots projects have been pursued in Atlanta, St. Louis, Baltimore, Delaware, Alabama, Virginia, Western Maryland, North Carolina and Florida. (Washington Post)

I can't imagine anyone showing this kind of loyalty to the sort of big, diverse high school I went to.

Asians, Immigrants, Race Politics, Class Politics, and NYC's Elite High Schools

Here are two interesting sets of numbers for Brooklyn Tech, one of the New York City high schools where entrance has been determined by competitive examination. First, by race: the population is 61% Asian, 24% white, and 15% Black and Latino, when Black and Latino students comprise a majority of the system. But also, 63% of the student population is economically disadvantaged, and the most disadvantaged racial group is the Asians. (New York Times)

Brooklyn Tech is full of immigrants and immigrants' children, from all over the world. Many of those immigrant families are quite poor in dollar terms. A majority of Brooklyn Tech's Asian students speak a language other than English at home. They do not see themselves as "privileged"; they see entrance to an elite high school as their ticket out of poverty, and it has indeed worked that way for thousands.

Arguments about these schools have a way of devolving into fights about race and racism, but the debate also raises fundamental questions about education. For example, what is education for?

A certain sort of educational system sees its mission as winnowing: such a school separates out the few who will rise to the top from the rest, and sends the losers toward menial jobs. A different model is that the schools are supposed to lift up everybody. Obviously modern public school systems have tried to do both, but emphasizing one approach makes a big difference. In the US, schools make much use of gifted and talented programs, pulling the best students out for advanced instruction. But globally many systems do not do this; instead they get the advanced students to tutor their slower peers, with the goal of raising up everyone. In the US, studies have regularly shown that slow students do better in classrooms that also include much better students, poor students do better in classrooms that include richer students, and Black students do better in classrooms that are not all Black. On the other hand, studies also show that students in gifted and talented programs end up going to higher-tier colleges and making more money. Who should sacrifice for whom?

You can see this argument in its starkest form when the subject is math. Some elite mathematicians are already doing cutting edge work by the time they are 18, so making them sit in classes with non-mathematical kids might be a big waste of their time. At a somewhat lower level, it is very difficult to get into a college engineering or science program if you did not have Calculus in high school, but most high school students have no interest in that level of math, and despite what certain educational theorists like to say, I do not believe all students could do it even if they tried. And why should they try? I am a quasi scientist and sometimes use statistics in my job, but I haven't used calculus since I finished my high school class. Some people say we should cultivate mathematicians and scientists the same way we cultivate young athletes, using talent scouts to spot them young and then pulling them into special programs with other elite prospects. That would probably be the best way to create more Nobel Prize winners; but is that our goal?

I see the fight over elite public high schools as a fight over what all schools are for. Those who defend these schools see education as providing pathways for the ambitious to achieve excellence; "realize your dreams" might be their slogan. They also tend to think that the economic future of the nation depends heavily on the achievements of elite engineers and managers. Those who resist elite schools think that the main mission of education should be equality, or maybe justice. They resist the whole notion of separating or winnowing, and think we should all rise or fall together. 

Obsessing about that 7 Percent

At the Washington Post, a white woman discovers that her mother was "passing" and she is 7 to 9 percent African, then decides this is the most important thing about her:

For the majority of my life, I’d never been asked my race. Everyone, including me, assumed I was what I appeared to be — a White woman. I never considered that once my mother’s story went public, people would question my racial identity. . . .

Is that really who I am — a White woman with Black heritage?

The worst part is the article's title, "I thought I was White until I learned my mother’s secret."

Let's go over this: genetically, race does not exist. Does not. West African ancestry exists, but it is a completely different thing from East African ancestry, and it is only tangentially related to "race" as various laws and societies have defined it. Nor is there any genetic way to decide the race of people with mixed West African and European genes.

What exists, is culture. So if you grow up in white culture and think of yourself as white and everybody else thinks you are white, then you are white in the only sense that I think has any meaning. Your genes are irrelevant. You may find it interesting that your genetic profile includes a few percent of non-European genes, but there is no special reason anyone else should care. This writer ends up deciding that she is "mixed race," which I think is a farce. Not that it's any of my business. But I hate, with an abiding passion, the notion that anything about your ancestry defines who you are. How you grow up, sure, that's something you can't escape. But who your great-grandparents were? Who cares?

This why I hate royalty, and I mean really hate it. If other countries want kings and queens, fine, that's their business. But if somebody tried to introduce one here I would become a violent revolutionary and fight monarchy to the death.

"Passing for white" is an archaic bit of American lore we should toss in the same bin as all the other strange arcana about our past, like bear baiting and ducking witches.

And while I'm ranting, let me ask this: why is your race "who you are?" There is nothing – repeat, nothing – in this piece about a single other component of the author's identity other than race. Nothing about her being a woman. Nothing about her being a writer and a speaker. Nothing about being kind or cruel, generous or stingy, truthful or dishonest, shy or bold. Nothing about being her mother's daughter in any way other than the race angle. Nothing at all but the bald fact of her 7-9 vs. 93-91 percent.

I suppose she might say, in her defense, that this is what everybody else asks her about and wants to talk about. Which might be true. But because the rest of America is obsessed with race is no reason to feed the fire.

The Moorish Sovereign Citizens

The Sovereign Citizen movement originated among white supremacists in the 1970s and made the news several times in the 90s. The central belief is that its members are independent states unto themselves, not bound by the laws of the US or any other nation. I have always found it an interesting thought exercise. What argument can one use against such people except force? We have police and an army, and you don't, so buzz off. I can't think of anything else one could say to them.

Since everyone in the US has been so focused on racial divides lately, it has been an interesting to watch as this peculiar ideology spreads among black radicals. 

Known as the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of empowerment. Experts say it lures marginalized people to its ranks with the false promise that they are above the law. . . .

This past summer the Moorish movement exploded into public view, after Ms. Little posted viral TikTok accounts of her ordeal and when the police pulled over members of a militant offshoot of the group on a Massachusetts highway. That subgroup, known as Rise of the Moors, engaged in a standoff with the police for more than nine hours, claiming that as sovereign citizens, law enforcement had no authority to stop them. No one was injured; 11 people were arrested and charged with unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, among other offenses.

Increasingly, across the country sovereign citizens have clashed with the authorities, tied up resources and frazzled lives in their insistence that laws, such as the requirement to pay taxes, obey speed limits and even obtain, say, a license for a pet dog, do not apply to them.

People who claim to be Moorish sovereign citizens believe they are bound mainly by maritime law, not the law of the places where they live, said Mellie Ligon, a lawyer and author of a study of their impact on the judicial system in the Emory International Law Review. (NY Times)

You have to love that detail about maritime law. What?

The major nuisance caused by these folks lately has been claiming property as their own, based on deeds and titles they issue to themselves. Sometimes they claim (as in the case in the Times story) that the property in question is their "ancestral estate," other times that it is due to them as reparations for slavery. 

If there's one thing in the US that unites people of all races, it's cranky antigovernment conspiracy theories.

Stacie Marshall Confronts her Family's Past

Stacie Marshall has taken over the running of her family's farm in Dirt Town Valley, Georgia. She is excited by the chance to bring the farm back to life using organic methods, but also worried about about the legacy she has inherited. Two ruined sharecropper's shacks still stand on the farm, memories of a time when the owning family relied on black labor. In 1860, they owned seven slaves. According to family lore they bought their first slave as a wetnurse, when the farmer's wife couldn't produce enough milk for her baby. Not only that, but they acquired the farm in 1833 in a lottery of land stolen from the Creek Indians.

This is a story that could easily come across as ridiculous, but Stacie Marshall is clearly not a ridiculous person, and the telling by Times reporter Kim Severson is nuanced and open-minded. What would it mean to cleanse the land of such a history? To redeem a family? Here is an excerpt:

If anyone in the valley could help Ms. Marshall begin her self-styled healing project, it was Melvin Mosley. He had been the assistant principal at her high school. He is also her father’s best friend.

The two men met as boys, when Mr. Mosley’s uncle lived in one of the shacks on the Scoggins farm and worked for Ms. Marshall’s grandfather. Mr. Scoggins went to the white school, Mr. Mosley the Black one. Every book at Mr. Mosley’s school was a hand-me-down from the white school, but the boys didn’t understand that their educations were different until they started comparing notes.

“One day he asks me, ‘Did you choose white milk or chocolate milk today?’” Mr. Mosley said. “Man, we didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have chocolate milk. I didn’t even know what a spit wad was because we never got straws.”

Chattooga County integrated its schools in 1966, when the boys were in seventh grade. In interviews, the men talked about how unfair segregation was, but their perspectives on the past are profoundly different. Both recalled joining the adults as they baled hay for Mr. Scoggins’s father, and breaking for midday dinner. The Black workers ate outdoors. The white workers went into the house.

“My mama would call them to come in the house, but they said, ‘No, ma’am,’ and stayed out by that wall there,” Mr. Scoggins said. “They were humble.”

To Mr. Mosley, eating outside wasn’t about humility. “We did what we did because that’s what you did,” he said. “That was a sign of the times.”

For decades, he taught in public schools and prisons. At 67, he is a preacher, and lives with his wife, Betty, on 50 acres near Ms. Marshall’s farm.

On a summer day in 2019, Ms. Marshall sat in their yard and told them she wanted to start sharing the whole, hard story of Dirt Valley, and make some kind of amends. She asked if she was on the right path.

Mr. Mosley always considered her a bright girl who should go to college — as he told her after sending her to detention for kissing a boy in the school mechanic shop. His advice now was simple.

“Let’s say that’s the water under the bridge,” he said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” All she needed to do was to pour as much love on their valley as she could.

“In all of our families, Black or white, there are some generational things that are up to us to break,” he told her. “And when we break it, it is broken forever.”

Remember. Contemplate. Pour love onto the world. That is my formula, too.