Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 22

Neal Brennan—White America's Greatest Klingon Writer

The Q&A with Neal Brennan, co-creator of "Chappelle's Show," over at Buzzfeed begins with this ominous paragraph:

In a sense, Brennan has made introducing black America to white America his life’s work. His advice for how white people should act around black people? “It’s an odd thing. You treat them like human beings.”

These two sentences are in conflict. It's certainly true that you should treat black people like human beings. The first step in that process is understanding that asking how to act "around black people" is itself an act of inhumanity.

The second step is understanding that the way to get introduced to black America is to introduce yourself to black America. This is not particularly hard. We have a month every year dedicated to this task. Some of our greatest literature, music, cinema and art hails from this experience. I have heard that there are whole neighborhoods where black people actually live.

The third step is understanding that white America does not so much need to be introduced to black America, as it needs to be introduced to itself. It pains me (seriously) to see this point made by Neal Brennan himself:

Some people question whether a white person should even be writing black characters.

NB: I think anyone can write about anything that they have knowledge of and exposure to. I think the best black screenwriter is Quentin Tarantino. Quentin may write better black characters than Spike. I mean, Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction is fucking unbelievable. That would be Exhibit A. I actually think that’s why Spike gets mad at Quentin. Quentin happens to write unbelievably rich black characters.

So does David Simon.

NB: There’s Exhibit B. Omar is the best black TV character, one of the best TV characters of all time. I think saying a white person can’t write black characters is as racist as anything on earth. And it’s also insulting to black people. It’s like, “So, are you not human?” Because I can write about humans. A white person writing about black people is writing about humanity with a slight vernacular spin.

I am not sure who these people are who don't think white people should never write black characters. Certainly not black actors and actresses, the lionshare of whom want to compete for the largest roles possible. Probably not even black screenwriters who, like most artists, want the right to follow their imagination. More likely, there are artists who are concerned that they actually don't get to follow their imagination, and even in their native world there are white artists who are privileged over them.

Which brings us back to Neal Brennan. Last week, during the great public intellectual debate, I pointed out that I'd grown up in a time when white people freely made whatever declarations they please about worlds they knew very little about. Neal Brennan is an accomplished artist, and we all thank him for his substantial contributions to "Chappelle's Show." But if you try to picture rich black American life, and the first thing that comes to mind is The Wire and Pulp Fiction, and the first characters who come to mind are black men who kill people, I suspect your qualifications are not all in order. 

And I love The Wire, but blindness follows blindness. Leave aside black screenwriters like John Ridley, Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay—Neal Brennan does not know who the best black screenwriter is because the best black screenwriter right now is waitressing tables, counting up shit tips, thinking about her babysitting shift that night, hoping to get her car out the shop tomorrow, and storing lines of dialogue and character notes in her memory chalet. Neal Brennan can not know who "the best black" anything is, because the best black anythings are shot, jailed and destroyed at discomfiting rates. And there were so few black people in Wilmette. And these facts, and Brennan's blindness, and Brennan's declaration offered in blindness, are not wholly unconnected.

Never trust anyone posing as a tour guide. Learning things is hard. Do the work.

Never trust that part of you that wants a tour guide. All of us are tempted by the Cliff-Notes. Decline them. Sometimes you must wander through The Louvre.

Never trust that part of you that thinks you found "the best black" anything. Likely, you are speaking loudly of the little you know, and not intelligently of the everything that is. And you know so little of it. This world was made precisely so that you would know so little of it. And the minute you learn anything of it, you will understand why that part of you was ridiculous.

Never try to look cool and learn something at the same time. You must have an awkward phase. All of us would like to skip that awkward phase. That is not how it works. Here is how it works: Get your ass in the water. Swim like me.

       

Neal Brennan--White America's Greatest Klingon Writer

The Q&A with Neal Brennan, co-creator of "Chappelle's Show," over at Buzzfeed begins with this ominous paragraph:

In a sense, Brennan has made introducing black America to white America his life’s work. His advice for how white people should act around black people? “It’s an odd thing. You treat them like human beings.”

These two sentences are in conflict. It's certainly true that you should treat black people like human beings. The first step in that process is understanding that asking how to act "around black people" is itself an act of inhumanity.

The second step is understanding that the way to get introduced to black America is to introduce yourself to black America. This is not particularly hard. We have a month every year dedicated to this task. Some of our greatest literature, music, cinema and art hails from this experience. I have heard that there are whole neighborhoods where black people actually live.

The third step is understanding that white America does not so much need to be introduced to black America, as it needs to be introduced to itself. It pains me (seriously) to see this point made by Neal Brennan himself:

Some people question whether a white person should even be writing black characters.

NB: I think anyone can write about anything that they have knowledge of and exposure to. I think the best black screenwriter is Quentin Tarantino. Quentin may write better black characters than Spike. I mean, Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction is fucking unbelievable. That would be Exhibit A. I actually think that’s why Spike gets mad at Quentin. Quentin happens to write unbelievably rich black characters.

So does David Simon.

NB: There’s Exhibit B. Omar is the best black TV character, one of the best TV characters of all time. I think saying a white person can’t write black characters is as racist as anything on earth. And it’s also insulting to black people. It’s like, “So, are you not human?” Because I can write about humans. A white person writing about black people is writing about humanity with a slight vernacular spin.

I am not sure who these people are who don't think white people should never write black characters. Certainly not black actors and actresses, the lionshare of whom want to compete for the largest roles possible. Probably not even black screenwriters who, like most artists, want the right to follow their imagination. More likely, there are artists who are concerned that they actually don't get to follow their imagination, and even in their native world there are white artists who are privileged over them.

Which brings us back to Neal Brennan. Last week, during the great public intellectual debate, I pointed out that I'd grown up in a time when white people freely made whatever declarations they please about worlds they knew very little about. Neal Brennan is an accomplished artist, and we all thank him for his substantial contributions to "Chappelle's Show." But if you try to picture rich black American life, and the first thing that comes to mind is The Wire and Pulp Fiction, and the first characters who come to mind are black men who kill people, I suspect your qualifications are not all in order. 

And I love The Wire, but blindness follows blindness. Leave aside black screenwriters like John Ridley, Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay--Neal Brennan does not know who the best black screenwriter is because the best black screenwriter right now is waitressing tables, counting up shit tips, thinking about her babysitting shift that night, hoping to get her car out the shop tomorrow, and storing lines of dialogue and character notes in her memory chalet. Neal Brennan can not know who "the best black" anything is, because the best black anythings are shot, jailed and destroyed at discomfiting rates. And there were so few black people in Wilmette. And these facts, and Brennan's blindness, and Brennan's declaration offered in blindness, are not wholly unconnected.

Never trust anyone posing as a tour guide. Learning things is hard. Do the work.

Never trust that part of you that wants a tour guide. All of us are tempted by the Cliff-Notes. Decline them. Sometimes you must wander through The Louvre.

Never trust that part of you that thinks you found "the best black" anything. Likely, you are speaking loudly of the little you know, and not intelligently of the everything that is. And you know so little of it. This world was made precisely so that you would know so little of it. And the minute you learn anything of it, you will understand why that part of you was ridiculous.

Never try to look cool and learn something at the same time. You must have an awkward phase. All of us would like to skip that awkward phase. That is not how it works. Here is how it works: Get your ass in the water. Swim like me.

       

The Friday Battalion

It's yours.

       

Liquid Chords

 

Awesome SZA. Watch This Woman

This has been a pretty depressing place for some time now. It's all Nazis, Stalinists, famine and torture, redlining and wealth gaps. There was a time when this blog was actually fun. It used to be oatmeal and MF Doom. It used to be old masters and football. It used to be Autobots. I'm not quite sure what happened. Perhaps it's seeing the other side of 35. Perhaps it's growth.

But some light must peek in, from time to time, so I present to The Horde, SZA The Great. Her shit is beautiful and weird, as if Kelis and Madlib convened a high-level conference in Switzerland:

I apologize for waiting to tell you for so long that I am not human.
I am made of I am made of bacon, fairy tales pixie dust. I don't feel.
I hung myself and didn't die.
I am omnipotent, I'm alive...

You get SZA's low husky voice, bizarre snippets of Eartha Kitt and Rosemary's Baby, and low bluesy grooves. I play her EP incessantly, along with this hot one.

I've played the joint below, "Aftermath,"  precisely 1,344,233,978 times. That a 23-year old could tell an old dude everything about his life is ridiculous. But I'm totally sold now on the proposition that music doesn't get old, we do. And if this ain't love--"You don't have to kidnap\I'd like to be kidnap"--then God ain't real. 

Of course she's down with Top Dawg and Kendrick Lamar. That makes sense. I'd like to tell you I don't believe in music anymore. The game ain't been the same since Jay Electronica broke my heart and took all of western civilization with him. ("The vivid memoirs of an obnoxious slave.") But some things we can't control. And what better motto might there be for this blue period, for this Horde, grieving for an imagined America, than "Maybe we should burn?"

       

Hitler on the Mississippi Banks

Poster depicting the Nazi campaign against "degenerate music." Wikimedia Commons.

From time to time, someone will ask why I write so much about racism. The underlying charge is that a writer should cease to follow his curiosities. I might well retort that Paul Krugman should stop writing about the economy, or Jeff Goldberg should stop writing about the Middle East. The difference is that the world which racism made is seen as a niche issue, with no real import. "Gender" and "women's issues" are often regarded in the same way.

Many of the vexing moral issues of our time--inequality, schooling, the drug war, mass incarceration--simply can't be discussed without discussing racism. People sometimes try to do so (especially in the vein of inequality.) Their analysis is the poorer for it. It's tempting to suggest that this idea of racism as a "niche issue" is a result of the way in which black history is taught and the rise of black studies. Except that regarding black people and the issues that injure them as "niche" did not begin in 1968. 

It is my guiding thesis that people who claim a serious interest in America but consider racism to be a niche topic are divided against themselves. You can't understand American politics, without understanding the Civil War. You can't understand the suburbs, without understanding redlining. You can't understand the constitution, without understanding slavery. In effect if you are an American who avoids understanding the force of racism, you are avoiding an understanding of yourself and your country. 

Perhaps you are even avoiding something more. 

The Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was called Generalplan Ost. It called for the conquest of Eastern and Central Europe, the reduction of its "non-German" peoples, the seizure of their land, and the enslavement of all who remained. The details are slightly different, but in its outlines, offered here in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, we should see something haunting and familiar:

The general design was consistent throughout: Germans would deport, kill, assimilate, or enslave the native populations, and bring order and prosperity to a humbled frontier. Depending upon the demographic estimates, between thirty-one and forty-five million people, mostly Slavs, were to disappear. In one redaction, eighty to eighty-five percent of the Poles, sixty-five percent of the west Ukrainians, seventy-five percent of the Belarusians, and fifty percent of the Czechs were to be eliminated.

After the corrupt Soviet cities were razed, German farmers would establish, in Himmler’s words, “pearls of settlement,” utopian farming communities that would produce a bounty of food for Europe. German settlements of fifteen to twenty thousand people each would be surrounded by German villages within a radius of ten kilometers. The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization’s edge would test the manhood of coming generations of German settlers. Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor.

The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.

It's easy to consider the reduction of this hemisphere's aboriginal people, the seizure of their land, their enslavement, the importation of African labor, the creation of a "black race," the profitable murder of black families, the perpetual warring against black people, the subsequent campaigns of terrorism which followed, as without analogue or global import. As though the land simply appeared beneath our feet, and by God's decree, delivered onto us its wealth. As though our state was not founded in plunder of land, labor and lives. 

Hitler knew better. From Ira Katznelson's piercing history, Fear Itself:

Hitler denigrated blacks, admired American racism, and regretted the South’s defeat in 1865, especially how “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.”* He complained when the French stationed African troops in the Rhineland, warned about racial mixing, and denounced “negrified music.” His main direct sources of information about the South were a series of odd and skewed reports that were provided by a German resident of Florida who wrote about putative Jewish plans to mobilize American blacks to destroy the white race.

Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler was fascinated in 1937 by Vom Winde verweht, the German edition of Gone with the Wind. This melodramatic epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction was a best-seller. The film, not surprisingly, proved a big hit. Nervous as he awaited the dawn invasion of the USSR, a move that would start Operation Barbarossa, Joseph Goebbels spent the hours after midnight on June 22, 1941, watching a prerelease German version with a group of invited friends, perhaps not aware that one of the film’s stars, Leslie Howard, was a British Jew.

When Americans complained about Nazi anti-Semitism, party officials rejoined by citing southern racial practices, claiming a kinship. The Völkischer Beobachter, the oldest Nazi Party newspaper, routinely disparaged Africans and African-Americans. Like much of the German press, it frequently printed antiblack cartoons, reminded its readers that southern public accommodations were segregated, and delighted in reporting how blacks, like German Jews, could not sleep in Pullman cars and could not exercise the right to vote. Lynching was a favorite subject. Neues Volk celebrated southern lynching for protecting white women from unrestrained black desire.

The Völkischer Beobachter published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal Schwarze Korps exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.” 

The desire to put a history of American racism, which is to say a portion of America's roots, in a corner is a kind of wish-fulfillment. It would be so much easier if "black studies" really were niche, if it really weren't that important, if racism really was a minor thread in the history of the West. We should be so lucky--except we shouldn't.  No state ever is and we are not an exception to humanity.

*It was pointed out to me that the first quote was pulled by Katznelson from a source which should be viewed skeptically. I would not have included that quote had I known this. I'm striking it to show that, but leaving it up so as not to erase the mistake. That is the only quote relying on that source.

       

Hitler On The Mississippi Banks

Poster depicting the Nazi campaign against "degenerate music." Wikimedia Commons.

From time to time, someone will ask why I write so much about racism. The underlying charge is that a writer should cease to follow his curiosities. I might well retort that Paul Krugman should stop writing about the economy, or Jeff Goldberg should stop writing about the Middle East. The difference is that the world which racism made is seen as niche issue, with no real import. "Gender" and "women's issues" are often regarded in the same way.

Many of the vexing moral issues of our time--inequality, schooling, the drug war, mass incarceration--simply can't be discussed without discussing racism. People sometimes try to do so (especially in the vein of inequality.) Their analysis is the poorer for it. It's tempting to suggest that this idea of racism as a "niche issue" is a result of the way in which black history is taught and the rise of black studies. Except that regarding black people and the issues that injure them as "niche" did not begin in 1968. 

It is my guiding thesis that people who claim a serious interest in America but consider racism to be a niche topic are divided against themselves. You can't understand American politics, without understanding the Civil War. You can't understand the suburbs, without understanding redlining. You can't understand the constitution, without understanding slavery. In effect if you are an American who avoids understanding the force of racism, you are avoiding an understanding of yourself and your country. 

Perhaps you are even avoiding something more. 

The Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was called Generalplan Ost. It called for the conquest of Eastern and Central Europe, the reduction of its "non-German" peoples, the seizure of their land, and the enslavement of all who remained. The details are slightly different, but in its outlines, offered here in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, we should see something haunting and familiar:

The general design was consistent throughout: Germans would deport, kill, assimilate, or enslave the native populations, and bring order and prosperity to a humbled frontier. Depending upon the demographic estimates, between thirty-one and forty-five million people, mostly Slavs, were to disappear. In one redaction, eighty to eighty-five percent of the Poles, sixty-five percent of the west Ukrainians, seventy-five percent of the Belarusians, and fifty percent of the Czechs were to be eliminated.

After the corrupt Soviet cities were razed, German farmers would establish, in Himmler’s words, “pearls of settlement,” utopian farming communities that would produce a bounty of food for Europe. German settlements of fifteen to twenty thousand people each would be surrounded by German villages within a radius of ten kilometers. The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization’s edge would test the manhood of coming generations of German settlers. Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor.

The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.

It's easy to consider the reduction of this hemisphere's aboriginal people, the seizure of their land, their enslavement, the importation of African labor, the creation of a "black race," the profitable murder of black families, the perpetual warring against black people, the subsequent campaigns of terrorism which followed, as without analogue or global import. As though the land simply appeared beneath our feet, and by God's decree, delivered onto us its wealth. As though our state was not founded in plunder of land, labor and lives. 

Hitler knew better. From Ira Katznelson's piercing history, Fear Itself:

Hitler denigrated blacks, admired American racism, and regretted the South’s defeat in 1865, especially how “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.” He complained when the French stationed African troops in the Rhineland, warned about racial mixing, and denounced “negrified music.” His main direct sources of information about the South were a series of odd and skewed reports that were provided by a German resident of Florida who wrote about putative Jewish plans to mobilize American blacks to destroy the white race.

Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler was fascinated in 1937 by Vom Winde verweht, the German edition of Gone with the Wind. This melodramatic epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction was a best-seller. The film, not surprisingly, proved a big hit. Nervous as he awaited the dawn invasion of the USSR, a move that would start Operation Barbarossa, Joseph Goebbels spent the hours after midnight on June 22, 1941, watching a prerelease German version with a group of invited friends, perhaps not aware that one of the film’s stars, Leslie Howard, was a British Jew.

When Americans complained about Nazi anti-Semitism, party officials rejoined by citing southern racial practices, claiming a kinship. The Völkischer Beobachter, the oldest Nazi Party newspaper, routinely disparaged Africans and African-Americans. Like much of the German press, it frequently printed antiblack cartoons, reminded its readers that southern public accommodations were segregated, and delighted in reporting how blacks, like German Jews, could not sleep in Pullman cars and could not exercise the right to vote. Lynching was a favorite subject. Neues Volk celebrated southern lynching for protecting white women from unrestrained black desire.

The Völkischer Beobachter published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal Schwarze Korps exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.” 

The desire to put a history of American racism, which is to say a portion of America's roots, in a corner is a kind of wish-fulfillment. It would be so much easier if "black studies" really were niche, if it really weren't that important, if racism really was a minor thread in the history of the West. We should be so lucky--except we shouldn't.  No state ever is and we are not an exception to humanity.

       

Grappling With History's Greatest Gangsters

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, author of the Katyn massacre. (Wikimedia)

In early 1940, the Soviet Union executed 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and others deemed problematic to Soviet rule. The author of this policy was Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet secret police. Beria was not simply a detached administrator of death, he was a serial rapist who employed the apparatus of the state to his ends:

The records contained the official testimony from Colonel R.S. Sarkisov and Colonel V. Nadaraia, two of Beria's most senior NKVD bodyguards. They stated that on warm nights during the war years, Beria was often driven slowly through the streets of Moscow in his armored Packard limousine. He would point out young women to be detained and escorted to his mansion where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them.

Beria's bodyguards reported that their orders included handing each victim a flower bouquet as she left Beria's house. The implication being that to accept made it consensual; refusal would mean arrest. In one incident his chief bodyguard, Sarkisov, reported that a woman who had been brought to Beria rejected his advances and ran out of his office; Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway prompting the enraged Beria to declare "Now it's not a bouquet, it's a wreath! May it rot on your grave!"

The woman was arrested by the NKVD the next day.

One of the men charged with carrying out Beria's orders (and Stalin's will) was Vasili Blokhin, arguably the most prolific executioner in modern history:

He had been one of the main killers during the Great Terror, when he had commanded an execution squad in Moscow. He had been entrusted with some of the executions of high-profile defendants of show trials, but had also shot thousands of workers and peasants who were killed entirely in secret. At Kalinin he wore a leather cap, apron, and long gloves to keep the blood and gore from himself and his uniform. Using German pistols, he shot, each night, about two hundred and fifty men, one after another.

Then the bodies were driven, in a truck, to nearby Mednoe, where the NKVD had some summer houses. They were thrown into a large pit dug earlier by a backhoe.

There are horrific scenes, perpetrated by seemingly awful people, the way through Bloodlands, so much that a kind of nihilism eventually sets in on the reader. If I have one critique, it's that the sheer scale of death in the book works against one of its ostensible goals--to make us feel the great tragedy that swept through Ukraine, Belorussia and Poland. You move from narrative into something closer to chronicle. 

Still I think Snyder frames the questions correctly--How can men commit such acts? The question is not answered by empty invocations of "evil" or vague invocations of "sociopathy." The question is not answered by memorializing victims (though this has its place) or the construction of national oaths (though that too might have its place.) On the contrary the question might best be answered, not by identifying with history greatest victims, but identifying with its killers. This is in fact, as Snyder argues, the moral position:

It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding politicians and intellectuals—for example, Edvard Beneš and Ilya Ehrenburg—yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet-Jewish writer were justifying revenge upon the Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position.  To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.   To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap. The safer route is to realize that their motives for mass killing, however revolting to us, made sense to them.

Vasili Blokhin was a particular man, handpicked for a particular duty.  Even the SS was purged in the last phase of the Final Solution, so that it could reduced to its most willing killers. But the point is not that all humans are interchangeable, so much as it is that game must recognize game.  Most of us may not killers, but that there is a killer in most of us. Much as there is a slaveholder in most of us.  It is enough to understand that mass murder made sense to Himmler. You have to get to the Himmler within.    I think that allows for a skeptical morality. I think that allows those of us on the socio-economic bottom to give up our righteousness, to understand that there is nothing super-moral, or blessed, or prophesied in being down here. The bottom is just the bottom. Can we truly say we'd be much different were we on top?   Perhaps we can--but not because of what is in our bones, but because of what is behind our questions. Once we can see the world from Stalin's end, perhaps we can push further and question--not just tactics, but goals. Perhaps we can see that the means by which we seek liberation--for ourselves and others--can not truly be separated from our ends:  

It cannot be denied that mass starvation brings political stability of a certain kind. The question must be: is that the sort of peace that is desired, or that should be desired? Mass murder does bind perpetrators to those who give them orders. Is that the right sort of political allegiance? Terror does consolidate a certain kind of regime. Is that kind of regime preferable? Killing civilians is in the interest of certain kinds of leaders. The question is not whether all this is historically true; the question is what is desirable. Are these leaders good leaders, and these regimes good regimes? If not, the question is: how can such policies be prevented?

 
       

'Germans Are the Masters and Poles Are the Slaves'

"I decide who is a Jew." Karl Lueger, 19th century mayor of Vienna

I finished Timothy Snyder's masterful study, Bloodlands, last night. Most of it anyway. I'm still picking my way through the conclusion. At any rate, I want to focus today on one of the minor, but gripping, themes running through Bloodlands--power and social invention. Whenever American racism enters our field of discussion, it's fairly common for liberals, like me, to point out that our concept of race is a social construct. I've tried to unpack the logic behind this before, but I think this is the sort of thing said so much, and perhaps sometimes said in such a flip manner, that it's become cliché. I think it's important to say that our modern construct of race isn't just a "social construct," but that it is--itself--a racist construct, and as such has always depended less on ancestry, then the naked exercise of power.

When Frederick Douglass died, his wife Helen wrote:

It is easy to say, as has been carelessly said by some in commenting 
upon Mr. Douglass' life and career, that the intellectual power, the 
ambition, the talent which he displayed, were inheritances from his 
white father; that the colored strain disappeared except as it gave the 
hue to his skin ; and that to all intents and purposes Frederick 
Douglass was a white man.

That America was full of black people, like Douglass, with white parents did nothing to dissuade. The point was to make Douglass, and his many accomplishments, accord comfortably with the dictates of the day. When Hermann Goring needed to justify the service of "The Jew Nazi" Erhard Milch he asserted, "I decide who is a Jew and who is Aryan." Goring was echoing the words of Austrian anti-Semite Karl Lueger who'd denounced Budapest as "Judapest," then turned around and justified his many friendships with Jews by claiming, "I decide who is a Jew."

Lueger and Goring were right. The "Jew" in Lueger's mind, the "black race" in the American mind, were little more than totems employed to legitimize injustice. Surely Jewish people (much like black people) exist in our world with their own culture and traditions. But these were not the Jews of Goring's imagination

Likewise in Poland:

At Ciepielów, after a pitched battle, three hundred Polish prisoners were taken. Despite all the evidence, the German commander declared that these captured soldiers were partisans, irregular fighters unprotected by the laws of war. The Polish officers and soldiers, wearing full uniform, were astonished. The Germans made them disrobe. Now they looked more like partisans. All of them were gunned down and thrown in a ditch. In the short Polish campaign, there were at least sixty-three such actions. No fewer than three thousand Polish prisoners of war were murdered...

As one general maintained, “Germans are the masters, and Poles are the slaves.” The army leadership knew that Hitler’s goals for the campaign were anything but conventional. As the chief of staff summarized, it was “the intention of the Leader to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Soldiers had been prepared to see the Polish civilian population as devious and subhuman. One of them was so convinced of Polish hostility that he interpreted a Pole’s death grimace as the expression of irrational hatred of Germans.

The point here is invention. The reality of Polish soldiers undercut Nazi needs and so they were vanished and refashioned into "partisans." One thinks of Howell Cobb writing during the Civil War, "If slaves seem good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Or Kate Stone, after hearing of a Confederate defeat at the hands of black soldiers, writing "there must be some mistake."

In Cracow, Polish intellectual accomplishment clashed with the Nazi image of the country and so the Nazis sought turned to destruction. "The entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps," writes Snyder. "The statue of Adam Mickiewicz, the great romantic poet, was pulled down from its pedestal on the Market Square." 

In post-war Communist Poland, the art of invention continued. The country sought to purge Jews from "public life and positions of political influence." There was just one problem:

....who was a Jew?

In 1968, students with Jewish names or Stalinist parents received disproportionate attention in the press. Polish authorities used anti-Semitism to separate the rest of the population from the students, organizing huge rallies of workers and soldiers. The Polish working class became, in the pronouncements of the country’s leaders, the ethnically Polish working class. But matters were not so simple. The Gomułka regime was happy to use the Jewish label to rid itself of criticism in general. A Jew, by the party definition, was not always someone whose parents were Jewish. Characteristic of the campaign was a certain vagueness about Jews: often a “Zionist” was simply an intellectual or someone unfavorable to the regime.

When I was young man, I studied history at Howard University. Much of my studies were focused on the black diaspora, and thus white racism. I wish I had understood that I was not, in fact, simply studying white racism, but the nature of power itself. I wish I had known that the rules that governed my world echoed out into the larger world. I wish I had known how unoriginal we really are.

       

'Germans Are The Masters And Poles Are The Slaves'

"I decide who is a Jew." Karl Lueger, 19th century mayor of Vienna

I finished Timothy Snyder's masterful study, Bloodlands, last night. Most of it anyway. I'm still picking my way through the conclusion. At any rate, I want to focus today on one of the minor, but gripping, themes running through Bloodlands--power and social invention. Whenever American racism enters our field of discussion, it's fairly common for liberals, like me, to point out that our concept of race is a social construct. I've tried to unpack the logic behind this before, but I think this is the sort of thing said so much, and perhaps sometimes said in such a flip manner, that it's become cliché. I think it's important to say that our modern construct of race isn't just a "social construct," but that it is--itself--a racist construct, and as such has always depended less on ancestry, then the naked exercise of power.

When Frederick Douglass died, his wife Helen wrote:

It is easy to say, as has been carelessly said by some in commenting 
upon Mr. Douglass' life and career, that the intellectual power, the 
ambition, the talent which he displayed, were inheritances from his 
white father; that the colored strain disappeared except as it gave the 
hue to his skin ; and that to all intents and purposes Frederick 
Douglass was a white man.

That America was full of black people, like Douglass, with white parents did nothing to dissuade. The point was to make Douglass, and his many accomplishments, accord comfortably with the dictates of the day. When Hermann Goring needed to justify the service of "The Jew Nazi" Erhard Milch he asserted, "I decide who is a Jew and who is Aryan." Goring was echoing the words of Austrian anti-Semite Karl Lueger who'd denounced Budapest as "Judapest," then turned around and justified his many friendships with Jews by claiming, "I decide who is a Jew."

Lueger and Goring were right. The "Jew" in Lueger's mind, the "black race" in the American mind, were little more than totems employed to legitimize injustice. Surely Jewish people (much like black people) exist in our world with their own culture and traditions. But these were not the Jews of Goring's imagination

Likewise in Poland:

At Ciepielów, after a pitched battle, three hundred Polish prisoners were taken. Despite all the evidence, the German commander declared that these captured soldiers were partisans, irregular fighters unprotected by the laws of war. The Polish officers and soldiers, wearing full uniform, were astonished. The Germans made them disrobe. Now they looked more like partisans. All of them were gunned down and thrown in a ditch. In the short Polish campaign, there were at least sixty-three such actions. No fewer than three thousand Polish prisoners of war were murdered...

As one general maintained, “Germans are the masters, and Poles are the slaves.” The army leadership knew that Hitler’s goals for the campaign were anything but conventional. As the chief of staff summarized, it was “the intention of the Leader to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Soldiers had been prepared to see the Polish civilian population as devious and subhuman. One of them was so convinced of Polish hostility that he interpreted a Pole’s death grimace as the expression of irrational hatred of Germans.

The point here is invention. The reality of Polish soldiers undercut Nazi needs and so they were vanished and refashioned into "partisans." One thinks of Howell Cobb writing during the Civil War, "If slaves seem good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Or Kate Stone, after hearing of a Confederate defeat at the hands of black soldiers, writing "there must be some mistake."

In Cracow, Polish intellectual accomplishment clashed with the Nazi image of the country and so the Nazis sought turned to destruction. "The entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps," writes Snyder. "The statue of Adam Mickiewicz, the great romantic poet, was pulled down from its pedestal on the Market Square." 

In post-war Communist Poland, the art of invention continued. The country sought to purge Jews from "public life and positions of political influence." There was just one problem:

....who was a Jew?

In 1968, students with Jewish names or Stalinist parents received disproportionate attention in the press. Polish authorities used anti-Semitism to separate the rest of the population from the students, organizing huge rallies of workers and soldiers. The Polish working class became, in the pronouncements of the country’s leaders, the ethnically Polish working class. But matters were not so simple. The Gomułka regime was happy to use the Jewish label to rid itself of criticism in general. A Jew, by the party definition, was not always someone whose parents were Jewish. Characteristic of the campaign was a certain vagueness about Jews: often a “Zionist” was simply an intellectual or someone unfavorable to the regime.

When I was young man, I studied history at Howard University. Much of my studies were focused on the black diaspora, and thus white racism. I wish I had understood that I was not, in fact, simply studying white racism, but the nature of power itself. I wish I had known that the rules that governed my world echoed out into the larger world. I wish I had known how unoriginal we really are.

       

Addendum to the Great Public-Intellectual Debate

Three quick items to close out the great public intellectual debate of 2014:

1.) Dylan Byers replies here. You can judge his argument for yourself.

2.) I received the following note from a reader:

How do I apply for the TNC public intellectual prize? Does it ever go to Jews? Does it ever not go to Jews? 

The TNC Public-Intellectual Prize is an annual cash-less award given by the International Institute for Greater Conversating. The International Institute for Greater Conversating does not discriminate. Jews and black people with Mormon lineage are encouraged to apply. As are Mormons with black lineage. Special attention will be given to blacks with Mormon heritage who've considered converting to Judaism. There is no application fee. Applications open in February. 

3.) The restaurant we went to (If you're a francophile and Aurora is your server, you're in luck.) was Joseph Leonard. If you're in New York, go. Get the kale. Get the oysters. And—I can't believe I'm going to say this—get the hamhock. Also get the carrot cake. And have a glass of Les Garrigues.  Take someone you love who loves food almost as much as they love you.