Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 23

What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual

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Last night my wife and I went out for dinner. Our server was French, a fact that allowed us to spend a few moments practicing the language. When the server left, my wife said, "It's everywhere." Indeed. Some years ago I decided to learn French. It turns out that means more than talking to people, reading books or watching movies. It means understanding the difference between a definite and an indefinite article, the deeper meaning behind "Prêt A Manger" or "Le Pain Quotidien," or the fact that the language you take as foreign is actually "everywhere"—on the buses and trains, on the lips of mothers remanding children, out the mouths of cab-drivers yelling at each other. 

These are Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"—not simply a lack of answers, but an obliviousness to questions.  The awareness of this is humbling and euphoric: If French is "everywhere," how many other things are "everywhere?" What does "everywhere" even mean? At that moment one realizes that it isn't the cool facts which wise you up, but the awareness of a yawning, limitless, impossible ignorance. 

Yesterday Dylan Byers, Politico's media reporter, sent out this tweet:

Ta-Nehisi Coates's claim that "Melissa Harris-Perry is America's foremost public intellectual" sort of undermines his intellectual cred, no?

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) January 7, 2014

He was then asked to offer suggestions of his own. Byers didn't immediately answer. After being berated for an hour and a half he decided he should: 

Bernard Lewis, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman (tho not anymore), E.O. Wilson… Obviously Sontag before she died cc @Mattyglesias

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) January 7, 2014

Byers's contenders were all white men and a white woman disqualified on account of death. This was caricature—a pose not wholly unfamiliar to Byers—and it was greeted with all the mockery which #blacktwitter so often musters. But black people—and #blacktwitter—mostly laugh to keep from crying. 

This began because I claimed that Melissa Harris-Perry is "America's foremost public intellectual." I made this claim because of Harris-Perry's background: Ph.D. from Duke; stints at Princeton and Tulane; the youngest woman to deliver the Du Bois lecture at Harvard; author of two books; trustee at the Century Foundation. I made this claim because of her work: I believe Harris-Perry to be among the sharpest interlocutors of this historic era—the era of the first black president—and none of those interlocutors communicate to a larger public, and in a more original way, than Harris-Perry. 

Now Melissa Harris-Perry neither needs (nor likely much cares about) my endorsement. Regrettably, there's no cash attached to the "TNC Public Intellectual Prize." Moreover, other people will make other cases. What sets Byers apart is the idea that considering Harris-Perry an intellectual is somehow evidence of inferior thinking.

I came up in a time when white intellectuals were forever making breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself. My life was delineated lists like "Geniuses of Western Music" written by people who evidently believed Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin did not exist. That tradition continues. Dylan Byers knows nothing of your work, and therefore your work must not exist.

Here is the machinery of racism—the privilege of being oblivious to questions, of never having to grapple with the everywhere; the right of false naming; the right to claim that the lakes, trees, and mountains of our world do not exist; the right to insult our intelligence with your ignorance. The machinery of racism requires no bigotry from Dylan Byers. It merely requires that Dylan Byers sit still. 

We suffer for this. So many people charged with informing us, with informing themselves, are just sitting still. 

       

The Smartest Nerd in the Room

Melissa Harris-Perry/Facebook

On Saturday, Melissa Harris-Perry apologized on air for segment that made light of the Romney clan's adoption of a young black boy. On Sunday, Mitt Romney accepted Harris-Perry's "heartfelt" apology, noting, "I've made plenty of mistakes myself." I've watched the offending segment several times now. I can see how a white parent who'd adopted a black child (or vice versa) would find the segment flip and offensive. It would not have surprised me if those concerned about adoption, equality, and racism voiced some protest about the segment. Instead what we got was week of invective driven mostly by a conservative movement with less lofty concerns.

"Harris-Perry has been a public laughingstock for some time now," wrote John Nolte. "P.S. The Duck Dynasty family has an adopted black child. Maybe this is why the media hate them so much." Nolte was writing for the site named for the man who engineered the "Shirley Sherrod is a racist" hoax. There has never been an apology for that and there won't be one. That is because the conservative movement does not believe that racism is an actual issue to be grappled with, but sees it instead as a hand grenade to be lobbed into an enemy camp. One week we find Sarah Palin defending a man who thought my father was better off living under state-sponsored terrorism. The next we find her arguing that history's greatest monster is one Melissa Harris-Perry. 

When not attempting to shame their enemies on trumped-up charges of racism, the conservative movement busies itself appealing to actual racists. We are into the sixth year of the era of a black president. In that time the conservative movement has gorged on a steady diet of watermelon jokes, waffle jokes, affirmative-action jokes, monkey jokes, barbecue jokes, terrorist machinations, secret Muslim plots, and dastardly Kenyan conspiracies. Three months ago, the movement reached a new low, waving the flag of slavery in front of the Obama's home. It is tempting to call this the climax of a long campaign. That would exhibit an unearned optimism at odds with history.

Mitt Romney is not immune to this trend—he embodies it. On July of 2012, then-candidate Romney spoke to the NAACP (allegedly planting his own supporters). Later that day, he went before a crowd of conservatives and pitched his speech as follows:

I had the privilege of speaking today at the NAACP convention in Houston and I gave them the same speech I am giving you. I don't give different speeches to different audiences alright. I gave them the same speech. When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren't happy, I didn't get the same response. That's OK, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don't stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that's just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy-more free stuff. But don't forget nothing is really free. 

A few months later Barack Obama ended Romney's political career. Romney responded as follows:

Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss to President Obama was a disappointing result that neither he nor his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama,” and attributed his rival’s victory to “the gifts” the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama’s first term.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another. Mitt Romney was born into a state whose policy was white supremacy, whose policy was to heap "gifts" upon people who looked like him, at the expense of people who looked like Barack Obama. Romney's familiarity with white supremacy was not passive and distant but direct and tangible. As a child he lived in a neighborhood which, by the employment of compacts, red-lining, and terrorism, was an exclusive white preserve.

As an adult, Romney worships in a church that as late as 1978 took racism not simply as policy but as the word of God. It is possible the church believes this even to this day. In 2012, the Washington Post looked at the Mormon church's racist history. Reporter Jason Horowitz talked to Brigham Young University professor of religion Randy Bott, who explained the church's take on its past:

“God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott, the BYU theologian. He quotes Mormon scripture that states that the Lord gives to people “all that he seeth fit.” Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood.

“What is discrimination?” Bott asks. “I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?” Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth—although not in the afterlife—protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. “You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.”

There is a sense that Romney's grandchild should be off-limits to mockery. That strikes me as fair. It also doesn't strike me that mocking was what Harris-Perry was doing. The problem was making any kind of light of a fraught subject—a black child being reared by a family whose essential beliefs were directly shaped by white supremacy, whose patriarch sought to lead a movement which derives most its energy from white supremacy. That's a weighty subtext. But there is no one more worthy, and more capable, of holding that conversation than America's most foremost public intellectual—Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Grappling With Holodomor

A few days ago, I listened to a chapter in Timothy Snyder's The Bloodlands on famine in Ukraine during the 1930s.  The famine was man-made--the result of Stalin making war against his own citizens in Ukraine. I listened (I have the book in MP3 format) to about 90 percent of the chapter before I just had to cut it off. I generally have a strong stomach when it come to reading about evil, but this was too much:

Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was “not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.” The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.

That people were starving to death in Ukraine, and that this was a political act, not an act of God, was hidden from the world. And then sometimes the world just looked away:

Throughout the following summer and autumn, Ukrainian newspapers in Poland covered the famine, and Ukrainian politicians in Poland organized marches and protests. The leader of the Ukrainian feminist organization tried to organize an international boycott of Soviet goods by appealing to the women of the world. Several attempts were made to reach Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president of the United States.96 None of this made any difference.

The laws of the international market ensured that the grain taken from Soviet Ukraine would feed others. Roosevelt, preoccupied above all by the position of the American worker during the Great Depression, wished to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The telegrams from Ukrainian activists reached him in autumn 1933, just as his personal initiative in US-Soviet relations was bearing fruit. The United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933.

In August of 1933, French politician Édouard Herriot came to Kiev to see the socialist spirit. Instead he got a show. Food--meant for display not consumption--was put in the shops. Party activist were brought in to make it seem as though the town were bustling. The healthiest of the starving children were trotted out and coached to give pre-approved answers. Herriot was then chauffeured on to Moscow where supped on caviar. He would later praise Soviet actions for honoring both "the socialist spirit" and the "Ukrainian national feeling."

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Grappling With Holdomor

 

A few days ago, I listened to a chapter in Timothy Snyder's The Bloodlands on famine in Ukraine during the 1930s.  The famine was man-made--the result of Stalin making war against his own citizens in the Ukraine. I listened (I have the book in MP3 format) to about 90 percent of the chapter before I just had to cut it off. I generally have a strong stomach when it come to reading about evil, but this was too much:

Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was “not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.” The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.

That people were starving to death in Ukraine, and that this was a political act, not an act of God, was hidden from the world. And then sometimes the world just looked away:

Throughout the following summer and autumn, Ukrainian newspapers in Poland covered the famine, and Ukrainian politicians in Poland organized marches and protests. The leader of the Ukrainian feminist organization tried to organize an international boycott of Soviet goods by appealing to the women of the world. Several attempts were made to reach Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president of the United States.96 None of this made any difference.

The laws of the international market ensured that the grain taken from Soviet Ukraine would feed others. Roosevelt, preoccupied above all by the position of the American worker during the Great Depression, wished to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The telegrams from Ukrainian activists reached him in autumn 1933, just as his personal initiative in US-Soviet relations was bearing fruit. The United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933.

In August of 1933, French politician Édouard Herriot came to Kiev to see the socialist spirit. Instead he got a show. Food--meant for display not consumption--was put in the shops. Party activist were brought in to make it seem as though the town were bustling. The healthiest of the starving children were trotted out and coached to give pre-approved answers. Herriot was then chauffeured on to Moscow where supped on caviar. He would later praise Soviet actions for honoring both "the socialist spirit" and the "Ukrainian national feeling."

1

       

Talk to Me Like I'm Stupid: Collectivization in the Soviet Union

I want to ask a question of those who've followed these threads on Postwar and now Bloodlands. I'd like to talk those of you who've spent some time thinking about, reading about, or researching the history of the Soviet Union. I am trying to understood what Lenin, and then, Stalin was trying to accomplish. I have it this way so far:

1.) Marx's theory of communism held that there would be a worker's revolution.

A.) The revolution would begin in the industrialized states.

B.) The revolution would lead to communism where the workers, themselves, ran shit.

2.) Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades were communists.

A.) They did not believe in waiting for revolution, they sought foment one.

B.) They did not live in an industrialized state.

3.)  1A and 2B are in conflict. The Bolsheviks seek to resolve this conflict by industrializing.

A.) The funds for industrializing come from the crops grown by the peasantry to buy heavy machinery.

B.) The peasants lands are seized by the state and organized into collectives.

Is this basically a correct formulation of the plan?

What follows, of course, is something out of mix of World War Z and 12 Years A Slave. Famine. Roving bands of cannibals. State-sponsored slavery. More on that later, but I'd like to understand the basics of the plan before we start critiquing it and outlining its grim (horrifying, actually) results. 

As with all these threads, please do not talk out of boredom, to be "first," or to simply "say something." Ask questions. But don't talk out of the side of your neck. In fact, I'll leave comments locked for a moment.

       

Talk To Me Like I'm Stupid: Collectivization In The Soviet Union

I want to ask a question of those who've followed these threads on Postwar and now Bloodlands. I'd like to talk those of you who've spent some time thinking about, reading about, or researching the history of the Soviet Union. I am trying to understood what Lenin, and then, Stalin was trying to accomplish. I have it this way so far:

1.) Marx's theory of communism held that there would be a worker's revolution.

A.) The revolution would begin in the industrialized states.

B.) The revolution would lead to communism where the workers, themselves, ran shit.

2.) Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades were communists.

A.)They did not believe in waiting for revolution, they sought foment one.

B.)They did not live in an industrialized state.

3.)  1A and 2B are in conflict. The Bolsheviks seek to resolve this conflict by industrializing.

A.) The funds for industrializing come from the crops grown by the peasantry to buy heavy machinery.

B.) The peasants lands are seized by the state and organized into collectives.

Is this basically a correct formulation of the plan?

What follows, of course, is something out of mix of World War Z and 12 Years A Slave. Famine. Roving bands of cannibals. State-sponsored slavery. More on that later, but I'd like to understand the basics of the plan before we start critiquing it and outlining its grim (horrifying, actually) results. 

As with all these threads, please do not talk out of boredom, to be "first," or to simply "say something." Ask questions. But don't talk out of the side of your neck. In fact, I'll leave comments locked for a moment.

       

The Myth of Western Civilization

 Nicolae Ceaușescu, African Big Man

I finished Tony Judt's Postwar--a book which ends as it begins, with Europe in process--just in time to catch the most recent reported musings of Phil Robertson. Here he is offering Christian marriage counseling to a young man:

I said "Well son, I'm going give you some river rat counseling, here. Make that sure she can cook a meal. You need to eat some meals that she cooks. Check that out. Make sure she carries her Bible. That'll save you some trouble down the road. And if she picks your ducks, now that's a woman."

They got to where they getting hard to find, mainly because these boys are waiting until they get to be about 20 years old before they marry 'em. Look, you wait ‘til they get to be twenty years-old and the only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket. You got to marry these girls when they’re about fifteen or sixteen and they’ll pick your ducks. You need to check with Mom and Dad about that of course.

In many parts of America, this is an argument for statutory rape. More specifically, it is an argument for men seeking to elide the power of grown women, by seeking their sexual partners among teenage girls. This style of svengalism is generally seen as repugnant to our morality. Phil Robertson believes that society should withhold civil rights from consenting gay men, while allowing men like him to push the age of consent to its breaking point. The contradiction here is as predictable as it is ridiculous. The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin. 

Postwar ends with a Europe of Hitler's nightmares--darker, older, less Christian. The continent is teetering, its welfare state endangered, its peace, uneasy before the genocide in the Balkans. One get the sense that Judt believes that Europe has accomplished something--relative prosperity, democracy in most of its countries, lengthening life spans, acknowledgment of the Holocaust. But Judt believes in a world of actions, not monuments, and not shibboleths. Democracy is a struggle, not a trophy and not a bragging right. This is not a matter of being polite and sensitive. It is understanding that we live on the edge of the volcano, that the volcano is in us. Judt is keenly aware that late 20th century Europe's accomplishments could be wrecked by the simple actions of men.

When I lived in Paris, this summer, I loved walking across Pont Neuf. There was something to the idea that I was standing on a bridge older (by centuries) than my entire homeland. When the murderous demagogue Slobodan Milošević rallied the Serbs, at Blackbird's Field, he was appealing to a memory older than Columbus. But Pont Neuf could fall next week. And everyone knows what followed Milošević's words.

Vulgar nationalists often point to Europe as evidence of something that all humans, from Phil Robertson on down, strive for--certain civilized ground. And yet the greatest proponents of such certainty, of Utopia, of exceptionalism, of soloutionism, of Stalinism, of Bibles, of Qurans, of great civilization, and complete theories, are so often themselves engineers on the road to barbarism. What Judt wants us to see is the tenuousness of human creations, and thus the tenuousness of the West, itself. Having concluded that Europe (though not its Eastern half) has finally, in fits and starts, come to grapple with the Holocaust, he grows skeptical:

Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless

But memory is constantly invoked. When Nicolae Ceauşescu's henchmen begin to turn on him, they condemn him in predictable terms: 

Romania is and remains a European country. . . . You have begun to change the geography of the rural areas, but you cannot move Romania into Africa.

But Romania, is, indeed, in Africa--the Africa of European imagination, the Africa which justified slavery, which brims with rape, murder and cannibalism. All of Europe lives in that imagined, projected Africa. In a little over a decade, in the middle of the civilized continent, 14 million people were killed.  

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands:

No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal. People who starved were observed, often from watchtowers, by those who denied them food. People who were shot were seen through the sights of rifles at very close range, or held by two men while a third placed a pistol at the base of the skull. People who were asphyxiated were rounded up, put on trains, and then rushed into the gas chambers. They lost their possessions and then their clothes and then, if they were women, their hair. Each one of them died a different death, since each one of them had lived a different life.

Snyder quotes the poet Anna Ahkmotova addressing the legions of the dead--"I'd like to call you all by name."

I don't think there's anything original in the blood of Europe that allows for this kind of human misery. And  I don't think there's anything in the blood that allows for Pont Neuf, either. Nations seem to require myth. Romania's governing history is filled with big men, autocrats and despots. But the European super-nation has long needed to believe itself above the world, above native America, above Asia, and particularly above Africa. The truth is more disconcerting: The dark continent has never been South of the Sahara, but South of Minsk and East of Aachen in the jungles of the European soul. 

That the enemy is us, is never easy to take. Yesterday, Confederates routinely accused Northerners of attempting to reduce them to slavery. Today, men who convene with Confederate flags at the White House, accuse the president of racism. Yesterday, the civilized man accuses you of barbarism, while practicing sophisticated human sacrifice to the God Of Nations, while reducing his lordly estate to a house of the dead. The homophobe accuses you of sexual immorality and damns you to hell, while preaching a gospel which would make wives of children. 

I don't have any gospel of my own. Postwar, and the early pages of Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does. 

I'm also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality. And I now feel myself more historian than journalist.  

"History contributes to the disenchantment of the world," writes Judt.

...most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins.  But history does need to be learned—and periodically re-learned. In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up ‘Armenian Radio’ with a question: ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to foretell the future?’ Answer: ‘Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.  So it does—and not only in totalitarian societies. 

  All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe’s competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans’ collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed. Europe’s barbarous recent history, the dark ‘other’ against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans. 

Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives. If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europe out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past.  If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. ‘European Union’ may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.

Happy New Year all.

       

The Myth Of Western Civilization

 Nicolae Ceaușescu, African Big Man

I finished Tony Judt's Postwar--a book which ends as it begins, with Europe in process--just in time to catch the most recent reported musings of Phil Robertson. Here he is offering Christian marriage counseling to a young man:

I said "Well son, I'm going give you some river rat counseling, here. Make that sure she can cook a meal. You need to eat some meals that she cooks. Check that out. Make sure she carries her Bible. That'll save you some trouble down the road. And if she picks your ducks, now that's a woman."

They got to where they getting hard to find, mainly because these boys are waiting until they get to be about 20 years old before they marry 'em. Look, you wait ‘til they get to be twenty years-old and the only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket. You got to marry these girls when they’re about fifteen or sixteen and they’ll pick your ducks. You need to check with Mom and Dad about that of course.

In many parts of America, this is an argument for statutory rape. More specifically, it is an argument for men seeking to elide the power of grown women, by seeking their sexual partners among teenage girls. This is style of svengalism is generally seen as repugnant to our morality. Phil Robertson believes that society should  withhold of civil rights from consenting gay men, while allowing men like him to push the age of consent to its breaking point. The contradiction here is as predictable as it is ridiculous. The loudest of doomsayers are, so often, carry the weightiest of sin. 

Postwar ends with a Europe of Hitler's nightmares--darker, older, less Christian. The continent is teetering, its welfare state endangered, its peace, uneasy before the genocide in the Balkans. One get the sense that Judt believes that Europe has accomplished something--relative prosperity, democracy in most of its countries, lengthening life spans, acknowledgment of the Holocaust. But Judt believes in a world of actions, not monuments, and not shibboleths. He is keenly aware that late 20th century Europe's accomplished could be wrecked by the simple actions of men.

When I lived in Paris, this summer, I loved walking across Pont Neuf. There was something to the idea that I was standing on a bridge older (by centuries) than my entire homeland. When the murderous demagogue Slobodan Milošević rallied the Serbs, at Blackbird's Field, he was appealing to a memory older than Columbus. But Pont Neuf could fall next week. And everyone knows what followed Milošević's words.

Vulgar nationalist often point to Europe as evidence of something that all humans, from Phil Robertson on down, strive for--certain civilized ground. And yet the greatest proponents of such certainty, of Utopia, of exceptionalism, of soloutionism, of Stalinism, of Bibles, of Qurans, of great civilization, and complete theories, are so often themselves engineers on the road to barbarism. What Judt wants us to see is the tenuousness of human creations, and thus the tenuousness of the West, itself. Having concluded that Europe (though not it's Eastern half) has finally, in fits and starts, come to grapple with the Holocaust, he grows skeptical:

Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless

But memory is constantly invoked. When Nicolae Ceauşescu's henchmen begin to turn on him, they condemn him in predictable terms: 

Romania is and remains a European country. . . . You have begun to change the geography of the rural areas, but you cannot move Romania into Africa.

But Romania, is, indeed, in Africa--the Africa of European imagination, the Africa which justified slavery, which brims with rape, murder and cannibalism. All of Europe lives in that imagined, projected Africa. In a little over a decade, in the middle of the civilized continent, 14 million people were killed.  

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands:

No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal. People who starved were observed, often from watchtowers, by those who denied them food. People who were shot were seen through the sights of rifles at very close range, or held by two men while a third placed a pistol at the base of the skull. People who were asphyxiated were rounded up, put on trains, and then rushed into the gas chambers. They lost their possessions and then their clothes and then, if they were women, their hair. Each one of them died a different death, since each one of them had lived a different life.

Snyder quotes the poet Anna Ahkmotova addressing the legions of the dead--"I'd like to call you all by name."

I don't think there's anything original the blood of Europe that allows for this kind of human misery. And  I don't think there's anything in the blood that allows for Pont Neuf, either. Nations seem to require myth. Romania's governing history is filled with big men, autocrats and despots. But the European super-nation has long needed to believe itself above the world, above native America, above Asia, and particularly above Africa. The truth is more disconcerting.: The dark continent has never been South of the Sahara, but South of Minsk and East of Aachen in the jungles of the European soul. 

 

 

1

       

Why I'm Against 'Daddy Days'

It's worth checking out Liza Mundy's piece in the magazine on paternity leave and policy. It's a fairly enthusiastic endorsement, arguing that leave isn't just good for fathers but good all around. Here's Mundy on the successes of "Daddy Days" internationally:

Some countries began recalibrating, shortening leave for women and offering “neutral leave” that could be taken by either parent—but which became de facto maternity leave. So policy makers decided to make men an offer they would feel ashamed to refuse. Norway, Iceland, Germany, Finland, and several other countries offered a variety of incentives to nudge men to take leave. Some countries offered them more money, which helped men feel that they were financially supporting their families even when they were at home. Many also adopted a “use it or lose it” approach, granting each family a total amount of leave, a certain portion of which could be used only by fathers. The brilliance of “daddy days,” as this solution came to be known, is that, rather than feeling stigmatized for taking time off from their jobs, many men now feel stigmatized if they don’t. 

I confess to some bit of philosophical, and personal, distance from the piece rooted in my odd upbringing. My dad stayed home with me. He cooked. My mother was, for significant periods of my childhood, the main breadwinner. This does not mean I lived in a family without gender roles. I'd bet money that my mother still put down most of the hours, in terms of housework. But it did mean that my model of fatherhood was a little different. Moreover, because there were so few fathers in my neighborhood, this was one of the few models of fathering I regularly saw.

When my son was born, I stayed at home. And for most of our relationship, my wife made more money than me. (Can't make them Benjis writin' articles, yo.) I cook. I don't think any of this has much to do with being particularly enlightened nor progressive, nor feminist. As with my dad, I'm sure if you tallied the housework hours, I'd—until recently—lose. There's nothing to crow about in that "recently," either. My wife went back to school (a luxury). We can afford to bring people in to clean when we need to. Effectively, any change in housework hours is really a change in class ranks. 

The change has been significant, if unwieldy. Our first year in New York we lived off of roughly $30,000. I was 25 and contributed roughly $1,000 to that sum. Our son was one. I had no prospects as a writer. My wife had a definable skill, which was in demand. Cooking and taking care of the boy were about all I brought to the relationship. If I couldn't do that, why was I there? Taking care of a kid is what you're supposed to do when you're a father.

I felt a lot of things in those days—lonely, broke, sometimes frustrated. But what I didn't feel in my allegedly hyper-macho black community was stigmatized. And I don't think my dad felt that way either. If anything, I felt like I got a lot more credit than I deserved. I'd put the boy in the stroller, head down Flatbush, and a cheering section would damn near break out. The only people I felt stigmatized by were old black women, who were certain I was about to either direct the stroller into a cloud of influenza or the path of an oncoming train.

So rather than hear about the stigma men feel in terms of taking care of kids, I'd like for men to think more about the stigma that women feel when they're trying to build a career and a family. And then measure whatever angst they're feeling against the real systemic forces that devalue the labor of women. I think that's what's at the root of much of this: When some people do certain work we cheer. When others do it we yawn. I appreciated the hosannas when I was strolling down Flatbush, but I doubt the female electrician walking down the same street got the same treatment.

This is obviously not a case against parental leave, so much as its a beef with the idea of "paternity leave." I always worry when we have to couch our language so that people with power don't get their feelings hurt. So you feel stigmatized for a few years. We're all very sorry, and hope for the day when you don't. (Though with that ugly Baby Bjorn on, son, you should be stigmatized. Not hood at all, my dude.) But the fact that we even have to use the phrase "Daddy Days," that we must have branding for men, says a lot about whose work we value and whose we don't.

       

Jean Grae for Christmas

A Merry Christmas to the Horde and a special tip: Friend of this blog Jean Grae will be premiering her show "Life With Jeannie" on jeangrae.com tonight. Most of you know Jean for the lyrics (if you don't you should) but she's also has a wicked sense of humor. Somewhere in the vaults there is a tape of me interviewing her, and attempting to keep up with her on the jokes. Didn't work. Watch the promo below. (With friend of the blog, Wyatt Cenac.) Then watch the show tonight.