Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 42
July 6, 2013
The Atlantic In Paris--Dispatch #1
We hit the ground running with no time to look pretty or cool or like anything more than what we are--Les Américains vont à Paris. I was there but I wasn't alone. I was there with my family--my wife and my son. We have bumbled into everything we've ever gotten, smacked into it sideways and awkward and shameless. We are living in le 6e arrondissement, and we got here in our particular fashion. A year ago I did not know what an arrondissement was. Two years ago I could not pronounce the word. I can barely pronounce it now.
Privilege is like money--when you have none it is impossible to get and when you have more people offer it to you at every turn. Last week, in short order, I treated with Tim Pawlenty, met Annie Lennox, and greeted Elena Kagan on my way out of town. And then I flew to Chicago and watched everyday people lose their lives. What haunted was the barrier of tissue paper I felt between the cold world and me. I saw families living in disorder and squalor, living in fire-traps built by men who should be prosecuted by the city.
We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing--and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don't want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.
But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At twenty-five my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there--perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you. And I love both of these men of privilege--power is a fact, it is not morality. Losing is tragic, but it is not noble. How many freedom fighters turned despots in the possession of superior guns?
But the game is rigged. Let me tell you how I came here. I write for a major magazine and this is a privilege. I would say that it is earned, except that many people earn many things which they never receive. So I shall say that it was earned and I was lucky. I shall also say that my whole aim when I write is to blow a hole in that great forever, to make you feel the particular fire that burns in me. Someone who felt that fire wrote me. He lived in Paris. We struck up a friendship. Now he is in New York with his family, and I am here in Paris with mine. Privilege multiplied many times over.
And we are here now, and all around me is the incredible music of French. I walk into stores and bumble my way through. I take my family for le boeuf et frites and bumble through. I inhale a bottle of red wine with my wife, and stumble out. I walk into pharmacies with my son mishandling verbs, fumbling pronouns, wrecking whole grammars. And I care not. It is not for them. It is for me. I know how we got here. I do not know when we may be called back.
July 4, 2013
To Be Born on the Fourth of July
There's a lot to think about today. There is the revolutionary birth of our country. There is the apex of a a second revolution which birthed us anew. And in the world around us, there are still more revolutions in the offing. At such a time, it really is a pleasure for me to bring you this short essay by historian W. Caleb McDaniel derived from his book--The Problem Of Democracy In The Age Of Slavery. I think we are all familiar with Lincoln's words at Gettysburg. But McDaniel reminds us that there was a time in America when the possibility that democracy would "perish from the earth" was very real. This is the strength of McDaniel piece--the Confederate rebellion was not incidentally pro-slavery and anti-democratic (it was both) but anti-democratic because it was pro-slavery.
Ever since that Fourth of July, Garrison has been remembered primarily for his rejection of the Constitution, a document he once said was dripping with human blood. Look more closely however, and you'll find more complicated, even patriotic, Garrison.
In fact, before he started setting paper on fire, Garrison delivered a less well-known speech that praised the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution as models for the world. He even began the day by declaring that the first Fourth of July was "the greatest political event in the annals of time." It had created a charter of inalienable rights that, if enforced, would mean the "eternal dethronement" of all tyrants everywhere and the "redemption of the world."
In an 1824 speech he described the American Revolution as "the splendid, immaculate guide,---to all other nations, in their career after freedom." Around the same time, Garrison advised recent revolutionaries in South America to use the United States as their "model."
Garrison never really stopped believing that the United States should be a "guide" to other nations--but a proslavery Constitution compromised such guidance. As Garrison said at Framingham in 1854, "we have proved recreant to our own faith, false to our own standard, treacherous to the trust committed to our hands." The result was that "instead of helping to extend the blessings of freedom" abroad, Americans had hindered the spread of their democratic ideals.
Abraham Lincoln would not have applauded Garrison's actions, but he often echoed him. Because of slavery, Lincoln said, "our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust," leaving the world without an untarnished example of "spirit of '76." To prove the danger, Lincoln quoted from a recent London newspaper which expressed "apprehension" that slavery was "fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw" and thus undermining "the liberal party throughout the world."
The idea that American slavery was a threat to American democracy, and thus democracy the world-over, was not an exaggeration in 1854. The future of political liberalism was far from clear, and many in the "liberal party throughout the world" looked to the United States, flawed though it was, as one of the only bastions of democratic politics.
Nothing made democratization in the early America inevitable. It proceeded slowly, with great struggle, at different paces in different states. But by 1855, most states had either minimized or eliminated the property qualifications that previously kept even white adult men from voting. Universal white manhood suffrage had become the reality.
Pure democracy, this was not. Women, slaves, and most free blacks remained disfranchised. Immigrants and industrial wage-workers faced renewed challenges to their voting rights even as universal white manhood suffrage took hold. In particular locales and states, even legally enfranchised voters grew accustomed to serious attacks on their rights. But the extent of voting rights in the United States made the nation seem like a radical democratic experiment, especially in comparison to the political arrangements that prevailed elsewhere in the nineteenth century.
In South America and Haiti, for example, early nineteenth-century revolutions had created undemocratic governments that managed to beat back any calls for the radical expansion of the right to vote. Parts of Europe had inched towards more popular rule, but a few telling numbers show how little progress had been made. In the United Kingdom, which reformed its Parliament in 1832, only around twenty percent of the adult male population could vote. In 1830, the French elevated a new monarch to the throne who promised to be the "People's King." But even then, as historian Mike Rapport notes, "the electorate swelled to include only 170,000 of France's richest men: this was a mere 0.5 per cent of the French population, a sixth of those who enjoyed the vote in Britain after 1832." And even such small electorates did not yet exist to check the rule of monarchs in Europe's other great powers---Prussia, Austria, and Russia.
The most serious challenge to Europe's crowned heads and landed classes came in a series of revolutions that swept the continent in 1848. Democratic European revolutionaries like Mazzini in Italy and Lamartine in France capitalized on the unrest of that year by establishing new republics in Rome and Paris. The tide seemed, for a moment, to be turning towards popular government. But by 1854 Europe's conservative forces had regained their balance, and republican experiments in Italy and France had ended. By the time Garrison rose at Framingham and Lincoln stood at Peoria, the fate of democracy worldwide seemed more fragile than ever, and even more dependent on the survival of the "spirit of '76."
But after 1848 American slavery also seemed---more than ever---like a hindrance to the further spread of that spirit. Revolution and reform in Europe had not brought radical democracy to the continent, but they had, by 1848, abolished colonial slavery in the British and French Caribbean empires. Meanwhile, as the electorate grew in the United States, the American slave population had surged to nearly 4 million. These facts were a source of embarrassment for American abolitionists, of course, but increasingly they were embarrassments for overseas democrats as well, who often heard conservative aristocrats cite American racism and slavery as reasons enough to doubt that majority rule was a good idea.
Many transatlantic liberals expressed their apprehensions about this directly to American abolitionists. As I show in my new book, the "liberal party throughout the world" was not just an abstraction for Garrison; it was a network of antislavery sympathizers and democrats who communicated directly with abolitionists in the United States. In Illinois, Lincoln gathered his perceptions of overseas liberals from the newspapers; Garrison and his allies got theirs directly, and sometimes in person, from Europeans like Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and leading British Chartists who fought for universal manhood suffrage. By the time he burned the Constitution, many of these allies had warned Garrison explicitly that slavery in the United States was materially damaging their causes overseas.
In 1852, for example, the French abolitionist and republican Victor Schoelcher wrote in a Garrisonian publication that it was "an incalculable danger to the democratic idea, both now and hereafter, that the most democratic people existing should be holders of Slaves!" And in 1853, Garrison had shared with another abolitionist audience an address from "the Democrats of England to the Democrats of America" which declared that the abolition of slavery would give the United States "double moral power to reanimate the swooning liberties of Europe." Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary whom Garrison had met personally in 1847, also wrote to his friend that same summer that abolitionism in America and the struggle for the People in Europe were "one single cause."
A long history of such statements set the stage for Garrison's address at Framingham the following year, and before setting the Constitution ablaze, Garrison made sure his audience remembered the situation confronting their faraway friends. Garrison's speech first carefully reviewed the current, depressing state of "the freedom of continental Europe" since 1848. He noted "the perfidious and high-handed usurpation" of Louis Napoleon, who had by then dissolved the Second Republic and declared himself Emperor. And in Austria and Russia, Garrison continued, the people still suffered under "bloody despotism" and "iron autocracy." In the Europe of 1854, it seemed once again that "the reign of tyranny is as absolute as fate, and the extinction of the people complete."
Then, drawing on what he had heard from the "liberal party throughout the world," Garrison declared that Americans had contributed to this sorry situation by trumpeting their own example while brutalizing millions of human beings. The Declaration of Independence should have inspired the overthrow of tyrannies everywhere, Garrison affirmed. But "our flag is red with the blood of our slaves, and marked by their stripes," and those stains had prevented the nation's signature document from doing its work. After surveying European politics, he concluded that "this tells the story of American influence upon the liberties of the world." If Americans' democratic ideals suffered abroad, it was because of imperfections at home.
Here Garrison underlined that being a radical critic of the United States, even one who reproached the Constitution and the flag, did not require giving up on the hope of positive American influence on the world. Garrison did disavow the sort of exceptionalism which led many Americans to believe that the United States could never fall from grace. As early as 1829, he ridiculed the idea that "the republic is immortal; that its flight, like a strong angel's, has been perpetually upward, till it has soared above the impurities of earth ... and, having attained perfection, is forever out of the reach of circumstance and change." But Garrison did believe, like Lincoln, that this corruptible and imperfect republic could be improved and could, eventually, fulfill its high calling as an example to other nations of government of, by, and for the people.
To borrow a term used in slightly different ways by historians Timothy Mason Roberts and H. W. Brands, the views of Lincoln and Garrison represented variations on the idea of "American exemplarism," instead of the idea of "American exceptionalism." And while subtle, the difference between "exemplarism" and "exceptionalism" had significant implications. For one thing, it meant that Lincoln and Garrison refused to immunize their countrymen from critique. On the contrary, the nation's flaws as a model required thoughtful Americans to begin their improvement of the world at home, to prefer humility to hubris, to balance patriotism with cosmopolitan concern, and to focus less on making the world safe for democracy and more on making democracy safe for the world.
This was not, then or now, an easy position to maintain. Burning the Constitution without spurning the Declaration was a difficult balancing act, and it often left abolitionists struggling to make the same, complex assessments of the American experiment familiar to readers of this blog. If, as an earlier post here put it, "the challenge for someone trying to assess America, at this moment, is properly calibrating how far we've gone with how far we have to go," this was the challenge for Garrison and Lincoln in their moment, too. Peer past the fire and smoke of Garrison's most iconic gesture and it's possible to glimpse a figure whose dilemmas are still relevant today, on another sweltering and polarized Fourth of July.
Born On The Fourth Of July
There's a lot to think about today. There is the revolutionary birth of our country. There is the apex of a a second revolution which birthed us anew. And in the world around us, there are still more revolutions in the offing. At such a time, it really is a pleasure for me to bring you this short essay by historian W. Caleb McDaniel derived from his book--The Problem Of Democracy In The Age Of Slavery. I think we are all familiar with Lincoln's words at Gettysburg. But McDaniel reminds us that there was a time in America when the possibility that democracy would "perish from the earth" was very real. This is the strength of McDaniel piece--the Confederate rebellion was not incidentally pro-slavery and anti-democratic (it was both) but anti-democratic because it was pro-slavery.
Ever since that Fourth of July, Garrison has been remembered primarily for his rejection of the Constitution, a document he once said was dripping with human blood. Look more closely however, and you'll find more complicated, even patriotic, Garrison.
In fact, before he started setting paper on fire, Garrison delivered a less well-known speech that praised the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution as models for the world. He even began the day by declaring that the first Fourth of July was "the greatest political event in the annals of time." It had created a charter of inalienable rights that, if enforced, would mean the "eternal dethronement" of all tyrants everywhere and the "redemption of the world."
In an 1824 speech he described the American Revolution as "the splendid, immaculate guide,---to all other nations, in their career after freedom." Around the same time, Garrison advised recent revolutionaries in South America to use the United States as their "model."
Garrison never really stopped believing that the United States should be a "guide" to other nations--but a proslavery Constitution compromised such guidance. As Garrison said at Framingham in 1854, "we have proved recreant to our own faith, false to our own standard, treacherous to the trust committed to our hands." The result was that "instead of helping to extend the blessings of freedom" abroad, Americans had hindered the spread of their democratic ideals.
Abraham Lincoln would not have applauded Garrison's actions, but he often echoed him. Because of slavery, Lincoln said, "our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust," leaving the world without an untarnished example of "spirit of '76." To prove the danger, Lincoln quoted from a recent London newspaper which expressed "apprehension" that slavery was "fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw" and thus undermining "the liberal party throughout the world."
The idea that American slavery was a threat to American democracy, and thus democracy the world-over, was not an exaggeration in 1854. The future of political liberalism was far from clear, and many in the "liberal party throughout the world" looked to the United States, flawed though it was, as one of the only bastions of democratic politics.
Nothing made democratization in the early America inevitable. It proceeded slowly, with great struggle, at different paces in different states. But by 1855, most states had either minimized or eliminated the property qualifications that previously kept even white adult men from voting. Universal white manhood suffrage had become the reality.
Pure democracy, this was not. Women, slaves, and most free blacks remained disfranchised. Immigrants and industrial wage-workers faced renewed challenges to their voting rights even as universal white manhood suffrage took hold. In particular locales and states, even legally enfranchised voters grew accustomed to serious attacks on their rights. But the extent of voting rights in the United States made the nation seem like a radical democratic experiment, especially in comparison to the political arrangements that prevailed elsewhere in the nineteenth century.
In South America and Haiti, for example, early nineteenth-century revolutions had created undemocratic governments that managed to beat back any calls for the radical expansion of the right to vote. Parts of Europe had inched towards more popular rule, but a few telling numbers show how little progress had been made. In the United Kingdom, which reformed its Parliament in 1832, only around twenty percent of the adult male population could vote. In 1830, the French elevated a new monarch to the throne who promised to be the "People's King." But even then, as historian Mike Rapport notes, "the electorate swelled to include only 170,000 of France's richest men: this was a mere 0.5 per cent of the French population, a sixth of those who enjoyed the vote in Britain after 1832." And even such small electorates did not yet exist to check the rule of monarchs in Europe's other great powers---Prussia, Austria, and Russia.
The most serious challenge to Europe's crowned heads and landed classes came in a series of revolutions that swept the continent in 1848. Democratic European revolutionaries like Mazzini in Italy and Lamartine in France capitalized on the unrest of that year by establishing new republics in Rome and Paris. The tide seemed, for a moment, to be turning towards popular government. But by 1854 Europe's conservative forces had regained their balance, and republican experiments in Italy and France had ended. By the time Garrison rose at Framingham and Lincoln stood at Peoria, the fate of democracy worldwide seemed more fragile than ever, and even more dependent on the survival of the "spirit of '76."
But after 1848 American slavery also seemed---more than ever---like a hindrance to the further spread of that spirit. Revolution and reform in Europe had not brought radical democracy to the continent, but they had, by 1848, abolished colonial slavery in the British and French Caribbean empires. Meanwhile, as the electorate grew in the United States, the American slave population had surged to nearly 4 million. These facts were a source of embarrassment for American abolitionists, of course, but increasingly they were embarrassments for overseas democrats as well, who often heard conservative aristocrats cite American racism and slavery as reasons enough to doubt that majority rule was a good idea.
Many transatlantic liberals expressed their apprehensions about this directly to American abolitionists. As I show in my new book, the "liberal party throughout the world" was not just an abstraction for Garrison; it was a network of antislavery sympathizers and democrats who communicated directly with abolitionists in the United States. In Illinois, Lincoln gathered his perceptions of overseas liberals from the newspapers; Garrison and his allies got theirs directly, and sometimes in person, from Europeans like Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and leading British Chartists who fought for universal manhood suffrage. By the time he burned the Constitution, many of these allies had warned Garrison explicitly that slavery in the United States was materially damaging their causes overseas.
In 1852, for example, the French abolitionist and republican Victor Schoelcher wrote in a Garrisonian publication that it was "an incalculable danger to the democratic idea, both now and hereafter, that the most democratic people existing should be holders of Slaves!" And in 1853, Garrison had shared with another abolitionist audience an address from "the Democrats of England to the Democrats of America" which declared that the abolition of slavery would give the United States "double moral power to reanimate the swooning liberties of Europe." Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary whom Garrison had met personally in 1847, also wrote to his friend that same summer that abolitionism in America and the struggle for the People in Europe were "one single cause."
A long history of such statements set the stage for Garrison's address at Framingham the following year, and before setting the Constitution ablaze, Garrison made sure his audience remembered the situation confronting their faraway friends. Garrison's speech first carefully reviewed the current, depressing state of "the freedom of continental Europe" since 1848. He noted "the perfidious and high-handed usurpation" of Louis Napoleon, who had by then dissolved the Second Republic and declared himself Emperor. And in Austria and Russia, Garrison continued, the people still suffered under "bloody despotism" and "iron autocracy." In the Europe of 1854, it seemed once again that "the reign of tyranny is as absolute as fate, and the extinction of the people complete."
Then, drawing on what he had heard from the "liberal party throughout the world," Garrison declared that Americans had contributed to this sorry situation by trumpeting their own example while brutalizing millions of human beings. The Declaration of Independence should have inspired the overthrow of tyrannies everywhere, Garrison affirmed. But "our flag is red with the blood of our slaves, and marked by their stripes," and those stains had prevented the nation's signature document from doing its work. After surveying European politics, he concluded that "this tells the story of American influence upon the liberties of the world." If Americans' democratic ideals suffered abroad, it was because of imperfections at home.
Here Garrison underlined that being a radical critic of the United States, even one who reproached the Constitution and the flag, did not require giving up on the hope of positive American influence on the world. Garrison did disavow the sort of exceptionalism which led many Americans to believe that the United States could never fall from grace. As early as 1829, he ridiculed the idea that "the republic is immortal; that its flight, like a strong angel's, has been perpetually upward, till it has soared above the impurities of earth ... and, having attained perfection, is forever out of the reach of circumstance and change." But Garrison did believe, like Lincoln, that this corruptible and imperfect republic could be improved and could, eventually, fulfill its high calling as an example to other nations of government of, by, and for the people.
To borrow a term used in slightly different ways by historians Timothy Mason Roberts and H. W. Brands, the views of Lincoln and Garrison represented variations on the idea of "American exemplarism," instead of the idea of "American exceptionalism." And while subtle, the difference between "exemplarism" and "exceptionalism" had significant implications. For one thing, it meant that Lincoln and Garrison refused to immunize their countrymen from critique. On the contrary, the nation's flaws as a model required thoughtful Americans to begin their improvement of the world at home, to prefer humility to hubris, to balance patriotism with cosmopolitan concern, and to focus less on making the world safe for democracy and more on making democracy safe for the world.
This was not, then or now, an easy position to maintain. Burning the Constitution without spurning the Declaration was a difficult balancing act, and it often left abolitionists struggling to make the same, complex assessments of the American experiment familiar to readers of this blog. If, as an earlier post here put it, "the challenge for someone trying to assess America, at this moment, is properly calibrating how far we've gone with how far we have to go," this was the challenge for Garrison and Lincoln in their moment, too. Peer past the fire and smoke of Garrison's most iconic gesture and it's possible to glimpse a figure whose dilemmas are still relevant today, on another sweltering and polarized Fourth of July.
July 3, 2013
Horde-Sourcing Egypt
My sense is that you guys will want a place to talk about this. I'm watching the news and reading what I can as I get ready for a big trip. Here's a space for some conversation. I won't even attempt to pretend to be an expert. But I hope to learn from you guys--links, questions and informed opinions (emphasis on well-informed) are all welcome. Rants less so.
Here's a good place to start--J.J. Gould talking to Mona Eltahawy about the "false choice" Egyptians were given during the election. More--here's our liveblog from the Wire.
Horde-sourcing Egypt
My sense is that you guys wil want a place to talk about this. I'm watching the news and reading what I can as I get ready for a big trip. Here's a space for some conversation. I won't even attempt to pretend to be an expert. But I hope to learn from you guys--links, questions and informed opinions (emphasis on well-informed) are all welcome. Rants less so.
Here's a good place to start--J.J. Gould talking to Mona Eltahawy about the "false choice" Egyptians were given during the election. More--here's our liveblog from The Wire.
July 2, 2013
Traveling Man
I am bursting with things to tell you guys--things I've seen in the last week. I started out in at the Ideas Festival and then found myself in Chicago (in Bricktown today) rolling with an eviction team. In between this I'm reading Rousseau for the first time and having my mind blown.
Like dig this:
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.
How real is that? It's not just enough for me to subdue you, I must make your subjugation into something more than "I've got more glocks and Techs than you." Power has to be sanctified. Charlemagne must have the Pope. Subjugation must be official. Must be biblical. Must be scientific.
Here's something else:
Even if we assume this terrible right to kill everybody, I maintain that a slave made in war, or a conquered people, is under no obligation to a master, except to obey him as far as he is compelled to do so. By taking an equivalent for his life, the victor has not done him a favour; instead of killing him without profit, he has killed him usefully. So far then is he from acquiring over him any authority in addition to that of force, that the state of war continues to subsist between them: their mutual relation is the effect of it, and the usage of the right of war does not imply a treaty of peace. A convention has indeed been made; but this convention, so far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance.
So, from whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: "I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like."
This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my Civil War piece from a few years back. America's slave society was a kind of of "useful killing." To strip a child from their mother in 1845 and sell the child to Mississippi is not literal death. But that child is no longer in the mother's world, and will never be again. To the mother, imagining the child in Mississippi is as "real" as imagining the child in Limbo.
Also I've been reading the Bible:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.
39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.
40 He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.
41 He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward.
42 And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.
I sort of love that. These are the kind of words that could inspire you to a great principle--or a psychotic one.
I leave for France on Friday. Won't be back until the end of the summer. I feel like I've got that plug jacked into my head from The Matrix. Except nothing these days comes across with the clarity of, "I know Kung-Fu." It's all a scramble.
More soon.
July 1, 2013
Manhood Among the Ruins
This morning I rode through Englewood, on Chicago's South Side, with the Cook County Sheriff's department's eviction team. Most of the evictees were long gone. They'd left behind trash, mattresses, children's clothes, blaring radios, food and dirty linen. But we stopped at one house where an entire family was set to be sat out on the street.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's office is more progressive than most. (You can click here and get a running tally of the county's jail population and breakdown of its cost.) They'd brought a social worker with them, and the officers were generally polite. But an eviction is an eviction and the fact of the law making you homeless can't really be massaged.
The adult male in the family, who was at home, seemed to grasp this. He argued with the officers and bucked in a way that was very familiar to me. He was in the living room with his spouse and their two kids. He was being emasculated in front of all of them. He had no power. His family was about to be sat out and there was nothing he could do. The officers escorted him outside. They told him to leave the immediate premises or be arrested. Outside there were men hired to haul the family's stuff into the streets.
The social worker took the mother to the back along her two kids. She asked the mother if she had a place to go. She offered referrals for shelter. One of the children, a beautiful brown boy, maybe two years old, wandered back out. "Alvin and the Chipmunks" was on TV. A bowl of cereal sat on the table. The beautiful brown boy kept yelling "chipmunk!" over and over and laughing. I thought of my father who came from home from school at age six, and found his entire life in the street. He lived on a truck with his father for two weeks after that.
When we left, the beautiful brown boy was standing on the sidewalk next to his parents. His mother held the baby on her hip. She said nothing. One of the officers wished them good luck. The man yelled in response, "You talk about us like we dead. We ain't dead. We still a family. Good luck to you." He said it in such a way that he seemed to be trying to convince himself.
Rousseau contrasts moral slavery, "the impulsion of mere appetite," with moral liberty, "obedience to the law you have set yourself." For much of American history the franchise on this kind of "moral liberty" has belonged to men. But it has never belonged to black men as much as it has belonged to white men. And in this day and age, it is increasingly not the strict franchise of men at all. This is as it should be. The past was not better. Still our notions of what men should be remain.
When I saw the father today, I saw a man without the power to set his own laws. I've seen the same pose out in the streets where men yell and threaten violence. I used to think such a display fearsome, but people who must show their power through threatening violence inhabit a low rung. They are not unprivileged. Even the threatening connotes the idea of some natural right which has eluded them, sort of like the phrase "poor white trash."
I've observed this before about the housing riots in mid-20th century Chicago. Those with the most power segregated black people through a dignified "urban renewal." Those with the least were reduced to brick-throwing, arson and riot. A few weeks ago my wife asked me if I would ever engage in cat-calling. I told her that as I am now--respected writer with a son in private school, a wife studying at an Ivy, and latte at the ready--I would not. But had things gone some other way (as they easily could have) I can't say what I'd do. Street harassment is a kind of implied violence, a tool most embraced by those who lack the power to set laws, men who are in doubt of themselves. Real men objectify women with dignity and decorum.
The macho pose, the loud talking, the insistence on violence as resolution, the boastfulness, marks the formative portion of my life. The men who participated in this behavior were no more sexist then the men I know now. But they lacked power. And they came from generations of men who lacked power. And they came up in society that claimed such power as the essence of manhood. The father standing with his family barking, homeless, was attempting to restore some of that power, to assert his dominance in the face of all events. The beautiful brown boy was watching him.
Manhood Among The Ruins
This morning I rode through Englewood, on Chicago's South Side with the Cook County Sheriff's department's eviction team. Most of the evictees were long gone. They'd left behind trash, mattresses, children's clothes, blaring radios, food and dirty linen. But we stopped at one house where an entire family was set to be sat out on the street.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's office is more progressive than most. (You can click here and get a running tally of the county's jail population and breakdown of its cost.) They'd brought a social worker with them, and the officers were generally polite. But an eviction is an eviction and the fact of the law making you homeless can't really be massaged.
The adult male in the family, who was at home, seemed to grasp this. He argued with the officers and bucked in a way that was very familiar to me. He was in the living room with his spouse and their two kids. He was being emasculated in front of all of them. He had no power. His family was about to be sat out and there was nothing he could do. The officers escorted him outside. They told him to leave the immediate premises or be arrested. Outside there were men hired to haul the family's stuff into the streets.
The social worker took the mother to the back along her two kids. She asked the mother if she had a place to go. She offered referrals for shelter. One of the children, a beautiful brown boy, maybe two years old, wandered back out. "Alvin and the Chipmunks" was on TV. A bowl of cereal sat on the table. The beautiful brown boy kept yelling "chipmunk!" over and over and laughing. I thought of my father who came from home from school at age six, and found his entire life in the street. He lived on a truck with his father for two weeks after that.
When we left, the beautiful brown boy was standing on the sidewalk next to his parents. His mother held the baby on her hip. She said nothing. One of the officers wished them good luck. The man yelled in response, "You talk about us like we dead. We ain't dead. We still a family. Good luck to you." He said it in such a way that he seemed to be trying to convince himself.
Rousseau contrasts moral slavery, "the impulsion of mere appetite" with moral liberty, "obedience to the law you have set yourself." For much of American history the franchise on this kind of "moral liberty" has belonged to men. But it has never belonged to black men as much as it has belonged to white men. And in this day and age, it is increasingly not the strict franchise of men at all. This is as it should be. The past was not better. Still our notions of what men should be remain.
When I saw the father today, I saw a man without the power to set his own laws. I've seen the same pose out in the streets where men yell and threaten violence. I used to think such a display fearsome, but people who must show their power through threatening violence inhabit a low rung. They are not unprivileged. Even the threatening connotes the idea of some natural right which has eluded them, sort of like the phrase "poor white trash."
I've observed this before about the housing riots in mid-20th century Chicago. Those with the most power segregated black people through a dignified "urban renewal." Those with the least were reduced to brick-throwing, arson and riot. A few weeks ago my wife asked me if I would ever engage in cat-calling. I told her that as I am now--respected writer with a son in private school, a wife studying at an Ivy, and latte at the ready--I would not. But had things gone some other way (as they easily could have) I can't say what I'd do. Street harassment is a kind of implied violence, a tool most embraced by those who lack the power to set laws, men who are in doubt of themselves. Real men objectify women with dignity and decorum.
The macho pose, the loud talking, the insistence on violence as resolution, the boastfulness, marks the formative portion of my life. The men who participated in this behavior were, no more sexist then the men I know now. But they lacked power. And they came from generations of men who lacked power. And they came up in society that claimed such power as the essence of manhood. The father standing with his family barking, homeless, was attempting to restore some of that power, to assert his dominance in the face of all events. The beautiful brown boy was watching him.
June 26, 2013
The Fearsome Power of Family Equality
I've been traveling today and didn't get the news handed down from the Supremes until relatively late. I haven't read any of my fellow writers yet, but I did want to take a moment to say how important this moment is in the war against inequality. I was tempted to say "social inequality," but in America, there simply is no real way to separate the social, the political, and the economic. When the larger country decided to stand aside as South Carolina went about the business of disenfranchising half its citizenry, the weapon was political, but the implications were economic and social. With no access to the franchise, black people lacked the means to protect their wealth. The poverty of wealth which befell them then reinforced their status as social pariahs, and their status as social pariahs reified the racist justifications for their disenfranchisement and the inglorious cycle was complete.
It must never be forgotten that in America, the right to marry is the right to protect one's family. Certainly the pictures of same-sex couples embracing and hugging warm the heart and are a powerful weapon in country that prides itself on fairness. But, if I may be so bold as to heterosplain, there is a danger here cousin to the one we see in people who think segregation was a matter of Colored Only water fountains. I think the case at the center of the DOMA suit, explained here by The New York Times, is telling:
The case on the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, concerned two New York City women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who married in 2007 in Canada. Ms. Spyer died in 2009, and Ms. Windsor inherited her property. The 1996 law did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse, and she faced a tax bill of about $360,000 that a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would not have had to pay. Ms. Windsor sued, and last year the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, struck down the 1996 law.
The state repossessing a couple's wealth because it finds them icky is wholly unjust. It recalls a particularly horrible aspect of slavery -- the assault on the families of people deemed to be outside the law. There is a particular war here, which better people than me can speak to. But power is at the core of the long war which began sometime in the mid-17th century with the passage of the first slave codes. The prohibitions against same-sex marriage are not simply about withholding the right to be pretty in a dress or dashing in a tux (though I would deny no one their day). It is about ensuring that only certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of families, are able to amass power, and, with that power, influence over the direction of our society.
It is wrong to strip people of wealth because you are bigot. It is wrong to strip people of the right to name their caretakers because you are afraid. It is wrong to make war on people because you can not get over yourself. And though today we may say that we have advanced, through much of this country, the wrong continues unabated.
The Fearsome Power Of Family Equality
I've been traveling today and didn't get the news handed down from the Supremes until relatively late. I haven't read any of my fellow writers yet, but I did want to take a moment to say how important this moment is in the war against inequality. I was tempted to say "social inequality" but in America, there simply is no real way to separate the social, the political and the economic. When the larger country decided to stand aside as South Carolina went about the business of disenfranchising half its citizenry, the weapon was political, but the implications were economic and social. With no access to the franchise, black people lacked the means to protect their wealth. The poverty of wealth which befell them then reinforced their status as social pariahs, and their status as social pariahs reified the racist justifications for their disenfranchisement and the inglorious cycle was complete,
It must never be forgotten that in America, the right to marry is the right to protect one's family. Certainly the pictures of same-sex couples embracing and hugging warm the heart and are a powerful weapon in country that prides itself on fairness. But, if I may be so bold as to heterosplain, there is a danger here cousin to the one we see in people who think segregation was a matter of Colored Only water fountains. I think the case at the center of the DOMA suit, explained here by The Times is telling:
The case on the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, concerned two New York City women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who married in 2007 in Canada. Ms. Spyer died in 2009, and Ms. Windsor inherited her property. The 1996 law did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse, and she faced a tax bill of about $360,000 that a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would not have had to pay. Ms. Windsor sued, and last year the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, struck down the 1996 law.
The state repossessing a couple's wealth because it finds them icky, is wholly unjust. It recalls a particularly horrible aspect of slavery--the assault on the families of people deemed to be outside the law. There is a particular war here, which better people than me can speak to. But power is at the core of the long war which began sometime in the mid-17th century with the passage of the first slave codes. The prohibitions against same-sex marriage are not simply about witholding the right to be pretty in a dress or dashing in a tux (though I would deny no one their day.) It is about ensuring that only certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of families, are able to amass power, and with that power, influence over the direction of our society.
It is wrong to strip people of wealth because you are bigot. It is wrong to strip people of the right to name their caretakers because you are afraid. It is wrong to make war on people because you can not get over yourself. And though today we may say that we have advanced, through much of this country, the wrong continues unabated.
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