Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 160
September 2, 2020
Special Post: The Rock Springs Massacre and Working-Class White Supremacist Violence
[I originally wrote this piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, but it didn't end up working out there. So I wanted to share it here!]
On the morning of September 2nd, 1885, ten white miners accosted Chinese miners working at a Union Pacific coal mine near the town of Rock Springs, Wyoming. After beating the Chinese miners brutally, the white miners joined a larger mob forming in town and marched to the Knights of Labor meeting hall. After spending hours working themselves into a frenzy of xenophobia and racism, the armed white mob descended on the Rock Springs Chinatown and began firing upon any Chinese people they encountered. By the day’s end they had lynched, brutalized, and murdered at least 28 Chinese Americans, wounded countless more, and burned much of the neighborhood to the ground.
That moment of racial terrorism echoed and extended broader histories about which I’ve written in this column. Most obviously, Rock Springs constituted one particularly violent expression of the overarching sentiments that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act and era, a period of profoundly exclusionary narratives directed not just at this particular American community but at immigrant arrivals from around the world. The massacre also illustrates the breadth and potency of the late 19th and early 20th century lynching epidemic, a decades-long explosion of racial terrorism that targeted communities of color across the United States (while decimating African Americans with especial potency).
But as we commemorate its 135th anniversary, the Rock Springs massacre also helps us engage another, more complex and just as crucial issue in American history: the problem with viewing “the working class” as a unified or monolithic community. Too often throughout American history, racial and ethnic violence and white supremacist terrorism have been perpetrated against non-white Americans by cross-sections of white Americans, including working-class whites in central or prominent roles. I’m not suggesting in any way that members of the white working class are more likely to be white supremacist than other Americans, but rather that they are not less likely—that white supremacy can cut across other elements of identity, and that in far too many cases throughout our history it has done so, producing violent and destructive effects for Americans of color. Remembering those histories is a vital first step in considering critically the possibility of working-class solidarity and shared activism in the present.
As I traced in another recent Considering History column, the anti-Chinese movement itself was profoundly linked to the rise of a white working-class labor movement in late-19thcentury California. Those xenophobic sentiments were often known as Kearneyism, a recognition of the potent influence of the Irish American immigrant and labor activist Denis Kearney and his anti-Chinese speeches at San Francisco’s “Sandlot.” In 1877 Kearney helped found a new political party, the Workingmen’s Party of California, which was dedicated in equal measure to advancing white workers’ rights and anti-Chinese fears (as illustrated by its 1880 electoral slogan “The Chinese Must Go!”).
The Rock Springs massacre was likewise driven by that combination of white labor activism and anti-Chinese prejudice. The radical labor union the Knights of Labor had been a key national advocate for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and in 1883 the Knights organized a Rock Springs chapter, with the express goal of creating a “Whitemen’s Town” to create solidarity and support for white miners in opposition to Chinese laborers. After the initial attack on Chinese miners (which seems to have happened at least somewhat spontaneously), the growing white mob gathered at the Knights of Labor meeting hall, from which they emerged to perpetrate their far more organized and destructive violence against the Rock Springs Chinatown community.
This kind of alliance of white working-class activism with white supremacist prejudice and violence was in no way limited to anti-Chinese sentiments in American history. The July 13th-16th, 1863 New York City Draft Riots have often been characterized as a working-class revolt against the city’s elites; in this narrative Irish American New Yorkers, spurred by resentments with the March Enrollment (or Civil War Military Draft) Act which created a Union Army draft that wealthy and powerful Americans consistently bought their way out of, took out those frustrations through violence. Yet that orgy of violence and destruction overwhelmingly targeted African Americans and their allies: lynching more than 100 African Americans; burning down numerous homes and buildings in both the African American and abolitionist communities, including the Colored Orphan Asylum and Horace Greeley’s residence; and forcing thousands of African American residents to flee the city.
Extra-legal massacres like the Draft Riots and the Rock Springs massacre comprised one form of white supremacist working-class violence, and laws that favored the white working-class by discriminating against Americans of color comprised another. As the United States formally expanded into the new territory and then state of California in the 1850s, two such laws sought to protect Anglo American workers through white supremacist discrimination. The Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850targeted immigrant arrivals like the Chinese laborers at Rock Springs, imposing an outrageous $20 per month task for “foreign miners” (defined as any resident who was not a “free white person”). More blatantly racist still was the Anti-Vagrancy Act of 1855, also known as the Greaser Act because it linked the “vagrants, vagabonds, and dangerous and suspicious persons” it targeted to “all persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood.” These laws sought to transform a state defined by its genuinely multi-racial and –national community into a white supremacist haven for white workers and their allies—and make clear that this white supremacy came just as much from the most powerful forces in American government and society as from angry mobs.
These multi-layered 19th century intersections between the white working class and white supremacist discrimination and violence continued into the 20thcentury. From the January 1930 Watsonville (CA) riots that targeted a community of Filipino American migrant laborers; to the January 1945 arson in California’s Placer County that destroyed the farm of a Japanese American family who had just returned from an internment camp (and for which the four white arsonists were acquitted by an all-white jury sympathetic to their defense that “this is a white man’s country”); to the 1974-75 anti-busing riots in Boston, which in both demographics and racist underpinnings closely paralleled the Draft Riots. And this alliance remains very much with us in the 21st century, as when “economic anxiety” is used as a justification for why many white working-class Americans voted (alongside white Americans from every strata of society) for the most overtly white supremacist president since Andrew Johnson.
American history likewise features significant moments and histories of cross-cultural solidarity, inspiring stories of alliances between workers and communities—such as during the 1920 West Virginia coal wars, when local miners joined forces with newly arrived Italian immigrant workers and African Americans brought in to serve as strikebreakers to fight back against their corrupt bosses and the detectives they had brought in to violently suppress the labor activism. That history, captured in cultural works like John Sayles’ film Matewan (1987) and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s poetry collection Kettle Bottom (2004), exemplifies what is possible when Americans find common cause despite such potentially divisive social and political issues.
Those inspiring histories deserve a place in our collective memories as well. But until we recognize how fully white supremacism and racism can trump class and labor solidarity, and how frequently they have done so across American history, we will fail to grasp a defining factor in both American society as a whole and the social and political debates of our moment in particular. The September 1885 Rock Springs massacre offers one clear and tragic illustration of how the white working class can become part of those national histories of white supremacist violence.
PS. Here are a few pictures that might have accompanied the column:
September 2, 2020: Fall Semester Previews: Ungrading
[This week I start what is unquestionably the most distinct and strange semester of my 20+ year teaching career. So for my annual Fall previews, I’ll be discussing some of the ways that my classes will and won’t be different this time around. I’d love to share some of what you’ve got going on in a crowd-sourced Fall 2020 weekend post!]
On my tentative embrace of a radical pedagogical practice, and a question that remains.
As I wrote in my Spring 2020 reflection post, when that chaotic semester shifted to online-only after Spring Break, I made the early decision to do away with grades for the remaining assignments in all of my classes. To be clear, I didn’t do so as part of any overarching pedagogical plan, and indeed quite the opposite: as I said throughout those challenging weeks (and in that reflection post), I saw the second half of the Spring 2020 semester not as online teaching at all, but rather as triage and care, as a vital moment to express communal support and solidarity for and with my students (while still hoping to get across at least a bit of the content and skills that were most central to each class). While a few students certainly did less work than they might have if the assignments were graded per usual (likely for very good reasons that were precisely the point of my eliminating grades, of course), the vast majority of my students rose to the occasion as I knew they would, producing work that was not only high-quality, but that to my mind was able to be more individual and creative without the fears of doing it “correctly” that grades inevitably add to the mix.
That last point, the opportunities for distinct and generally richer and more meaningful student work if grades are taken out of the occasion, is a main argument behind the radical pedagogical practice known as “ungrading.” Once I realized that I had (without any initial intention) started to move in the direction of that practice, I asked online if folks had resources on it they could share, and as usual y’all delivered; here are just a few of the many great ungrading articles, conversations, and textsthat were sent my way. I also learned that one of our most talented Fitchburg State English Studies alums, Ian Wilkins, has been using ungrading in his classrooms for years. I had ambitious plans to investigate these sources and resources at length this summer, and as a result to become much more intentional and thoughtful in my use of ungrading pedagogies this fall; like many Summer 2020 best-laid plans, I’m sure, those did not come to fruition, and so I’d say that my broader ungrading ideas remain at an early and too-unformed stage, although I do hope to continue de-emphasizing grades in various ways in my Fall classes.
As I work to do so, I do have one main question about the practice—I’m sure it’s addressed in those sources, but I’ll also note it here, both to make clear my ongoing thinking and in case any of y’all have ideas or perspectives to share (including by email if that works better). What I’m wondering about is how to keep student focus on a class’s objectives if that class moves toward ungrading while all their other classes continued to feature regular graded work in a way that demands their attention and effort more consistently. Again, my Spring 2020 students absolutely rose to the occasion when it came to my ungraded culminating work, but that semester was a unique one in which many if not most of my colleagues likewise adjusted their emphases; whereas I’m quite sure that most classes in Fall 2020 will be graded in more conventional ways. So it seems to me to be only human nature that if my class features de-emphasized grades, and all their other classes feature regular ones, students will tend to prioritize the graded work, making it more difficult for us to focus on the content and skills, conversations and objectives, in my classes. Again, I’ll keep looking into ungrading resources myself to find answers to such questions, but I’d love any thoughts of yours on them or any other aspects of the practice as well. Thanks!
Next Fall preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What are you teaching or working on this Fall? Let me know for the weekend post!
September 1, 2020
September 1, 2020: Fall Semester Previews: Open-Access Texts
[This week I start what is unquestionably the most distinct and strange semester of my 20+ year teaching career. So for my annual Fall previews, I’ll be discussing some of the ways that my classes will and won’t be different this time around. I’d love to share some of what you’ve got going on in a crowd-sourced Fall 2020 weekend post!]
On an impressive specific resource, and a broader question moving forward.
I’ve written in at least a couple prior semester preview posts about my ongoing goal of making my classes more digital, and one core element of that project has been finding more digital/online resources to use as readings and texts in those classes. I’ve had various reasons for wanting to do so, including of course wanting to connect to and amplify (and also help make more intentional and analytical) my students’ increasing digital literacy. But there’s no doubt that my most explicit reason has been an economic one—as the costs of college have risen (particularly in terms of fees, which unfortunately have risen quite a bit in recent years to offset our consistently shrinking state endowments), and as students and their families have dealt with the aftermaths of the 2008 recession as well as all the ongoing crises since, I’ve found it harder and harder to justify asking students to purchase texts if and when there are available digital, online, and free options.
That economic concern became even more prominent as I began to think about this Fall 2020 semester, and I decided at an early point that I would require no hard-copy, purchased texts for any of my five undergraduate courses. Fortunately, Fitchburg State has recognized the same realities, and has through the university library offered faculty mini-grants to support the adoption and use of open-access texts and materials. I was fortunate enough to receive one of those mini-grants, and am using it for my American Literature I survey class, where I have adopted the open-access anthology The American Yawp. That anthology’s Primary Source Reader in particular pulls together numerous readings and materials that I might have been able to find eventually online, but that here are collected in one convenient spot, with clear introductions and connections to one another that exemplify the best of what anthologies can offer (but without the hefty price tag that anthologies too often come with). I’m excited to share Yawp with my students, not only to help with this class but also to give them a sense of what’s available and possible in this burgeoning world of open-access materials.
In this especially fraught moment, I have no qualms about using such materials for all of my classes, and hopefully relieving at least one source of anxiety for my students. But doing so does beg a broader question: is there a compelling argument for ever going back, for asking students to purchase texts of any kinds for any classes? Certainly there are individual classes or instances where I really want us to engage a particular text that is not available online: for example my second-favorite novel, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, which I teach in at least a couple of my recurring courses. That’s an individual reason to ask students to purchase a specific text here or there, but it doesn’t necessarily answer the overarching question about my practices across the board. And on that one I’ll admit being torn: my central focus on student needs makes me think I should minimize purchases as much as possible; but I recognize that the more I do so, the more I might provide nails in the coffin of the scholarly publishing industry, which despite its many flaws has been a vital element of my own teaching and writing career and one I would hate to see disappear. I don’t have any unifying answers here, and would love to hear how you all are navigating these questions and concerns, in Fall 2020 and overall.
Next Fall preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What are you teaching or working on this Fall? Let me know for the weekend post!
August 31, 2020
August 31, 2020: Fall Semester Previews: A Policy of Care
[This week I start what is unquestionably the most distinct and strange semester of my 20+ year teaching career. So for my annual Fall previews, I’ll be discussing some of the ways that my classes will and won’t be different this time around. I’d love to share some of what you’ve got going on in a crowd-sourced Fall 2020 weekend post!]
On the most important paragraph I’ve ever written in a syllabus.
I’ve always tried to make clear to students that my most consistent policy, the one that both underlies and takes precedence over any and all other class policies, is for them to keep me updated on things so I can be fair and responsive to what’s going on with them and in their (very busy and complicated) lives. But while I have always meant that and have tried to honor it on each and every occasion where it applied, my syllabi have nonetheless featured other policies as well, basic class expectations and rules for issues like attendance, late papers, and the like. I’ve gone back and forth over my 15 years at Fitchburg State and 20+ of teaching overall on whether to keep including policies for each of those issues, but have tended to feel that they are necessary both to make my classes fair for all students and to help students maximize their experience and success in the class.
Not for Fall 2020, though. For all five of this semester’s undergrad course syllabi I replaced my usual Policies spiel with this short and sweet paragraph: “This is normally the place where I write about attendance and late paper policies and the like. I’m not going to do that this semester, though, because I really only have two such policies: be safe and take care of yourselves first and foremost; and keep me updated on everything so I can help make the class and semester as successful and productive for you.” That new paragraph builds on my aforementioned underlying policy of open communication and flexibility, but takes it a significant step further: doing away with any set policies or rules for things like attendance and late papers, making each and every case by default one where the student and I will figure out together what makes sense and works, what is necessary and helpful, what will help them not just stay safe and healthy this semester (although of course) but also have the most meaningful experience possible.
Adding that explicit statement into my syllabi has made me think more about expressing and communicating such a policy of care even in less overtly fraught times. Of course caring about students has always been my #1 priority, as I hope that underlying policy has made clear and as is the baseline of my student-centered pedagogy. But I don’t know whether that priority, that emphasis on care, has been quite present enough—and certainly it has not been quite clear enough—in my syllabi. Perhaps that’s not an issue for in-person classes, where I can start communicating it clearly from the first day on; I now worry that it has been somewhat of an issue for online classes, and will work to address that in particular moving forward. But even for in-person classes, many students look at syllabi before a semester starts, they sit with them for at least a few minutes before the first class begins, and of course they return to them (we hope, anyway!) across the semester, often at times when we are not together as a class. So working to express and communicate that policy of care more fully and thoughtfully in my syllabi will be I believe a meaningful goal in every type of class, and one this most unusual semester has helped me identify.
Next Fall preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What are you teaching or working on this Fall? Let me know for the weekend post!
August 29, 2020
August 29-30, 2020: August 2020 Recap
[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]
August 3: Military Massacres: Wounded Knee: For the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, a massacre series starts with three attempts to raise awareness of a horrific event.
August 4: Military Massacres: The Pullman Strike: The series continues with how 1890s anti-labor violence parallels Wounded Knee, and a key difference.
August 5: Military Massacres: Balangiga: Why it matters how we refer to a 1901 event, and how to get beyond that question in any case.
August 6: Military Massacres: Hiroshima: On that 75th anniversary, an unanswerable question and a vital reframing.
August 7: Military Massacres: My Lai: The series concludes with three complex, flawed, and powerful engagements with one of our more recent military massacres.
August 8: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011: The annual birthday series of blog highlights!
August 9: Birthday Bests: 2011-2012
August 10: Birthday Bests: 2012-2013
August 11: Birthday Bests: 2013-2014
August 12: Birthday Bests: 2014-2015
August 13: Birthday Bests: 2015-2016
August 14: Birthday Bests: 2016-2017
August 15: Birthday Bests: 2017-2018
August 16: Birthday Bests: 2018-2019
August 17: Birthday Bests: 2019-2020: And the newest addition to the series, 43 favorite posts from the past (10th!) year on the blog.
August 18: Virginia Histories: Bacon’s Rebellion: My annual Cville/Virginia series begins with myths and realities of a famous 17th century uprising.
August 19: Virginia Histories: Mr. Jefferson’s University: The series continues with the instructive early struggles of an educational pioneer.
August 20: Virginia Histories: Loving v. Virginia: Two under-remembered contexts for the ground-breaking Supreme Court decision and what they add to the conversation.
August 21: Virginia Histories: The Virginia Tech Shooting: The series concludes with two ways in which AmericanStudies can provide contexts for a devastating recent tragedy.
August 22-23: Charlottesville in 2020: A special weekend post on where my hometown stands in 2020, from statue debates to inspiring activists.
August 24: Katrina at 15: Nature or Nurture?: For Katrina’s 15th anniversary, a series kicks off with two distinct ways to frame a disaster, and what our current crisis helps us understand.
August 25: Katrina at 15: The Aftermaths: The series continues with what we still don’t talk about enough from it comes to Katrina’s aftermaths, and what we really don’t talk about at all.
August 26: Katrina at 15: Treme: Five telling characters from my favorite TV show, as the series rolls on.
August 27: Katrina at 15: Three Hurricanes: How three other historic storms help us contextualize and understand Katrina.
August 28: Katrina at 15: New Orleans and America: The series concludes on a optimistic note, why I’d call New Orleans the most American of our major cities.
Fall preview series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!
August 28, 2020
August 28, 2020: Katrina at 15: New Orleans and America
[I can’t quite believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic and telling 21st century story.]On why I’d call New Orleans the most American of our major cities.I’ve written a good bit about New Orleans in this space: from this early city-centric post inspired by Mardi Gras and my first visit to the city; to this one from the same blog era on one of my favorite American novels and a book that’s as much about New Orleans as it is about its huge, multi-generational cast of characters, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1881). Those posts illustrate a few of the many reasons why I believe New Orleans is so distinctly and powerfully American, as I hope have this week’s posts in their own ways, despite the specific focus on Katrina. And indeed, the responses to and aftermaths of that horrific storm likewise reveal some of the worst as well as the best of American history, society, culture, and art; on that final note, I should highlight one more time a text I could definitely have featured in the week’s series and one of my favorite 21st century American novels, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011). To say much more eloquently than I ever could a bit more about why I’d define New Orleans as so deeply American, here’s one of the central characters from Treme that I didn’t get to analyze in Wednesday’s post, Steve Zahn’s DJ Davis McAlary. As a radio DJ, and a highly opinionated person to boot, Davis is often ranting, much of it about the best and worst of his beloved New Orleans (and all of it a combination of communal and self-aggrandizing, convincing and frustrating). But my favorite Davis monologue, in the opening scene of the Season 4 episode “Dippermouth Blues,” is far quieter and more thoughtful. Coming out of playing a hugely cross-cultural song, Davis calls it, “A stellar example of McAlary’s theory of creolization. Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, the Great American Songbook meet African American musical genius. And that’s what America’s all about…‘Basin Street, is the street, where all the dark and light folks meet.’ That’s how culture gets made in this country. That’s how we do. We’re a Creole nation, whether you like it or not. And in three weeks, America inaugurates its first Creole president. Get used to it.”Those of us who loved that aspect of Obama and even called him “the first American president” as a result didn’t have to “get used to” anything, of course. And as for those whom Davis is addressing more directly in those closing lines, well to say that they seem not to have gotten used to it is to significantly understate the case (which of course David Simon and his co-creators knew all too well, as that final-season episode of Treme may have been set around New Year’s 2008 but was made and aired in late 2013). Indeed, when I’ve been asked by audiences during my book talks for We the People about why we’ve seen such an upsurge in exclusionary rhetoric and violence over the last decade, I’ve frequently argued that backlash to Obama—as a representation of so many perceived national “changes”—has been a central cause. Which is to say, it’s not just that we need to “get over” the reality of our creolized history, culture, and identity—first the we who love those elements need to do a better job making the case for them, both as valuable and as foundationally American. There’s no place and no community through which we can do so more potently than New Orleans. August Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
August 27, 2020
August 27, 2020: Katrina at 15: Three Hurricanes
[I can’t quite believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic and telling 21st century story.]On how three other historic storms help further contextualize Katrina.1) Hurricane Betsy (1965): Betsy is the historical hurricane most frequently referenced as a context for Katrina, and for good reasons: one of the deadliest tropical storms in US history, Betsy caused more than 150,000 New Orleans homes to flood, among many other effects that led to more than $1 billion in damages and the nickname “Billion Dollar Betsy”; and in response the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers created a new Hurricane Protection Program which built new levees in the city. That those levees failed so fully and spectacularly in August 2005 only adds one more layer of context, as well as dramatic and tragic irony, to this comparison. 2) Hurricane Sandy (2012): There have been a few particularly bad hurricanes since Katrina (and the predictions are for a bad hurricane season this year; I’m drafting this in late May and I hope I won’t have to update it before it goes live), but only one to my knowledge has been called a “superstorm,” and that was Sandy. While the destruction caused by Sandy was certainly comparable to (and more widespread than) that of Katrina, however, the federal and governmental responses were far, far quicker and stronger. There are various possible factors in that difference, including of course having learned from Katrina’s many failures. But it’s difficult not to see the racial and economic demographics of the affected communities as having contributed to these contrasts as well. 3) Galveston Hurricane of 1900: Betsy and Sandy are the two hurricanes I’ve seen most frequently compared to Katrina, and for all those good reasons. But neither of them, nor Katrina, is known as “the deadliest natural disaster in United States history”; that dubious honor goes to the Great Galveston hurricane or the Great Storm of 1900. Given that the storm landed in an era when there was no way of capturing video footage (and when even photography was a far more laborious and infrequent practice), it’s understandable that we don’t think or talk as much about this hurricane, either in relationship to Katrina or on its own terms. But of course many of the topics I cover in this space are in one way or another distant, and if anything that makes it more important to engage them and consider both their own stories and their potential connections to us. To cite two such compelling, American stories about this storm (and leave the connections for further thought): the job of loading the storm’s dead onto a barge to be dumped at sea was apparently given to 50 African American menrecruited at gunpoint; and the city’s drastic population loss after the storm was countered by the Galveston Movement, a campaign to bring Jewish immigrants from East Coast communities to this Texas city. Last KatrinaStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
August 26, 2020
August 26, 2020: Katrina at 15: Treme
[I can’t quite believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic and telling 21st century story.]On five characters through which the wonderful HBO show charts Katrina’s stories. [NB. The hyperlinked clips are just relatively random ones from YouTube, not summations of everything about these deeply human and multi-layered characters.][Also NB. Here be SPOILERS, so if you haven’t watched this great show yet, hie thee hence!]1) Creighton Bernette: I wrote about John Goodman’s Creighton and his righteous rants about New Orleans and Katrina in Monday’s post, and those rants are what made Creighton famous, both on the show and in the responses to the show. But while those rants were indeed righteous, they were also fueled by Creighton’s inability to move on, his permanent state of mourning for what had happened to his adopted, beloved city. In retrospect, everything in this character (and in many ways in the show’s first season) built inevitably to his suicide at the end of that season’s penultimate episode, as a statement about Katrina’s all too permanent effects for New Orleans and many of its residents. 2) LaDonna Batiste-Williams: Khandi Alexander’s fiery bar owner LaDonna’s first season arc embodies a different, even more tragic lingering effect of Katrina: all those families who literally lost loved ones in the storm and its aftermaths, and who never knew (or did not learn for months if not years) what had happened to them. But while the story of LaDonna’s brother Daymo wraps up by the end of season one, LaDonna’s character endures, experiencing another decidedly different tragedy of her own while fighting to maintain a foothold in a city that seems intent on pushing her and her family out. New Orleans is still trying even in the series finale, but against LaDonna I don’t like even an entire city’s odds.3) Janette Desautel: Kim Dickens’ chef and restauranteur Janette reflects a third, slower burning kind of post-Katrina tragedy—someone who tries her hardest to stay but finds the storm’s lingering effects too much for her, and more exactly for her career and passion. Like her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Steve Zahn’s DJ Davis McAlary, New Orleans post-Katrina seems as if it might be more destructive than constructive for Janette, a passionate but unsustainable relationship. But in truth, even what would seem to be a significant relationship upgrade (to the New York City culinary world) can’t ultimately compete, and the show’s end finds Janette back in New Orleans and back with Davis—and despite ourselves we fully understand and support her in those choices.4) Albert Lambreaux: My favorite character is Clarke Peters’ Big Chief Albert, a handyman whose true talent and passion is in the world of Mardi Gras Indians. Albert’s return to New Orleans and his decimated house (and to masking Indian) seem for much of his arc like the acts of sheer stubbornness that his children (especially Rob Brown’s jazz trumpeter Delmond) believe them to be. But the traditions and legacies that Albert embodies and carries on are too potent to be broken and, it turns out, too charismatic to be resisted, even by his frequently resisting son. Like New Orleans post-Katrina, Albert may be fighting a losing battle—but he makes the fight so irresistibly appealing that we’re with him every step of the way. 5) Antoine Batiste: And then there’s the first character we meet, Wendell Pierce’s jazz trombonist Antoine. While Antoine is certainly affected by Katrina (particularly in the loss of his house), in some ways he is the character who seems least by either the storm or the events of the show’s multi-year arc, who feels the closest in the final episode to where he was in the opening one (down to his continued disagreements with cab drivers). But Antoine’s difficulties finding steady gigs (which might be an effect of Katrina, but might be the challenge of a city jam-packed with jazz musicians) push him into a new profession, that of middle school music teacher, and through that work Antoine becomes connected to the most crucial question of all when it comes to post-Katrina New Orleans: what it will mean for the city’s young people, and especially young people of color. That remains a painfully uncertain question at the show’s conclusion, but with Antoine at the front of the classroom I feel better about the answer to be sure. Next KatrinaStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
August 25, 2020
August 25, 2020: Katrina at 15: The Aftermaths
[I can’t quite believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic and telling 21st century story.]On what we still don’t talk about enough when it comes to the aftermaths of Katrina, and what we don’t really talk about at all.Not too long after Katrina, I took part in a panel on Richard Wright at the American Literature Association conference (in Boston in May 2007). Also on that panel was Jason Stupp, then a graduate student at UConn (he’s now a faculty member at Alfred State College in the SUNY system), who presented a remarkable paper linking Wright’s Native Son and particularly the stereotypical constructions of Bigger Thomas by other characters and communities in that novel to a striking post-Katrina text: the divergent captions for two nearly identical Associated Press images of New Orleans residents wading through flood waters with supplies. The caption for an image of two white residents described them as “finding bread and soda from a local grocery store,” while the one for an image of a black resident said that he had been “looting a grocery store.” As the hyperlinked New York Times story illustrates, that discriminatory difference became for a time national news (with the photographer disputing any racial side to the captions, but I remain unconvinced), helping to contextualize other post-Katrina moments like Kanye West’s famous commentary (during a celebrity benefit effect for hurricane relief) that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” So we’ve collectively engaged at least a bit with the fundamental, frustrating roles—both symbolic and all too real—that race played in the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina. But I’m still not sure we’ve done so enough, and my argument for that position can be boiled down to two words: Danziger Bridge. On September 4th, 2005, six days after Katrina’s landfall, at least five New Orleans police officers (three of them white, two of them African American) shot at a number of unarmed civilians on that bridge, killing two (one a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, Ronald Madison, who was shot in the back; the other 17-year-old James Brissette) and wounding four more, all of them African American. The cops then repeatedly and collectively lied about what had happened in an attempt to cover up the murders. The shooting and its many legal follow ups have received some journalistic and public attention over the years, but not nearly as much as is warranted by such an outrageous story, one that echoes the numerous police shootings of unarmed African Americans but amplifies it by a factor of at least six. We can debate terminology or semantics, but to my mind this was unquestionably a racist massacre (and no, I don’t think it matters that a couple of the cops were black—there’s a reason why “blue lives matter” is presented as an entirely distinct frame from “black lives matter,” after all).So we still need to talk more about the role that race played in the horrific effects and aftermaths of Katrina. But there’s another, not unrelated but also distinct issue that if anything we’ve talked about even less: the controversial use of the U.S. military in an American city. That hyperlinked article makes the case that the federal government did not deploy the military to New Orleans (due to the Posse Comitatus Act), which may be technically correct; but the National Guard were deployed for months (as, that article notes, were private security forces employed by Blackwater), with an explicit goal of “fighting the insurgency in the city” (a direct quote from the Guard, per that hyperlinked Mother Jones article once more). Fighting an insurgency! In an American city! And one devastated by a still unfolding natural and man-made disaster! Sorry for all the exclamation points, but in this case I believe they are quite appropriate and necessary. In the 15 years since Katrina, the Guard’s and government’s roles in the city have been consistently framed as disaster relief, and obviously that was part of what they did; but it’s not all that they did, and indeed not how they framed their own mission at the time. That seems like a pretty significant American story, and one we most definitely need to talk about more.Next KatrinaStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
August 24, 2020
August 24, 2020: Katrina at 15: Nature or Nurture?
[I can’t quite believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic and telling 21st century story.]On two distinct ways to frame a disaster, and what our current crisis helps us understand.In the 15 years since Hurricane Katrina hit, meteorologists and other scientists have frequently used it as an example of a “perfect storm” (or at least the hurricane version of that concept, as opposed to the one that most fully entered our lexicon through the Gloucester-set book and film of the same name). A tropical depression meeting a tropical wave, and moving through warm water with no wind shear to help slow down or dissipate the building storm; intensity that didn’t seem to lessen much when the storm moved over land (which apparently is normally what happens); a particularly warm Gulf Loop current that sped up Katrina’s wind speeds by more than half (from 75 to 110 mph); and continued intensifications in the days leading up to the storm’s Louisiana landfall. From what I understand, many of those individual ingredients are present in any number of hurricanes or tropical storms each season that don’t turn out to be anything out of the ordinary (hence the repeated line in Treme’s depiction of the approaching storm, about which more later in the week, that the storm will veer off before it gets to New Orleans “as they always do”). But this time, they all came together and created what does indeed seem to be a perfect hurricane, in the worst sense of that phrase.So that’s the more “natural” explanation for Katrina’s unprecedented levels of destruction and devastation, and to this non-scientist at least it makes sense. But there’s also an equally compelling argument for “nurture”—that it was decades of neglect and corruption and mismanagement and malfeasance, coupled with a truly horrific governmental response in August and September 2005 (“Heckuva job, Brownie”), which made Katrina’s effects on New Orleans and its vicinity so unusually extreme and awful. This is why, to cite another Treme line and perspective to which I’ll return in a couple days, John Goodman’s wonderful character Creighton Bernette insists on calling Katrina a “man-made disaster” (rather than the natural variety); or, as Bernette puts it so evocatively in that last hyperlinked clip (which you should really watch in its entirety, and especially through the end), while the storm itself was of course natural, “a hurricane, plain and simple, the flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe, a federal fuck-up of epic proportions, and decades in the making.” Obviously these two narratives can (and I would argue do) coexist in the overarching story of Katrina, but there is nonetheless a matter of emphasis, at least when it comes to the crucial question of why the storm hit New Orleans so potently. While the analogy is far from an exact one, I can’t help but think, here in 2020, about the clarity that our own currently unfolding disaster might provide. To put it bluntly: COVID-19 seems like a perfect storm of disease, in its originality, in how potently contagious and aggressive and destructive it is, even in its ability to evolve right before our eyes as we try to get a handle on it; but to my mind none of those aspects explain why the United States has been hit so horrifically hard (as I draft this in late May we are nearing 100,000 deaths in three months or so) while other nations have done so much better (most famously, South Korea, which saw its first diagnosed case on the same day as the US but remains well under 1000 deaths here in late May). Which is to say: natural disasters are gonna happen, all the more frequently as climate change continues to change our world in all the ways it has and will; but what those disasters do to us, and how we respond, are very open questions, and ones for which we now have all too clear examples of the worst versions, in 2005 and 2020 alike. Next KatrinaStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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