Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 209

January 31, 2019: Great (Sports) Debates: Soccer in America?

[Sunday, February 3rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday. For this year’s Super Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your opinion into the mix in comments, please!]On why soccer hasn’t quite taken off in the U.S., and why that question might be the problem.As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I was (I believe) part of the first generation to play youth soccer en masse. I don’t know exactly what percentage of us played soccer (I know I could try to look it up, but I’m writing this post on Thanksgiving morning and am feeling a bit too lazy to do so), but it felt like the majority of us at least (although I’m sure there were race and class factors, since registration wasn’t cheap and personal transportation to practices and games was a necessity and so on). By the time my sister began playing five or so years later, the sport seemed even more ubiquitous. Flash forward thirty years later, and it feels like literally every kid my preteen sons’ age (or again, at least every one in certain towns and communities) is out there every Saturday all fall and spring chasing that checkered ball (and a sizeable number of their parents are out there trying to herd those cats as volunteer coaches—I see you, my brothers and sisters in arms, or legs!). When I think about how many pictures I see on social media of kids playing soccer, posted by friends from all walks of life, around the country, it feels like the sport has truly become one of the most shared experiences of American childhood.And yet, despite those four decades of building momentum, by most accounts soccer still hasn’t broken into the upper echelon of American professional sports. I’ve seen all sorts of explanations over the years for that gap, from xenophobic and silly ones about the sport’s “foreign” flavor (more on that nonsense in a second) to practical and understandable ones about how low-scoring the games (warning, that’s a National Review article, just FYI) generally are, among many many others. But to my mind, there’s a simpler explanation for at least one factor in why men’s soccer hasn’t become a dominant professional sport in America (women’s soccer most definitely has, at least at the national team level): our greatest male athletes have too many other options. In many nations, if you’re a superstar or even just talented youth athlete, soccer is the most likely and logical fit, and the best path to potential professional sports stardom (there’s a reason why Neymar joined a professional team’s system at age 11!). But here in the U.S., such young prodigies have their pick of a number of sports paths, and who can really imagine high school phenoms and freaks of athletic nature like LeBron or Zion picking soccer over basketball (to name one exemplary trend)?So despite all those youth soccer players, the U.S. hasn’t produced a ton of great home-grown professional talents, at least not yet. But honestly, while players are one measure of a sport’s popularity, fans are another—and on that front, to say that soccer isn’t a major sport in the U.S. is to replicate many of the xenophobic narratives I mentioned. For many American communities, especially multi-cultural and immigrant ones, soccer is most definitely the spectator sport of choice; just check out fans of the Mexican national team celebrating their recent performance in the World Cup at a rally in Los Angeles this past June. Hispanic Americans are far from the only American community to exemplify this soccer craze, but they certainly are a prominent one—and any narrative of soccer as less popular nationally that doesn’t acknowledge the sport’s centrality to this sizeable and growing American community is fundamentally myopic and discriminatory. Soccer might not be at the level of American football yet (and to be clear, neither are hockey or baseball any more, and probably not basketball either although it’s closer), but its popularity is only growing, and is one of the most telling 21stcentury American trends.Last debate tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other great debates you’d highlight?

January 30, 2019: Great (Sports) Debates: Fighting in Hockey?

[Sunday, February 3rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday. For this year’s Super Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your opinion into the mix in comments, please!]On the way not to argue for a sport’s violent tradition, and a possible way to do so.First, in the interest of full disclosure: of the four major sports, I know by far the least about hockey. And that’s especially true of hockey history—other than a few big name players and the occasional interesting story (both of those hyperlinked pieces focus on Boston-related topics, which is likely why I know a bit more about them than I do other hockey histories), what I know about the history of hockey can be fit inside a box much smaller than the penalty one. So as always, and especially when it comes to topics like this one on which I am generally and admittedly ignorant, I’ll very much appreciate any responses and challenges and other ideas in comments (or by email). I don’t think I’m ever gonna get to full octopus-on-the-icelevel hockey fandom, but there’s no topic about which I’m not excited to learn more, this one very much included. So with all of that said, it’s my understanding that one of the most heated debates in the hockey world is over whether fighting is a central and beloved element of the sport that must be preserved or an outdated and dangerous aside that should be discarded to attract more widespread fan support. Obviously I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion (I’m opposed to fighting-based sports, but this is somewhat of a different story of course), but I will say this: from what I can tell, many of the arguments in favor of fighting seem to come from what we could call hockey traditionalists. And having had more than my share of experiences with baseball traditionalists, I’d say that “This is how we have always done things” is an incredibly ineffective way to argue for any aspect of a sport (or most anything else for that matter). For one thing, such an argument would by extension make any change impossible, and anything that is going to endure over time needs to evolve in at least some ways in order to do so. And for another thing, there are many cases where we learn things that require specific changes in the way we do things—and it seems to me that what we now know about head injuries, for example, just might make that the case when it comes to fighting in hockey.I’m pretty serious about CTE (although I haven’t been able to give up football yet), so if I were to weigh in more fully on the fighting in hockey debate, I’d likely be in the opposition camp. But I try to be open to different perspectives of course, and in a debate like this what I’d be interested to hear is how pro-fighting perspectives might argue for its role in how the sport is played. That is, when it comes to fighting in baseball (something I know a lot more about), fights represent an entirely unsanctioned and illegal element, one that always leads to ejections and suspensions and fines and so on. Whereas fighting in hockey is more or less entirely sanctioned, with the two fighters surrounded by the referees and allowed to complete their fight before the regular gameplay resumes. So perhaps there are reasons beyond tradition alone, ways that fighting contributes to the play of hockey within games, within a season, as a sport. After all, all rules in sports are arbitrary and constructed, and don’t necessarily need changing as a result. This one features violence to be sure, but so for that matter does hockey overall—so I’m open to hearing (including here if you’d like!) for how this element of hockey might also feature other sides to this sport, past and present.Next debate tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other great debates you’d highlight?

January 29, 2019: Great (Sports) Debates: LeBron or Michael?

[Sunday, February 3rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday. For this year’s Super Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your opinion into the mix in comments, please!]On two layers to the best basketball player debate, and an unexpected twist.In many ways, the debate over whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time seems to come down to a very familiar refrain: championships vs. stats. That’s the same metric that has often been used to adjudicate another famous basketball debate (Russell vs. Chamberlain), as well as some of the more famous ones in football (Montana vs. Marino and Brady vs. Manning). It’s a particularly compelling sports debate because it extends the focus from just the two individual players in question to broader arguments about whether team victories or individual achievement are more effective measures of greatness—of course the ultimate goal in team sports is to win a title, but how much can any individual contribute to that, and how much should we penalize those whose teams just weren’t quite good enough? Plus, LeBron has made it to a ton more championship series and just hasn’t quite won them all—if he had gotten those few extra bounces and won them all, would we even be having this debate? Are Jordan’s stats comparable enough that he would stay in the conversation regardless? And so on (and so on and so on…).There’s another possible side to the greatest basketball player debate, though: the character and communal presence of each man. I wrote about Jordan’s relative lack of community engagement here, and about LeBron’s impressive activism here (which has only increased recently with his opening of a wonderful new school). Obviously activism isn’t the only measure of character, but in this case it does seem to line up pretty well with that side of the two men as well: Jordan was notoriously nasty and petty as a player, gave one of the most arrogant and vindictive Hall of Fame speeches ever, and has spent much of his retirement gambling like he’s in a Scorcese film; while LeBron has married his childhood sweetheart, given back to his community at every turn, and basically turned the other cheek to ridiculous levels of vitriol and hatred from fans almost everywhere other than his own cities. Obviously activism and character are separate from athletic performance—but once we introduce championships into the mix, we’ve already moved beyond the individual accomplishments of players in any case, so I see no reason not to think about whether other factors might contribute to how we measure overall greatness. And once we start considering other such factors, the whole debate has the potential to take a surprising twist. After all, neither Jordan (#4) nor LeBron (currently #5) are at the top of the all-time NBA scoring list; that honor goes to the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And if we’re talking about social and cultural presence and impact, I don’t know that any professional athlete can compare with Kareem—from his to his ongoing career as a writer and novelist, and especially to his consistently thoughtful and impressive contributions to public debates, Abdul-Jabbar has left his imprint on American popular culture, politics, and society in numerous ways over the last five decades. That’s not enough to ensure all-time greatness of course, but again, Abdul-Jabbar is also the NBA’s all-time leading scorer and was unquestionably one of the greatest players by any number of such measures. So at the very least, I’d say that his combination of on-the-court greatness, championship contributions, and social presence and activism puts Abdul-Jabbar on the very short list of all-time greats, and perhaps should make him, rather than MJ, LeBron’s fiercest competitor for the throne.Next debate tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other great debates you’d highlight?

January 28, 2019: Great (Sports) Debates: Who Invented Baseball?

[Sunday, February 3rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday. For this year’s Super Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your opinion into the mix in comments, please!]On what’s not the case about the sport’s origins, and two interesting details of the (uncertain) real story.So apparently Abner Doubleday had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of baseball. I’m not gonna pretend for a second that I knew that before researching this post—indeed, blog completists might remember that I highlighted Doubleday as at least a strong contender for the title in this long-ago post on Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (if you are really that long-standing and attentive of a reader, please please please leave a comment or email me and say hi!). But while former baseball player, club executive, and sporting goods entrepreneur Albert Spalding really pushed the narrative of Doubleday as the sport’s inventor—going so far as to commission his friend and former National League President Abraham Mills to “investigate” the question, leading to the highly suspect Mills Commission report of December 1907—the truth is that there is no specific evidence in Doubleday’s life or writings, or any peripheral materials, to support the myth. That’s particularly ironic because the Mills Commission identified Cooperstown, NY as the site of Doubleday’s invention (in the equally fabricated year of 1839), leading to the eventual location of the Baseball Hall of Fame in that town.Doubleday’s lack of involvement with the sport’s invention is far more certain than the question of when baseball was invented, and by whom. Indeed, what is far more definite is the late 19th and early 20th century featuring warring camps, and that those camps were often explicitly linked to the ongoing rivalry between England and America. The English historians traced the sport’s origins to various traditional folk games, from archaic games like “stoolball” and “trap ball” to the more familiar (and still played) parallel sports of cricketand rounders. Their American rivals acknowledge these antecedents and influences, but focus instead on more direct references in early American texts and documents to games like “baste ball” (mentioned in the 1786 diary of Princeton University student John Rhea Smith), or to “baseball” being included (alongside “wicket, cricket, batball” and others) in a 1791 bylaw in Pittsfield, MA. In truth, what these various historical examples and details indicate is that the sport developed over centuries, through various iterations and stages, and was played in both England and America for many years before being standardized and professionalized (on which more in a moment). But that’s not as sexy as a fight to the death between Revolutionary rivals, so I’ll let the transatlantic diamond turf war proceed unchecked.Apologies to my EnglishStudying colleagues and friends, but it was more definitely in an American setting that the sport’s rules were first laid down in a more standardized way. That setting was New York City in September 1845, where the Knickerbocker Club and its officers Alexander Cartwright, William Wheaton, and William Tucker published a set of rules that came to be known as (duh) the Knickerbocker rules. These rules were close enough to the modern game that in 1953 Congress credited Cartwright as the sport’s inventor, which was a total slap in the face to the Williams but that’s another story for another post. But in any case I think we can all agree that the most compelling thing about the Knickerbockers was their decision later in 1845 to move their home games to Hoboken, NJ’s Elysian Fields, which remains the most impressively named field or stadium I’ve ever encountered. As I’ve highlighted in just about every post I’ve written about baseball in this space, the sport captures certain fundamental, pastoral, idyllic American images in a legendary, mythological way that defies precise histories, which might just explain why the history of its own invention remains and likely will always remain an open debate.Next debate tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other great debates you’d highlight?

January 26-27, 2019: Crowd-sourced Af Am Life Writing

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ve AmericanStudied African American lives in texts. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post on the responses and nominees of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!] Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member .”Adam Newman Tweets, “Two somewhat complicated (due to genre) examples I would suggest are John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick . Both use memoir/autobiography but as material for analysis of contemporary & historical issues of race.” He adds, “Both are pretty freaking amazing and Wideman’s in particular felt largely overlooked perhaps because he is of an older generation though the book itself is truly a tour de force. Meanwhile Cottom’s book is amazing and thankfully getting the attention it rightly deserves.”Matthew Teutsch writes, “I would say Wideman's Brothers and Keepers . That is a very powerful book. I'm also thinking about works such as John Marrant's narrative or even something like Iceberg Slim's The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim . Both works highlights different periods and aspects of Black life.”Finally, one of the most acclaimed recent works of African American biography has to be Imani Perry’s new Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018). Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?

January 25, 2019: African American Life Writing: Three Recent Works

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ll be AmericanStudying African American lives in texts. I’d love to hear your responses, as well as other lives and texts you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On a trio of recent works that exemplify 21st century African American life writing.1)      Between the World and Me (2015): I’ve written a good bit already about Ta-Nehisi Coates in this space (and other spaces), and would certainly argue that his talents and significance extend well beyond any individual book. Moreover, Betweenisn’t nearly as straightforward a memoir as Coates’s first book, the story of his childhood and father The Beautiful Struggle (2008). That book is certainly worth your time as well, but I’m not sure there’s a better work of 21st century non-fiction than Between—and it is certainly life writing, if it also puts that life in conversation with another life (that of Coates’s teenage son, to whom it is written) and just about every imaginable context and frame. Seriously, if you haven’t read this book yet, do so!2)      Negroland (2015): Published in the same year as Coates’s book, New School Professor Margo Jefferson’s Negroland is a much more traditional memoir, the story of her upbringing among the African American upper middle class in the 1950s and 60s. But like all of the best life writing, Jefferson’s book draws us into a very specific world, in this case one that has been largely absent from American narratives and collective memories. Jefferson is celebratory and critical of that elite African American community in equal measure, and most of all uses it, as all great memoirists do, to tell a story that is at once intensely personal and profoundly representative of American issues and histories. 3)      2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014): Putting a rap album on a list of life writing works might seem like an intentionally provocative or contrarian move, but I don’t mean it as such; albums aren’t the same as books, but it’s certainly possible to tell a life story through music, and that’s exactly what J. Cole does in his magisterial 2014 album. As I argued in that hyperlinked post, I’d call Cole’s album a magnus opus for the #BlackLivesMattermovement and movement, one of the first artistic texts in this 2010s era to both represent an individual life within that frame and to grapple with the social and cultural contexts around such a life. It’s quite simply one of the great and vital 21st century African American and American autobiographies.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?

January 24, 2019: African American Life Writing: Sojourner Truth

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ll be AmericanStudying African American lives in texts. I’d love to hear your responses, as well as other lives and texts you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On a voice captured in a famous speech, and a life lived well beyond it.
When you think about how many of the inspiring Americans I’ve highlighted in this space are not collectively remembered at all—and how many others, like Frederick Douglass, are generally remembered but without, I would argue, the kinds of specific connections to texts and works that would make those memories truly meaningful—Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) has it pretty good. Not only is this freed slave and lifelong activist for African American and women’s rights remembered in our national narratives, but her most famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” a stirring rebuke to both racist and sexist arguments delivered at an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, is one of the few 19th-century American texts that has endured in any specific way into our collective 21st-century consciousness (I’ve seen excerpts from the speech in posters in high school classrooms, to cite one piece of evidence for that enduring presence).
“Ain’t” is indeed a great American speech, managing in just a few short paragraphs to develop arguments using all three principal rhetorical strategies: pathos, appeals to her audience’s emotions; logos, appeals to their reason; and ethos, appeals based on Truth’s own character as the speaker. It also nicely illustrates Truth’s unique perspective and voice, her fiery eloquence which had by this moment (only a year after the publication of her personal narrative had first brought her to the attention of abolitionists and activists throughout the North) already made her a sought-after speaker and presence at any event. Yet the speech’s representation of that voice, and more exactly the written version’s use (from its title on) of dialect to portray Truth’s manner of speaking, makes it somewhat less clear whether this one text should indeed exemplify the woman behind it. The most significant Truth biographer and scholar, Nell Irvin Painter, has indeed argued that the dialect version was produced after the fact and by white activists who, while friendly to Truth and seeking to help amplify her voice, might have overly emphasized her use of the vernacular to highlight her natural eloquence and the limitations that her early life in slavery had enforced on her education and identity. After all, Truth’s most famous contemporary African American activist, Frederick Douglass, had been accused at times of falsifying his history because of his highly literate voice and style; Truth’s dialect voice in the speech thus bears at least a multi-part relationship to issues of slavery, authenticity, and identity.
The layers and complications of Truth’s life and identity go well beyond those questions of dialect, however, and her name itself both partially obscures and yet reflects that complicated personal history. The name was one of her own choosing, bestowed upon herself in 1843 as she began a period of work as an itinerant preacher in New York and New England. She had been born Isabella Baumfree, and for the first four decades of her life had worked, both as a slave and then as a freed servant, in upstate New York; as she traces in her personal narrative, and as biographers and historians such as Painter have likewise documented, she moved between numerous families and households in those years, while having four children of her own as part of a forced marriage to a fellow slave. By far the most ambiguous and complex period of those decades was also perhaps one of the most formative of her spiritual perspective: between 1829 and 1834 she served as both housekeeper and preacher to a reformer named Elijah Pierson, a man who called his house “the Kingdom”; sometime in that period another reformer named Robert Matthias took over the house and turned it into a brief but full-blown cult, including polygamous marriages and other fanatical practices (as detailed in Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz’s compelling narrative history, The Kingdom of Matthias [1994]). The exact influences of these years and figures on Truth’s identity will never be known, not least because she wrote relatively little about them in her narrative; but no account of her life and perspective can entirely elide her apocalyptic religious visions, one unquestionably stoked by this time in the Kingdom.
I don’t mean, by highlighting that one period of Truth’s life, to imply that her later activism or writings must be analyzed through this lens; these were but five years of a more than 8-decade long life, one that included not only the abolitionist and women’s rights activism but also contributions to the formation of African American regiments during the Civil War and numerous post-bellum efforts on behalf of freed slaves, temperance, and opposition to capital punishment, among other continuing work. My main point, as ever, is that the more we know about this inspiring American’s identity and experiences and writings and work, the more we can understand the whole truth about who she was, who we were through the 19th century, and thus where we come from. Last life writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?

January 23, 2019: African American Life Writing: Nat Love

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ll be AmericanStudying African American lives in texts. I’d love to hear your responses, as well as other lives and texts you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the autobiography that captures both the myths and realities of the American frontier.
For those scholars who like to identify and define certain dominant American narratives—a group that, it will surprise no reader of this blog, would include a certain AmericanStudier—the Western frontier presents a particularly challenging topic. On the one hand, no one could dispute that many of our most mythologized, iconic, and heroic national figures are Western in origin; but on the other hand, what do those figures symbolize? Do they represent the carving out of a path for American “civilization” as it moved west (The answer, of course, is yes, our frontier myths encompass all of those roles and identities and many others as well. After all, of the many ways in which we could argue that the frontier exemplifies America (an argument that AmericanStudiers as diverse as Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Alexis de Tocquevillehave all made), to my mind the most convincing is in its thoroughly cross-cultural community, the ways in which every prominent Western event and site and place were constituted out of at least a couple different cultures and identities, peoples and perspectives. Many of those cross-cultural contacts were far from ideal, violent clashes and conflicts between the army and Native American tribes, Irish and Chinese rail workers, California squatters and Mexican landowners, and many other variations. Yet while such violent encounters have understandably been the focal point of many of the recent revisions of frontier history—just as the violence of the Wild West was a focal point for many of the original stories of the region—these cross-cultural and combinatory Western communities could also produce unique and impressive American identities, lives and stories that embody the best possibilities of such a hybrid setting. And at the top of that list would have to be Nat Love (1854-1921).
Much of what we know of Love we have learned from the man himself, courtesy of his engaging and mythologizing autobiography, Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907). That book’s subtitle is over forty words long and yet still manages only to highlight some of the diverse worlds and identities through which Love moved in the course of his very Western and very American life: from his birth in slavery to dual frontier careers as a cowboy on the cattle ranges and a prize-winning rodeo competitor known as “Deadwood Dick.” The subtitle doesn’t even get to Love’s final iteration as a Pullman conductor, returning to the West where he had made his name and fortune as a buttoned-up representative and spokesman (quite literally, as this section of the narrative reads at times like an advertisement) for the technology and comfort of the new railway lines. These hugely diverse stages and worlds can make the narrative feel scattershot in tone and focus, and Love similarly divided in perspective, but that’s precisely what makes the book and the man so emblematic of the frontier—this is a man who was born a slave and who still experienced frequent racism in his Pullman work, but who also became one of the period’s most celebrated rodeo performers and a frontier legend; a man who worked as a cowboy alongside peers from every culture and community in the west, went to work for one of the Gilded Age’s most successful corporations, and closes his book addressing eastern audiences who have likely never been further west than the Mississippi.
There’s no way to boil that life and identity down to a single type or narrative; his subtitle couldn’t even boil it all down to forty words. Many of the frontier’s cross-cultural experiences were, again, not nearly as successful as Love’s, but that too is central to the point—a narrative of the frontier, like a narrative of America, would need to include both Love and Little Big Horn, and everything and everybody in between and alongside. “Cowboys and Indians,” that is, can and must mean both mythic confrontations and the possibility that the “and” does indeed symbolize connection and community. Next life writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?

January 22, 2019: African American Life Writing: Olaudah Equiano

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ll be AmericanStudying African American lives in texts. I’d love to hear your responses, as well as other lives and texts you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the controversial autobiography that should be required reading whatever its genre.In the same year that the Bill of Rights was approved and the Constitution ratified, the ex-slave turned British sailor, hairdresser, French horn player, and abolitionist (among his many other roles) Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Equiano’s book was an international bestseller and has remained famous and significant as the first published autobiography by an African American (although that category, like any, is complicated when it comes to Equiano’s identity), but in recent years elements of its authenticity have been challenged. Scholar Vincent Carretta has unearthed evidence that suggests that Equiano may have been born in the Carolinas, and thus that the narrative’s African-set opening chapters were fabrications, created to enhance Equiano’s credibility as both an ex-slave and an abolitionist. The evidence is very ambiguous and open to continued debate, but certainly Carretta’s work has complicated any easy categorization of Equiano’s book as autobiography.I dedicated a chapter of my second book to Equiano’s narrative, and addressed this controversy at length there. I made a couple of central points about the book’s opening images of Africa: that whatever their factual authenticity, they reveal a great deal about late 18th century images of Africa, and its relationship to the multiple other places (America, the Caribbean, England, the world of transatlantic trade) through which Equiano moved; and that Equiano’s choice to define himself, from his book’s title on, as “the African,” whether purely autobiographical or more voluntary, is an important one that can tell us a lot about constructions and complications of identity in his era, in those different settings and communities, and in how we have perceived and read him and his book in the centuries since. None of that means that the archival work of scholars like Carretta isn’t important, or that trying to learn the factual details of Equiano’s life doesn’t impact how we read and analyze his narrative—but to my mind, autobiographical writing is always more about contexts and communities, multiple and constructed identities and audiences, than the life story of one individual; and Equiano’s has much to tell us on those levels in any case.Of the many such lessons Equiano’s book has to offer, the many reasons why I believe his narrative should be just as famous and foundational for American audiences as Ben Franklin’s, I would highlight in particular his striking evolutions, that huge range of stages and roles to which I alluded in my opening description above. In his time in the Caribbean alone Equiano was both a slave and an overseer, a sailor and a captain, a laborer and a merchant, among other shifts. Those changes, like the opportunity to purchase his own freedom that enabled most of them, were far from the norm for African slaves, and it would be important not to see Equiano’s life or book as broadly representative of that (or any) community. If we did make Equiano’s narrative required American reading, that is, we would want to pair it with a text like Frederick Douglass’ or Harriet Jacobs’, one that better captures the realities and histories of slavery. But on the other hand, just as Douglass and Jacobs moved through multiple stages and identities in their inspiring lives, Equiano’s amazingly varied life exemplifies such evolutions, and his narrative thus presents a unique and vital way for us to understand the constructions, revisions, and stories that have always comprised identity in America.Next life writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?

January 21, 2019: The Real King

[For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, my annual post on remembering the real King! Kicking off a series on African American lives and texts. Share your African American histories, stories, texts, and contexts for a crowd-sourced MLK Day weekend post, please!]On the limits to how we currently remember King, and how to get beyond them.
It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my AmericanStudies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the “I Have a Dream” speech is kind of overrated. I’m sort of saying that for effect, since I don’t really mean that the speech itself isn’t as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that’s true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King’s “content of their character” rather than “color of their skin” distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen “one day”—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.
But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of “one day”) has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King’s philosophies and ideas and arguments. There’s no question that the speech’s liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King’s work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X’s. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King’s rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the “Poor People’s Campaign” and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.
To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King’s perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can’t Wait , the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don’t think any American text can top the “Letter” itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King’s first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I’ll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter’s opening sentence, of his audience’s description of his protest activities as “unwise and untimely.” And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter’s closing paragraphs: “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of “I Have a Dream” is like remembering Shakespeare for the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that’s a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there’s, y’know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn’t bad either. It’s about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future. Next African American life tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Af Am histories or stories you’d highlight?