Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 237

February 23, 2018: Anti-Favorites: Anti-Filipino Racism

[On Valentine’s Day, I gave a Fitchburg State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America . These histories and stories couldn’t be more important to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]On three dark and destructive moments of 1930s anti-Filipino discrimination.1)      The 1930 Watsonville riots: Anti-Filipino sentiments had been on the rise in the United States since (ironically) the initial US occupation of the islands during the Spanish American War, as illustrated by this bigoted and ugly 1899 Boston Sunday Globe political cartoon. But they boiled over in the first year of the Depression, and the California city of Watsonville became in January 1930 the starting point; a popular Filipino dance hall became the target of a marauding group of more than 500 angry white townspeople, and the conflict spread throughout the city over the next four days. Soon enough the tension and violence would likewise spread to many other California cities and communities, endangering Filipino Americans and their allies for many subsequent months. Exclusion stems from many sources and follows many paths, as the week’s examples have proved time and again; but in this case overt, communal violence set the stage for the later, more legal forms I’ll detail below.2)      1934 and 1935 laws: As far too often in our histories, federal laws mirrored and extended these exclusionary sentiments toward an American community. The first such law was 1934’s Tydings-McDuffie Act, which ostensibly set the stage of Filipino independence from the United States but mostly focused on banning Filipino immigration to the US. As one of the law’s sponsors put it, ““It is absolutely illogical to have an immigration policy to exclude Japanese and Chinese and permit Filipinos en masse to come into the country … they will come in conflict with white labor … and increase the opportunity for more racial prejudice and bad feelings of all kinds.” And since that law did not directly impact the hundreds of thousands of Filipino Americans already in the country, the following year saw the Filipino Repatriation act of 1935, which provided subsidized, one-way travel for Filipino Americans to return to the islands, as well as ending family reunification policies and otherwise making it more difficult for the existing community to endure and grow. Taken together, these two laws were at least as discriminatory and purposefully destructive as the Chinese Exclusion Act and its aftermaths.
3)      Judge Lazarus’s bigoted narratives: Communal violence and xenophobic laws are two central prongs of American exclusion, and the third—bigoted narratives about an existing American community—was present in these 1930s moments as well. Ruling in a San Francisco court case in which a Filipino man was accused of fraternizing (consensually) with two white women, in violation of the state’s anti-miscegenation laws, Municipal Court Judge Sylvain Lazarus ruled, “This is a deplorable situation. It is a dreadful thing when these Filipinos, scarcely more than savages, come to San Francisco, work for practically nothing, and obtain the society of these girls. Because they work for nothing, decent white boys cannot get jobs.” Lazarus would go on to defend his position, adding, “Basing my conclusions on years of observation, I regret to say that there is probably no group in this city, proportionate to its members, that supplies us with more criminal business than the local Filipino colony.” Linking a community so thoroughly to both sexual and criminal “savagery” is a vital element to excluding them from national narratives and identity, and the words and work of a figure like Judge Lazarus were frustratingly influential in creating such links.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?

February 22, 2018: Anti-Favorites: The Geary Act

[On Valentine’s Day, I gave a Fitchburg State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America . These histories and stories couldn’t be more important to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]On the extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act that went significantly further.As I wrote in this piece, the first for my biweekly Considering History column for the Saturday Evening Post, the earliest national immigration laws (such as the 1875 Page Act and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) were designed not only to limit future arrivals from particular targeted nations, but also and especially to destroy existing American families and communities. To quote myself for a moment, “Many elements of these discriminatory first immigration laws were created precisely to disrupt both new and existing immigrant American families, and through them communities deemed less desirable or less ‘American.’” The Chinese Exclusion Act in particular, with features such as the stripping of citizenship from all Chinese Americans who had gained it—and with a follow-up law, the 1888 Scott Act, that made it illegal for nearly all Chinese Americans to leave the country and then attempt to return—, was overtly intended to make it nearly impossible for the more than 100,000 current Chinese Americans to remain in the United States.The Exclusion Act was originally created to be in effect for ten years, but it was extended for another decade by the 1892 Geary Act. Yet the Geary Act did not simply extend the policy of exclusion and its existing corollaries; it added another, far more insidious and destructive new policy as well. Section 6 made it “the duty of all Chinese laborers within the limits of the United States … to apply to the collector of internal revenue of their respective districts, within one year after the passage of this act, for a certificate of residence,” and noted that any laborer who did not do so within one year of the law’s passage would be determined to be illegally present in the United States and could be deported. Moreover, in order to secure such a certificate “to the satisfaction of the court” in cases where their identification was absent or questioned, these Chinese Americans would require the support of “at least one credible white witness,” making clear how closely this policy of identification papers was tied to an overtly white supremacist vision of American identity. Given the role that documents such as birth certificates, Social Security cards, and driver’s licenses have come to play in 20th and 21st century American life, the Geary Act’s creation of the “certificate of residence” document for Chinese Americans might not seem quite as dramatic as it in fact was in the late 19th century, when such collective documentation was largely unheard of and represented a dramatic federal invasion into the lives and communities of these Chinese Americans. Yet even in later eras when federal documents became more common, there would of course remain a world of difference between documents shared by all Americans and ones overtly intended to identify members of a particular community as distinct from—and really outside—the rest of the American community. The certificate of residence did just that, marking these Chinese Americans as fundamentally separate from—and, given that “credible white witness” line among other factors, clearly lesser than—their fellow Americans. In a very real way, then, the Geary Act sought to exclude Chinese Americans more than any of the era’s other discriminatory laws; fortunately, as with all of my week’s focal moments and exclusionary efforts, it did not succeed at doing so.Last anti-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?

February 21, 2018: Anti-Favorites: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

[On Valentine’s Day, I gave a Fitchburg State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America . These histories and stories couldn’t be more important to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]On the treaty that displaced and excluded, psychologically but also in many cases physically, a foundational American community.While there remain many significant gaps in our national narratives about and inclusions of Native Americans, I think we’ve gotten a lot better in the last few decades at recognizing a couple core realities of Native American experience: the history of unbalanced and broken treaties that defined the government’s relationship with native tribes; and the removals from and losses of homelands and homes that said history produced. As I wrote in this post on the Trail of Tears, those narratives don’t do anything like full justice to Native American histories, nor do they help us much to engage with contemporary native issues, identities, and perspectives; but they’re definitely better than nothing. And when it comes to another community that saw their homes and homelands significantly altered by both federal action and encroaching Anglo settlers, Mexican Americans in the mid to late 19th century, “nothing” is about the extent of what our national narratives include.As I wrote in this post, the most significant and troubling aspect of our national misunderstandings of the Mexican American War isn’t related to the war itself—it’s about the longer histories and communities that we fail to recognize and incorporate into our narratives as a result. Without an awareness of the many, longstanding and deeply rooted Mexican American communities and identities in the Southwest and California, homes and homelands that went back in many cases to the first 16th and 17th century arrivals of Spanish explorers and settlers, it’s certainly impossible to understand with any complexity the war itself, and specifically how much it pitted American communities against one another, at least as much as it represented two distinct nations in conflict. But without such awareness it’s even more difficult to recognize how much the war’s conclusion, and the terms and effects of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with which it closed, changed for those longstanding Mexican American communities and individuals.Far from representing a negotiated peace settlement, the Treaty’s terms were mostly dictated by the US representatives—who were occupying Mexico City at the time—and the imbalance is obvious: the treaty is more exactly a land transfer, one equal to the Louisiana Purchase in its immediate and sweeping addition of an enormous area (comprising more than 500,000 square miles) to the United States. When it came to the many communities of Mexican Americans present within that region, the Treaty was in its official terms quite generous, granting citizenship to them and expressing support for their maintaining of their lands and homes. Yet precisely as was the case with the aforementioned treaties with native tribes, the Treaty was immediately and consistently broken: both by arriving Anglo settlers who treated Mexican American land as available for the taking; and by subsequent legal decisions and governmental policies, which tended to side consistently and overwhelmingly with those Anglo settlers. Much of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s historical novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) focuses precisely on that history of broken promises and lost homelands; the book’s second chapter, “The Don’s View of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” should be required reading for all Americans if we are to understand the perspectives and experiences of Mexican Americans over these dark decades of displacement and exclusion.Next anti-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?

February 20, 2018: Anti-Favorites: Jefferson’s Paragraph

[On Valentine’s Day, I gave a Fitchburg State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America . These histories and stories couldn’t be more important to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]On important historical contexts for a frustrating founding text, and why the frustrations remain nonetheless.In this July 4th, 2015 piece for Talking Points Memo, my second-most viewed piece in my year and a bit of contributing bi-monthly columns to TPM, I highlighted and analyzed the cut paragraph on slavery and King George from Thomas Jefferson’s draft version of the Declaration of Independence. Rather than repeat what I said there, I’d ask you to take a look at that piece (or at least the opening half of it, as the second half focuses on other histories and figures) and then come back here for a couple important follow-ups.Welcome back! As a couple commenters on that post noted (and as I tried to discuss further in my responses to their good comments), I didn’t engage in the piece with a definitely relevant historical context: that the English Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had in November 1775 issued (from on board a warship anchored just off the Virginia coast) a prominent Proclamation both condemning Virginian and American revolutionaries, declaring martial law in the colony, and offering the prospect of freedom to any African American slaves who left their owners and joined the English forces opposing them. A number of slaves apparently took Dunmore up on the offer, and so when Jefferson writes that “he [King George] is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us,” he might have been attributing the idea to the wrong Englishman but was generally accurate about those English efforts. Yet of course Jefferson’s misattribution is no small error, as it turns a wartime decision by one English leader (and a somewhat unofficial one at that, as it’s not at all clear to me that Dunmore had the authority to make such an offer nor that the Crown would necessarily or consistently have upheld it) into a defining feature of the relationship between England and the colonies.There are significantly bigger problems with Jefferson’s paragraph than that misattribution, however. And to my mind, by far the biggest is his definition of African American slaves as a foreign, “distant people,” not simply in their African origins (and of course many late 18th century slaves had been born in the colonies) but in their continued identity here in America. Moreover, Jefferson describes this distant people as having been “obtruded” upon the colonists, an obscure word that means “to impose or force on someone in an intrusive way.” And moreover moreover, Jefferson then directly contrasts the slaves’ desire for liberty with the colonists’ Revolutionary efforts (and thus their desire for liberty), a philosophical opposition that excludes these Americans from the moment and its histories just as fully as his definitions and descriptions exclude them from the developing American community. As I’ll highlight in one of next week’s posts, a number of prominent slaves—from Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley to Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker—had already proved and would continue to prove Jefferson quite wrong. But for as smart and thoughtful a person as TJ, it shouldn’t have required such individuals to help him see how much African American slaves were an integral, inclusive part of Revolutionary Virginia and America.Next anti-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?

February 19, 2018: Anti-Favorites: Columbus’s Letter

[On Valentine’s Day, I gave a Fitchburg State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America . These histories and stories couldn’t be more important to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]On an easily overlooked exclusion in a letter that helped originate far too many of them.Given that in this January 2017 post I compared Christopher Columbus’s perspective and voice in his famous February 1493 letter from the Americas back to his Spanish ally and backer Luis de Santangel to those of none other than Donald Trump, it’s fair to say that I’ve already made my opinion on Columbus and his letter pretty clear. Moreover, for this past fall’s Columbus Day I had the chance to contribute to Bryan Brown’s really interesting Junior Scholastic magazine article on “Challenging Columbus,” and made the case there that in this letter specifically, and in many of his initial choices and actions overall, Columbus helped the stage for (if he did not indeed directly originate) such horrific atrocities as genocide and slavery. For example, Columbus begins one paragraph in the letter “I understood sufficiently from other Indians, whom I had already taken, that this land was nothing but an island” a clear reflection of his willingness to kidnap and use native peoples for his purposes of exploration and conquest.So it’s fair to say that Columbus’s letter is exclusionary in some central and sweeping ways. But it’s just as exclusionary in seemingly smaller aspects of its language and perspectives, ones that I would argue also helped originate particular ways of thinking about the Americas and our cultures and identity that have likewise echoed down across the subsequent centuries. I would focus especially on a crucial turn of phrase in the letter’s opening paragraph, where Columbus is describing his voyage and initial encounter with “the Indies” to Santangel. He writes, “And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of them all I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me.” In the sentence’s first clause Columbus directly acknowledges the existing native peoples (and indeed just how many of them there are), but in its second clause he literally elides their identity as separate cultures; the fact that it’s not clear whether he means the islands or the people or both with the phrase “of them all I have taken possession” is, to my mind, precisely the point. These innumerable people are just part of the landscape, at most an inoffensive obstacle to be overcome in the taking of that setting for Spain.That attitude of course made the horrific histories of genocide and slavery that much easier to both perpetrate and justify. But I would argue that it also contributed to less aggressive but also destructive effects such as the development of the Vanishing American narrative. As I have written in posts such as this one, the concept of the Vanishing American was even adopted by reformers who imagined themselves to be “Friends of the Indian,” as a way to mourn the destruction of Native American cultures but see it as both inevitable and (by the 19th century, at least) largely completed and past. Adopting that narrative depended in significant measure on linking Native Americans to a broader American past, seeing them as a part of the continent and hemisphere’s origin points rather than its ongoing and evolving present and future identity. That perspective overtly excludes Native Americans from contemporary definitions of America, and makes it far more difficult to consider their stories and voices, communities and identities, in our own moment. And like so many other destructive attitudes, we see that form of exclusion in Christopher Columbus’s initial response to the Americas and their cultures.Next anti-favorite tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?

February 17-18, 2018: Learning to Love Mariah Carey

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to share and briefly discuss a handful of my favorite songs, leading up to this special weekend post on a legendary singer/songwriter on whom my perspective has significantly and happily evolved. I’d love to hear about your favorite songs or artists in comments!]On respecting, but not remaining too stagnantly settled on, personal tastes.To say I don’t speak much Latin would be to significantly understate the case, but nonetheless one of the most recurring phrases in my conversations with my sons for many years now has been the Latin phrase “de gustibus, non est disputandum (there’s no arguing taste).” For one thing, it’s fun to say, and/or to refer to as the “windy bus” phrase. But for another, it’s a very effective shorthand for stopping many potential sibling or family arguments before they start. You like this particular food but your brother really doesn’t? Windy bus. You two think this song is incredibly annoying but your Dad kinda digs it? Windy bus. Of course we all can and do still argue for our own tastes and preferences and why they’re correct, but it’s also important to take a step back sometimes and remember that others’ tastes are no less (and no more, but that’s less immediately relevant to our own internal perspective I’d say) valid than our own.Yet we can recognize the personal and indisputable nature of tastes without seeing them as either absolute or unchangeable, and I’ve recently encountered a striking illustration of the need to remain open about our own such preferences. Up until pretty recently, I would have said that I was quite sure that I wasn’t a Mariah Carey fan; it’s not that I had any particular problem with her music, but I didn’t believe it was of much interest to or did much of anything for me. Moreover, my perspective on Carey as both an artist and an individual was more or less in line with many of the popular narratives, which have for many years portrayed her as a diva, as self-centered to the extreme, as an unquestionably talented singer but one whose lifestyle and luxuries (and public failures at marriage, and so on) have overtaken those talents as the focus of the story.Well those prominent narratives are wrong, and so was I. Over the last few months I’ve come to learn a great deal about Carey that I didn’t know (and had never before sought to learn), and much of what I’ve learned has both countered my misconceptions and added important layers to my sense of her life, career, and art. For one thing, I’ve learned a lot about Carey’s heritage and childhood, including her mixed-race identity and some of the many significant challenges that she and her family faced; while noen of those factors mean we can’t be critical of choices she makes in her life in 2018, they provide key contexts for understanding where she’s come from and who she is. And for another, I’ve had the chance to hear many more Carey songs, most of them album tracks that are not only not the most prominent pop singles, but that also reveal very different sides to both her content and style, the uses to which she puts her impressive voice and songwriting talents. For example there’s “Languishing” (2009), a moving and sad reflection on her relationship to her estranged sister. Or for another there’s “Close My Eyes” (1997; check out this powerhouse performance of it on Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show), a powerful set of images that link Carey’s childhood memories to her evolving sense of self in the present. Written and produced by Carey herself, as all her music has been, these songs embody an artist whose voice, art, career, and life go way beyond what I thought I knew just a short time ago. Maybe we can’t dispute tastes, but neither can we be too confident in them!The annual anti-favorites series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite songs or artists you’d share?

February 16, 2018: Songs I Love: Macklemore’s “White Privilege 2”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to share and briefly discuss a handful of my favorite songs, leading up to a special weekend post on a legendary singer/songwriter on whom my perspective has significantly and happily evolved. I’d love to hear about your favorite songs or artists in comments!]Once again, I already said a lot of what I’d say about Macklemore’s personal yet political “White Privilege 2”(2016), in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014) album, in this post. So once again I’ll ask you to check that one out and then head back here to add your thoughts, thanks!Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite songs or artists you’d share?

February 15, 2018: Songs I Love: Tori Amos’ “Me and a Gun”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to share and briefly discuss a handful of my favorite songs, leading up to a special weekend post on a legendary singer/songwriter on whom my perspective has significantly and happily evolved. I’d love to hear about your favorite songs or artists in comments!]I said pretty much everything I would still want to say about Tori Amos’ raw and stunning “Me and a Gun” (1992) in this post, so will just ask you to check that one out and then head back here to share your own thoughts. Thanks!Last favorite song tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite songs or artists you’d share?

February 14, 2018: Songs I Love: Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to share and briefly discuss a handful of my favorite songs, leading up to a special weekend post on a legendary singer/songwriter on whom my perspective has significantly and happily evolved. I’d love to hear about your favorite songs or artists in comments!]On two more reasons I have come to love my long-time favorite song.I’ve written on at least two prior occasions in this space, as well as at length in the opening of my second book, about Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” (2000; I still prefer that live version to any subsequent one, although this post-Trayvon Martin performance from 2012 comes very close for sure). But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in this space a very cool complement to my own love for the song: my younger son’s early and continuing affection for it as well. Of course that began with my playing it for the boys, but I’ve played plenty of songs for them, and it was “American Skin” that really grabbed my son and has endured across many years and many other shifts in musical taste. To hear him sing along to my favorite lines—“We’re baptized in these waters/And in each other’s blood”—has been one of those singularly moving moments that parenting can offer.So that’s one way I’ve come to love Springsteen’s song even more fully. But another is the reason I’m highlighting it today: this afternoon I’ll be giving Fitchburg State University’s biannual Harrod Lecture, focusing on the topic of my book in progress, Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America. I’ve been thinking about those themes pretty much nonstop for the last couple years, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered a cultural work that more succinctly and powerfully highlights both of them than does “American Skin.” Even the title alone features both ends of the spectrum: Amadou Diallo was killed because of the color of his skin and what it meant to certain other Americans; but by calling it his “American skin,” Springsteen reminds us that those racist and exclusionary attitudes do not and cannot deny Diallo his full participation in an American community and identity. That we still so desperately need to hear that message is just one more reason to keep listening to “American Skin (41 Shots).”Next favorite song tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite songs or artists you’d share?

February 13, 2018: Songs I Love: Steve Earle’s “Taneytown”

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to share and briefly discuss a handful of my favorite songs, leading up to a special weekend post on a legendary singer/songwriter on whom my perspective has significantly and happily evolved. I’d love to hear about your favorite songs or artists in comments!]On a favorite song that gets inside one of our darkest histories.I’ve written about the lynching epidemic many times in this space, including in this tribute to the epidemic’s most inspiring opponent, Ida B. Wells. Despite the efforts of Wells and many others, I believe that we still have precious few collective memories or representations of this century-long, hugely pervasive and destructive national history. Hopefully that will change somewhat with the April 2018 opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Lynching Memorial, which promises to become immediately one of our most important public spaces. But as I’ve consistently argued in this space, cultural texts and artists have just as central in role as museums/memorials (or any other influence) in helping shape our collective memories and conversations.Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939) seems unlikely ever to be topped as the single best song about lynching. But I’m also a very big fan of Steve Earle’s “Taneytown” (1997), which tells a profoundly personal story of one young African American man and how his quiet, private life intersects with communal histories of place, race, and lynching. I won’t say any more than that about the song’s content here, and will just add that Earle weds those stories and themes to a driving, potent melody and sound which propel his narrator/protagonist and his audience alike towards the song’s stunning conclusion.Next favorite song tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite songs or artists you’d share?