Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 287

June 24, 2016: SummerStudying: Kids and “Summertime Blues”

[To kick off the summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]On what a summer classic reveals about the voices of youth.I listened to a lot of early rock and roll growing up (something about having a couple baby boomers for parents during the era that first defined the concept of “classic rock” and produced countless “Best of the 1950s” type collections), and few songs stood out to me more than Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958). I don’t know that any single song better expresses the clash of youthful dreams and adult realities on which so much of rock and roll and popular music more generally have been built, and I definitely believe that Cochran and his co-writer (and manager) Jerry Capehearthit upon the perfect way to literally give voice to those dueling perspectives: in the repeated device through which the principal speaker’s teenage desires are responded to and shot down by the deep voices of authority figures, from his boss to his father to his senator. (For my favorite performance of those conversational exchanges, see Bruce and Clarence, natch.)Coincidentally, Cochran himself died very young, at the age of 21, in an April 1960 car accident while on tour in England. Cochran’s death came just over a year after the tragic plane crash that took the lives of three other prominent young rock and rollers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. There’s obviously no direct relationship between these two accidents, nor would I argue that these artists’ youthful deaths were the cause of their popularity (all four were already popular prior to the accidents). But on the other hand, I think there’s something iconic, mythic even, about rock and rollers dying young—or about, more exactly, our narratives and images of such figures—and I believe it’d be difficult to separate those myths from the idealistic and anti-authoritarian attitudes captured in Cochran’s biggest hit. That is, it feels throughout “Summertime Blues” as if the speaker’s youthful enthusiasm is consistently being destroyed by those cold adult responses—and melodramatic as it might sound, the loss of childhood dreams can certainly be allegorized through the deaths of the kinds of pop icons who so often symbolize youth.Yet of course most young people continue to live in, and thus impact, the world far after their youthful dreams have ended (“Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone,” to quote another youthful anthem), and in a subtle, unexpected way Cochran’s song reflects that human and historical reality as well. When Cochran’s speaker tries to take his problem to more official authorities, he is rejected by his senator for a political reason: “I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote” is the reply. In 1958, when “Summertime Blues” was released, the national legal voting age was 21, and so the 20 year old Cochran could not vote; but over the next decade a potent social and legal movement to lower the voting age would emerge, in conjunction with the decade’s many other youth and activist movements, and in 1971 Congress passed and the states ratified the 26th Amendment, which did indeed lower the eligible age for voting to 18. Being able to vote certainly doesn’t eliminate all the other problems of teenage life and its conflicts with adult authority—but it does remind us that neither the gap nor the border between youth and adulthood are quite as fixed or as absolute as our myths might suggest.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?

June 23, 2016: SummerStudying: Utopias and the Summer of Love

[To kick off the summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]How two prior American utopias can help us understand the famous 60s social experiment.Throughout the summer of 1967, between 75,000 and 100,000 people gathered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood(and in other cities such as New York and London, but Haight-Ashbury was without doubt the movement’s center) to take part in the self-proclaimed Summer of Love. Many of the topics about which I wrote in May’s series on 60s rock played important roles in the Summer of Love, from the folk music and drug cultures embodied by Joan Baez and Janis Joplin respectively to the communal and festival atmosphere of Woodstock. Yet at the same time, the summer differed from the rest of the decade, inasmuch as it comprised the era’s most overt and self-consciously utopian experiment, an attempt to put alternative, idealistic lifestyles and perspectives into individual and communal practice. And as such, it can be productively contextualized and analyzed not only within its own period, but also in relationship to other American utopian movements and concepts, each of which can shed its own light on the Summer of Love.The 19thcentury was full of utopian communities and social experiments, each of which could offer its own contexts and lessons for Haight-Ashbury. But perhaps the single most prominent, in its own era as well as into our own (thanks in significant part to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance, derived from his own experiences with the community), was George and Sophia Ripley’s Brook Farm. Hawthorne focuses much of his novel on the romantic, sexual, and gendered experiments at Brook Farm, and those elements represent both a similarity with the Summer of Love more than a century later and an example of why utopian communities are always complicatedly connected to and influenced by human psychology and relationships. Yet if we focus too fully on those elements (as I believe Hawthorne does), we risk missing the philosophical and spiritual ideas at the heart of utopian communities, and the Ripleys’ Transcendentalism (with its Eastern influences, its democratic vision of humanity, its profound optimism) was an idea very similar in many respects to those that motivated the Summer of Love.Ever since Thomas More (if not before, although he is thought to have coined the term “utopia” in that book), of course, utopian communities have been imagined in literary works at least as often as they have been put into social practice. One of the more interesting American literary utopias is that created by author and reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her book Herland (1915). Originally serialized in Gilman’s magazine The Forerunner, Herland imagines a utopian community populated entirely by women (who reproduce asexually), a society free of war, social stratification, and other conflicts. Both her central pacificism (tellingly produced in the midst of World War I) and the book’s overarching, progressive ideas about gender, sexuality, and society obviously link Gilman’s utopian philosophies to those that would drive the Summer of Love a half-century later.               Yet just as important to Gilman’s book is her vision of the utopia’s effects on outsiders—specifically, the male protagonist Van Jennings and his two friends, explorers who stumble upon Herland, are initially held captive there, and become complicated parts of and converts to its society and ideas. After all, no utopian experiment can survive if it doesn’t multiply, doesn’t extend beyond its initial community and influence a larger society. Whether and how the Summer of Love did so remains an open question, but a vital one to consider as we analyze this 1960s utopian movement.Last SummerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?

June 22, 2016: SummerStudying: Irony and “Summertime Sadness”

[To kick off the summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]On the artistic and human roles and significance of irony.As no less an authority than Alanis Morrissette has conclusively demonstrated, and as I’ve encountered time and again in trying to include it in classroom conversations, irony can be very hard to define. The line between coincidence, contradiction, and genuine irony is at best a fuzzy one, and I won’t pretend that I’m not likely to get it wrong myself in the course of this post. (Which would be ironic, I think, after I opened by poking fun at Alanis—but these are the risks we AmericanStudiers take.) But wade into the fray I must, because, as foundational New Critic and literary scholar par excellence (and longtime professional partner of Robert Penn Warren) Cleanth Brooks argued in his ground-breaking essay “Irony as a Principle of Structure” (1949), many of the great works of art are composed and achieve their effects through ironic juxtapositions and reversals, strikingly shifting readers’ expectations for and undestandings of seemingly familiar images or concepts.Two of the most famous American poems open with precisely such ironic shifts. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death” (not the actual title, since she didn’t give her poems titles) follows that first line with the striking “He kindly stopped for me –,” with that “kindly” immediately offering a jarring recognition that the poem will portray death in quite unexpected ways. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land begins with an even more surprising ironic reversal: “April is the cruelest month,” a line that, along with the extended descriptions that follow it, turns virtually every prior poetic image of spring and flowers and rebirth on its head. I wouldn’t put contemporary singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey on the same artistic level as Dickinson and Eliot yet (not because songwriters can’t get there, but because she’s far too early in her career at this juncture), but her song “Summertime Sadness” (originally released on her 2012 debut album but best known through the popular 2013 remix by Cedric Gervais) makes similarly interesting and evocative use of literary irony, and provides a good case study for how such ironic images can affect audiences in meaningful ways.Del Rey’s song portrays a powerful but potentially doomed summer love (the last verse, not included in the radio version of the remix, opens, “Think I’ll miss you forever/Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky”), and so her speaker’s summertime sadness could be read as a parallel to the nostalgia in Henley’s “Boys of Summer.” But that reading would miss an important difference: Del Rey’s song uses the present tense for every verse prior to the future tense of that last one, and is thus set very overtly and centrally in the emotions and environment of that idealized summertime moment (“Got my red dress on tonight [and] I’m feeling alive”; “I feel it in the air”; “I’m feelin’ electric tonight”; and so on). Yet despite that powerful present—or rather as a part of that present—, her speaker still imagines the loss, feels and dwells in the summertime sadness. And a result, Del Rey’s song and its central irony can help us understand the way in which pleasure is always complemented by inevitable loss, forces us to engage with the crucial fact that nostalgia for a moment in our lives is often (if not always) produced while we’re in and enjoying that moment. That’s a tough but important idea to consider, and one that this exemplary use of literary irony can help us wrap our heads around.Next SummerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?

June 21, 2016: SummerStudying: Nostalgia and “The Boys of Summer”

[To kick off the summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]On the limitations of nostalgia, and why it’s a vital perspective nonetheless.Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” (1984), the opening track from his hugely successful and influential Building the Perfect Beast album, includes as its bridge one of the most famous expressions of nostalgia for a lost, idealized past ever set to music: “Out on the road today I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac/A little voice inside my head said ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back’/I thought I knew what love was, what did I know?/Those days are gone forever, I should just let them go but—.” Henley’s whole song is a nostalgic elegy, full of summertime metaphors for those idealized memories of the girl and the world that got away. But in “a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac” Henley has found one of the most succinct and pitch-perfect images I’ve encountered for the inevitability of change and loss and how we continue to be reminded of what once was even as we’re driving down the road of what is toward what will be. (“Objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are,” to use another famous rock and roll metaphor for nostalgia.)I’ve written about nostalgia in this space before, and have focused in much of those posts on some of the limitations of this necessarily idealizing and often overtly conservative perspective on both past and present. I would say many of the same things about Henley’s version in “Summer,” particularly when it comes to the summertime love the speaker shared with the song’s addressee, that mythical woman who got away. After all, she’s defined more or less solely by her appearance, through the chorus’s emphasis on how the speaker can still “see” her and her “brown skin,” irresistible smile, sunglasses, “hair slicked back,” and so on. Like both the boys and the season of summer, of course, those kinds of physical and superficial elements inevitably fade over time, were never built to last, and it’s thus entirely fair to wonder whether there was any genuine there there for this couple—or whether, as the speaker to his credit overtly wonders, “it was a dream.” In any case, as the song’s first verse makes clear, both the season and the woman are entirely absent in the present—“the summer’s out of reach” and “you’re not home”—and it indeed seems to be time for the speaker to “just let them go.”Or not. It’s not just that nostalgia is (I believe and have also argued in those prior posts) a universal and inescapable part of the human condition, and most especially of aging. And it’s not just that the things for which we’re nostalgic can, at least if we try to remember them with nuance, help us imagine and work toward better presents and futures based on the best qualities of those pasts. Those are both significant elements to consider to be sure, but nostalgia is also valuable precisely because it has been the source of so many wonderful and transcendent works of art, a list that would have to begin with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past(also known as In Search of Lost Time) but that would also include Henley’s song (as well as “Sunset Grill,” the best song on that great Perfect Beast album), the great E.B. White essay “Once More to the Lake” (about which I wrote in the first of those prior posts on nostalgia), unique and amazing children’s books such as Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix, and many other texts. Without nostalgia, the canon of human artistic creation would be seriously impoverished—and we’d have to lament the loss, just one more reminder that there will always be occasion for nostalgia.Next SummerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?

June 20, 2016: SummerStudying: The Fresh Prince and “Summertime”

[To kick off the summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]On two distinct but equally significant ways to AmericanStudy the Fresh Prince.He had had his famous failures, but by the time Will Smith released 1991’s “Summertime”(under his rap name the Fresh Prince, and in conjunction with his partner and co-writer DJ Jazzy Jeff), the multi-talented artist was back on his path toward world (or at least cultural) domination. He had just completed the first season of his TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , which would over its six seasons become one of the decade’s most popular sitcoms; he was only two years out from his acclaimed film debut in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and only a handful from his first mega-hits, Bad Boys (1995) and Independence Day (1996); and “Summertime” itself became one of his first huge hits, reaching #4 on Billboard’s singles chart and #1 on the R&B/Hip Hop chart. It wasn’t quite the Willeniumyet in 1991, but the occasion was at least approaching.I’m not sure if it’s possible to argue with Smith’s uniquely successful presence in 1990s American culture (has any other artist had simultaneous hits in TV, film, and music?), but how we AmericanStudy that presence, well, that’s a more complex and open-ended question. On the one hand, I think it’s possible to see Smith’s rap career, and more specifically a song like “Summertime,” as a crucial stage in the genre’s evolution from something locally and culturally grounded (in urban, African American communities and experiences) to something more mainstream and marketable (more, you could say, Bel-Air). “Summertime” even opens with lyrics that explicitly contrast its vibe and identity with other contemporary songs: “Here it is the groove slightly transformed/Just a bit of a break from the norm/Just a little something to break the monotony/Of all that hardcore dance that has gotten to be/A little bit out of control.” Seen in this light, the song’s sample of (and closing allusion to) Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” (1974) indicates that it is a “new definition” (as the song’s closing lyric puts it) of such musical and cultural traditions.On the other hand, this reading of Smith’s music and/or persona would seem to me problematic in precisely the same ways as were critiques of The Cosby Show for being insufficiently representative of particular versions of the African American experience. That is, Will Smith’s raps were no less (and no more) “representative” than Tupac Shakur’s, and vice versa—each are first and foremost the expression of a particular artist and voice, but each can also connect to multiple possible communities and experiences, and thus communicate those to their audiences. Seen in that light, “Summertime” can be read as a profoundly intertextual conversation with tradition, one that opens with a verse that entreats its audience to “think of the summers of the past” and then alludes in each of the next two verses to “Summer Madness,” that source of its musical sample. Whether that tradition is specifically African American or broadly American (or simply human) depends in part of the listener’s own identity and perspective, and of course the different possibilities are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, they’re all part of that complex cultural entity that was and is the Fresh Prince.Next SummerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?

June 18-19, 2016: ApologyStudying: Apologizing for America?

[Inspired by two recent events about which I wrote on Monday, this week’s series has focused on the complex question of whether and how America should apologize for historic wrongs. Leading up to this special weekend post featuring broader thoughts from both me and fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours, please!]First, I wanted to consider for a final moment why these narratives about “apologizing for America” seem to have such purchase in our conversations. Certainly the “my country right or wrong” concept can be found in every nation and culture, as illustrated nicely by this Midnight Oil song on such narratives in Australia. Yet at the same time, many Americans seem particularly paranoid about the possibility of collective apologies, to the point where (as I wrote in this long-ago post) we’re 150 years out from slavery with no national slavery museum, compared for example to the speed with which Germany built a Stasi Museum. And I would argue that these fears of apologies and dark histories stem in large part from narratives of American exceptionalism, the idea that we’ve been a special and blessed place from our origins through our Revolution, our spread across the continent, the American Century, and down into our present.As I wrote in this recent Huffington Post piece, though, the answer to those narratives isn’t to swing the pendulum all the way to the opposite extreme, to focus on the worst of American history and identity. After all, “my country has always been wrong” is no less over-simplified than the other end of the spectrum, and no more likely to lead to nuanced narratives and conversations. Moreover, I believe that the kinds of historical apologies I’ve traced in this week’s series could help us remember the kinds of critical patriots I highlighted in that post: the lives and work of Fred Korematsuand Yuri Kochiyama in relation to Japanese internment, to cite only one example. Such collective memories offer the best possible response to the paranoid fears of “apologizing for America,” reminding us that it’s often been in our darkest moments that our most inspiring figures and histories can be found.Enough from me! Other responses to the week’s posts and topics:On Twitter, Derek McGrath writes, “Happy to read this discussion. Reminds me of Sara Ahmed on national politics and apologies.”Ellak Roach follows up, writing, “Enjoyed the post as well. As someone studying PolySci, it's good to check against my own assumptions on things like this,” and adding in response to Friday’s post, “I think the argument contrasting Japanese Internment and American slavery is a strong one towards reparations.”Following up Tuesday’s post, Shelli Homerwrites, “I learned about Japanese internment in junior high from a Danielle Steel novel. #embarrassingnotembarrassing”Heidi Kim, an expert on Japanese internment, writes, “The appropriations debate was indeed the inglorious aftermath to the Civil Liberties Act. Another important aspect is the presidential apology. I like to show my students the videos of Pres. Clinton's apology about Japanese American confinement and Pres. Reagan's apology about Tuskegee. Very different styles, wording, and staging.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other responses or thoughts?

June 17, 2016: ApologyStudying: The Reparations Debate

[Inspired by two recent events about which I wrote on Monday, a series on the complex question of whether and how America should apologize for historic wrongs. Leading up to a special weekend post where I’ll share some broader thoughts and for which I’m not at all sorry to ask for your contributions as well!]On the elephant in the ApologyStudying room, and how this week’s topics could be connected to it.As I wrote back in this January post on 21st century civil rights, the debate over reparations has returned to our national conversations over issues of race and history, thanks in large part to the wonderful Ta-Nehisi Coates Atlantic cover story I referenced there. I mentioned in that post that I agree with Coates’ position, and most especially support his arguments that reparations for African Americans would not and could not be limited to slavery, but should instead be expanded to cover (and indeed should likely focus on, given how much more possible it would be to learn and quantify the effects for particular individuals and families) more 20th century histories such as Jim Crow laws, the lynching epidemic and racial violence/terrorism, housing discrimination and segregation, and the like. Shifting the reparations conversation in precisely those ways has been a major element of what Coates has contributed, and it’s hard to overstate the importance of that effect.Yet at the same time, it’s even harder for me to imagine any national progress toward African American reparations. As far as I know, Barack Obama hasn’t addressed the issue directly during his time as president, but he did so at least twice in the years leading up to the 2008 election, and was opposed to reparations in those remarks. As that article notes, Obama’s position is substantively similar to those of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, neither of whom seem the slightest bit likely to push for reparations if elected president. If Donald Trump is elec—nope, can’t finish that sentence yet, but suffice to say that neither Trump nor anyone else in the 2016 Repbulican Party is ever going to be on board with reparations (I noted earlier in the week that many Republicans voted against reparations for Japanese internment, in a far less partisan or divided moment). And given how fully the #BlackLivesMatter movement seems to have polarized the American people, and how many Americans apparently take issue with that seemingly straightforward concept, the thought of any collective, unified support for reparations feels like imagining a utopian future more distant than one with personal jetpacks.If we are to move toward that future, though, I wonder if another perspectival shift about reparations might not help us get there. As far as I know, the debate over reparations has to date largely taken place on its own terms, sometimes parallel to but often and in many ways outside of and separate from the other formal or official apologies about which I’ve written this week. But I don’t know why it should—each history and issue is of course specific and distinct, but they’re all linked by the fundamental similarity that these are dark and painful American histories, ones created and perpetuated by laws and policies, ones that continue to echo into the present and effect both these particular communities and our society and nation as a whole. If we can see them all as connected, as part of the pattern of American history and identity, then we can not only see our apologies and reparations as similarly shared responses and policies, but can also and just as importantly (like with the Japanese Internment Civil Liberties Public Education Fund) make collective the work of acknowledging and remembering these American histories. What could be more important to our future than that?Special post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Responses to this topic and/or broader thoughts on American apologies for the weekend post are very welcome!

June 16, 2016: ApologyStudying: The Chinese Exclusion Act

[Inspired by two recent events about which I wrote on Monday, a series on the complex question of whether and how America should apologize for historic wrongs. Leading up to a special weekend post where I’ll share some broader thoughts and for which I’m not at all sorry to ask for your contributions as well!]On what it means to apologize for something we don’t remember, and how one might affect the other.In June 2012, the House of Representatives passed a formal resolution apologizing for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the many equally discriminatory, subsequent laws and policies that extended and deepened the exclusion era’s realities and effects on the Chinese American community. One of my favorite journalists and writers, James Fallows, blogged at his Atlantic site about the apology and how it was being perceivedfrom a Chinese perspective (a particular expertise of Fallows’) here; in this follow up post I was fortunate enough to have an email of mine to Fallows quoted as part of the conversation abuot the Exclusion Act. Although (like the last couple apologies about which I’ve written this week) the House resolution did not include any reparations or other such actionable items, it was nonetheless a significant moment in both American political history and for our relationship with this fellow global superpower. And yet, as Fallows notes in the first post, the resolution received no coverage in any of the leading American newspapers.Fallows attributes that absence to the fact that the House passes a lot of resoutions, and most of them go unnoticed or unremarked upon. That’s true enough, but it’s also true—or at least I would argue it is, and did so in the entire premise of my third book—that we don’t collectively remember the Chinese Exclusion Act much at all, and it’s pretty hard to think or care about a Congressional apology for something that’s not on our collective radar to begin with. Fallows notes how different things are in China, where he argues memories of the Exclusion Act run far deeper; but in my series of book talks for that Chinese Exclusion Act project, I had the chance to talk with both communities of Chinese Americans (such as at the Chinatown branch of the San Francisco Public Library) and Chinese nationals (a group of graduate students at UMass Lowell who had recently arrived from China), and found that even among those groups there was not a widespread base of knowledge about the Exclusion Act and its contexts. At best, memories of this crucial law and all the histories to which it connects are painfully partial and simplified, and it’s fair to wonder whether an apology for such histories has any valence at all (outside of what it might mean, practically speaking, for our current relationship with China).Yet at the same time, why not? I spent a whole weekly series focusing on bad memories, dark histories that it’s painful and difficult to remember, and thinking about various ways we might better so and models for those possibilities. And there’s certainly no reason why formal, official apologies for those histories couldn’t become (provided, yes, that they received some media coverage and conversation) one successful method for spreading and amplifying those collective memories. Indeed, however much pride I might take in my book on the Exclusion Act, even in my most optimistic takes on its potential reach and resonance it would pale in comparison to the kinds of coverage that can accompany government actions and debates in our news cycle age. Such coverage would only be a first step towards more full and nuanced collective conversations and memories, of course—and that’s where public scholarly voices would become important contributors—but it could certainly provide a significant starting point. So even though we’re four years (almost to the day) from that June 2012 Congressional resolution, I say we stir up some debate, and see if we can’t jump start some collective conversation about this American apology. You in?Last ApologyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this topic and/or broader thoughts on American apologies for the weekend post are very welcome!

June 15, 2016: ApologyStudying: Apologies to Native Americans

[Inspired by two recent events about which I wrote on Monday, a series on the complex question of whether and how America should apologize for historic wrongs. Leading up to a special weekend post where I’ll share some broader thoughts and for which I’m not at all sorry to ask for your contributions as well!]Two official apologies for the oppression of Native Americans, and the distance we have yet to go.1)      1993 Congressional resolution on Hawaii: On the 100th anniversary of the illegal occupation and overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Congress passed a Joint Resolution acknowledging and apologizing for those historic wrongs. Compared to the Civil Liberties Act about which I wrote yesterday, this resolution was explicitly and entirely toothless, ending with the following Disclaimer: “Nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.” Yet that weak conclusion notwithstanding, the resolution does include an impressively detailed account of the many stages through which the U.S. government and its coroporate allies had oppressed, mistreated, and robbed the Native Hawaiians and their sovereign leader Queen Liliuokalani. No one who reads the resolution could fail to understand quite precisely the wrongs done to the queen and her people, nor (I believe) fail to recognize what we collectively owe to this native community.2)      2010 Apology to native peoples: Section 8113 of the typically gargantuan 2010 Department of Defense Appropriations Act comprised a striking “Apology to native peoples of the United States.” The product of nearly a decade of bipartisan work, this ironically located apology, like the 1993 Joint Resolution, ends with a disclaimer that “Nothing in this section authorizes or supports any claim against the United States” (what the military would call a CYA moment). Covering a much broader range of histories and communites than the 93 resolution, this 2010 apology nonetheless does manage to be impressively layered, both in its apologies for “official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants,” as well as “many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect,” and in its “commitment to move toward a brighter future where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters, … in order to bring healing to this land.” Hard to disagree with any of that!3)      And yet: Compared to the time-limited history of Japanese internment, our national mistreatments and oppressions of Native Americans extend literally back to the origin points of post-contact America and forward into our own moment. Both the resolution and the apology note the continued resonances and effects of these histories, but both—by expressly forbidding the possibility of reparations and by taking no specific actions beyond the apologies themselves—do not in any way offer specific visions of what we can do in the present and future to address those ongoing effects. So while my first instinct for this paragraph was to note the many oppressive and genocidal Native American histories for which we should also apologize—and indeed such apologies could help raise awareness and understanding of those horrific histories—I’d say that this is one instance where we can and must also and especially put our money, our collective resources and efforts, where our apologies have begun to be.Next ApologyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this topic and/or broader thoughts on American apologies for the weekend post are very welcome!

June 14, 2016: ApologyStudying: Japanese Internment

[Inspired by two recent events about which I wrote on Monday, a series on the complex question of whether and how America should apologize for historic wrongs. Leading up to a special weekend post where I’ll share some broader thoughts and for which I’m not at all sorry to ask for your contributions as well!]Two things that the 1988 Civil Liberties Act got very right, and one way it came up short.1)      Education for the future: The 1988 law, entitled “Restitution for World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and Aleuts,” included a number of initiatives dedicated not only to redressing that past but also to influencing the future. For one thing, the law appropriated monies “to provide for a public education fund to finance efforts to inform the public about the internment of such individuals so as to prevent the recurrence of any similar event.” More broadly, it included among its purposes the goals of “discouraging the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future” and “making more credible and sincere any declaration of concern by the United States over violations of human rights committed by other nations.” Apologies for the past have to include a sense of relevance and meaning in the present and future as well, and the CLA did so pitch-perfectly.2)      Reparations for the past: They can’t only address those present and future concerns, though—not without becoming too purely symbolic. I greatly (and obviously) value symbolism and collective memories and national narratives, but there’s something—really a great deal—to be said for accompanying them with meaningful action as well. In the CLA, that meaningful action took the form of substantive financial reparations for every living survivor of the internment camps, a community numbering more than 82,000 individuals. It’s easy, and not inaccurate, to argue that money paid in 1990 (when the payments began) can’t possibly ameliorate wrongs done half a century earlier, much less the cumulative effects and aftermaths of those wrongs. But without a time machine, action could only be taken in the present—and the financial reparations both gave the symbolic apology teeth and undoubtedly aided these Japanese Americans and their families.3)      A messy and partial aftermath: Support and opposition for the CLA largely fell along partisan political lines, and such political debates continued to impact the establishment and work of the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, created to fulfill the purposes discussed above. The bill had authorized $50 million for the fund, but years of budget battles both held the monies up in committee and reduced the sum to $5 million as of 1994. The CLPEF was finally able to begin distributing the funds in 1997, but only did so for one year before (as the archived website at that above hyperlink notes) closing its offices permanently in November 1998. A great deal of good was done in that year to be sure, but these ugly realities nonetheless remind us that apologies and laws require continued work and diligence, and that the battle to remember our history more fully and accurately is not one that will have ever definitive or conclusive victories. Yet the CLA was a victory all the same, and one worth its own collective memory and emulation.Next ApologyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this topic and/or broader thoughts on American apologies for the weekend post are very welcome!