Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 83

February 23, 2023: Non-favorite Trends: Circular Firing Squads

[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]

On the difference between debate and division, and why it matters a great deal.

The comedian Will Rogers once famously remarked, when asked about his political affiliation, “I am not a member of any organized party—I am a Democrat.” That was in the 1930s, so it’s fair to say that for at least the majority of the 20thcentury—and most definitely into the first couple decades of the 21st—the big tent of the Democratic Party has also been a notoriously noisy one. While some of those party members who have made the most noise have ended up rightly unable to find a home in the party—I’m thinking of the 1948 Dixiecrats in particular here, without whose blatantly racist views and white supremacist ideologies the party was distinctly better off—the vast majority have remained, constituting a political community with nearly as many internal differences and debates as external contrasts with its official adversaries.

I’m entirely good with that—a political party isn’t a religion, much less a cult, and should never demand nor require rigid or unthinking allegiance to anything or anyone (and certainly not to, I dunno, orange conmen). Moreover, I genuinely love the big tent goal, as I think we can and should debate a wide range of policy priorities and principles while still pulling together toward the goal of forming a more perfect union. Whatever their flaws and failings—and they were more than a few—the American Framers most definitely achieved that multi-layered purpose, debating famously and ceaselessly (if not quite as musically as recent representationshave portrayed the process) yet eventually and consistently helping push the new nation forward. Some of my favorite arguments have been political ones with fellow lifelong Democrats—my parents very much among them—and I like to think that my hometown frenemy Thomas Jefferson would have very much approved.

But here’s the thing: debate and division might be on the same spectrum, but they are in very different locations. That’s particularly true when it comes to the “pulling together” part of the formula I articulated above—if we see ourselves as divided from someone else, we’re almost certainly not seeing them as allies in a cause, as those with whom we want or need to pull together. It seems to me that here in 2022, far too many of my fellow folks on the political left see themselves as divided from many others on the left, and indeed would define those others as opponents rather than members of a raucous big tent. I call that phenomenon the “circular firing squad,” our tendency to shoot at each other rather than at those against whom we are genuinely battling in our quest to move the nation forward. And the thing with a circular firing squad is, all of its participants end up wounded at best, destroyed at worst, and certainly not having achieved any of their goals. All of which makes this trend one of my least favorites on our political landscape.

Last non-favorite trend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?

February 22, 2023: Non-favorite Trends: Free Speech for Me

[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]

On how “free speech” so often seems to mean the exact opposite.

One potential response to both of my last two posts—on defunding as the real crisis facing public higher education and legislative, rhetorical, and actual attacks on teachers and librarians as the real threat facing our educators—would be to ask whether limits on (or even arguments for limiting) free speech in schools aren’t another crisis and threat in and to our educational institutions. I tried to engage thoughtfully with those free speech debates in the opening paragraphs of the Saturday Evening Post Considering History column to which I linked in Monday’s post, and which I’ll share here again for convenience. The too-long/didn’t read version is that I do think at times activists on campuses and at schools (or in related groups) can go too far in limiting voices and debates, and/or otherwise changing speech (the revised version of Huck Finn being a striking case in point). But I’d say those cases are the exceptions rather than the rules, and indeed can serve as canards to distract us from what’s really going on much of the time.

What’s really going on when it comes to free speech debates is to my mind concisely illustrated by what happened at Twitter in late 2022. When Elon Musk bought the social media giant (which as I’ve discussed many times in this space was my very favorite online community), one of his chief promises what that he would return “free speech” to the platform. He did indeed immediately set about allowing various folks who had been banned from Twitter for violations of the site’s policies to return, from former President Trump to alt-right and neo-Nazi voices. Yet at precisely the same time—and I do mean precisely the same time; the two articles hyperlinked in these two sentences are far from the same day, November 29—Musk used suspensions and deactivations to silence the accounts and voices of left-wing critics of not only those extremists, but also and especially of himself and his actions. He then took that one giant step further by suspending a wide range of journalists who had simply reported on Musk’s actions and words (among other important topics). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more overt example of the old (and apparently quite true) adage “free speech for me (and in this case my friends and fellow travelers), but not for thee.”

Twitter isn’t itself an educational space, although I think there are important parallels. But I would say that the same adage applies to many of those who are pushing for “free speech” when it comes to including voices and debates in such educational spaces. After all, if they’re advocating for inviting, hearing, debating a voice that blatantly and systematically argues for eliminating other people and communities, they’re fighting for free speech for such voices at the direct expense of the speech (and existence) of others. A great case in point was the invitation of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes to speak at Penn State in the Fall—McInnes and the Proud Boys advocate for hate and violence that targets numerous American communities and seeks to eliminate them from not just our public sphere but I would argue our society entirely. Allowing McInnes the “free speech” to express those views and goals at an educational institution would be inviting a direct threat to many other members of that educational community, which can’t help but make their ability to speak freely fraught and endangered at best. That version of “free speech” is a serious non-favorite trend of mine.

Next non-favorite trend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?

February 21, 2023: Non-favorite Trends: Attacking Teachers & Librarians

[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]

On one horrifying and one really horrifying evolution of a longstanding trend.

My colleague and friend Heather Urbanski likes to point out just how far back (and I do mean really far back) complaints about “students these days” not being able to write can be found. These things aren’t synonymous by any means, but I’d nonetheless say that there’s a pretty direct parallel between those longstanding complaints and the similarly deeply-rooted history of complaints about teachers and educators of all types. Often those complaints take the form of relatively good-natured if deeply misguided microaggressions (“Must be nice to get summers off!), and sometimes they’re part of understandable parent frustration with things like homework. But far too often, complaints about educators have turned into full-blown attacks on educators, and despite its consistent presence that trend has quite strikingly exploded over the last few years.

As I traced in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column (very much a corollary to the column on defunding public higher education that I highlighted in yesterday’s post), most of those recent attacks have been focalized around bills and laws that seek to limit, preclude, and outlaw entirely a variety of educational subjects and strategies (and even basic conversation points) that are deemed “woke” (to use one of the pejorative buzzwords these anti-education voices employ ad nauseam). These aren’t just symbolic statements, although they can feel that way at times—real teachers and librarians have lost their jobs as a result of these laws, and it’s hard to imagine that many others won’t be similarly affected (and countless more limited in performing their already incredibly tough jobs) if we don’t change these laws and policies ASAP. If that doesn’t seem to you all as well like a truly horrifying trend, we’re definitely on very different wavelengths.

But (inside baseball warning) as I draft this post in late 2022, such attacks are far from the most horrifying layer to this evolving and deepening trend. For that extremely dubious honor I’d have to go with the white supremacist domestic terrorist organizations that have created online resources and communities through which folks can identity libraries or schools that are hosting drag queen reading events, allowing these armed, dangerous, and dangerously dumbass roving gangs of aggrieved white men (I’m generalizing, but I’d stand by it) to descend upon these institutions of learning and education and their overworked and underpaid and truly inspiring employees (to say nothing of the terrorized young people about whom these idiots proclaim to care so much). To lean into that last parenthetical point, I’d hasten to guess that each and every child and family at these events is infinitely more traumatized by the appearance of armed angry assholes than they could ever be by someone living their truth and reading them a book. Anti-education trends are now morphing directly into domestic terrorism, and that’s one of my least favorite things in the world.

Next non-favorite trend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?

February 20, 2023: Non-favorite Trends: Defunding Public Higher Ed

[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]

For this first non-favorites post, I’m gonna ask you to read instead one of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns. In that column I discussed that long and inspiring history of public higher education in America, and why the ubiquitous defunding of public higher ed around the country is one of the worst 21st century trends. As a PhD product of and long, longtime professor in public higher education, nothing, and I mean nothing, gripes my cookies more than this systemic defunding, and I’d love for you to check out that column and join me in the fight to reverse this longstanding and in many ways deepening trend.

Next non-favorite trend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?

February 18-19, 2023: Hettie Williams’ Guest Post on Black Writers & AIDS

[This is Dr. Hettie Williams’ third excellent Guest Post, tying her with Dr. Emily Lauer for the lead in the clubhouse. All you other Guest Posters, past and potential, take inspiration!]

Out of Our Silence 

Black Writers Confronting the Stigma of Homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s

“He has to be remembered for helping to lead us out of our silence...”

—Essex Hemphill on Joseph Beam

                                                                Photo by y y on Unsplash

              “When Essex came over to finish the book, he stayed at my house and got himself a job and an apartment….Essex wanted to finish the book because he loved Joe…one of the things Joe wanted was for gay people to be gay people,” stated Dorothy Beam, mother of African American writer Joseph F. Beam, in a 2007 interview.Joseph Beam, journalist, writer, literary critic, and civil rights activist advanced a multidimensional praxis of politics that encompassed Black gay identity making, community building, wellness, and social justice. In doing so, he built upon a tradition of activism first shaped by the work of civil rights activists such as Bayard Rustin and writers such as James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.

In the early 1980s, a core group of Black intellectuals waged a serious assault on the stigma of homosexuality in African American society while, eventually, also confronting the AIDS epidemic. These intellectuals did this by relying upon Black feminism as their primary epistemological framework. Focusing on writers James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Joseph F. Beam, this essay provides a historical analysis of how African American intellectuals confronted the stigma of homosexuality and the AIDS crisis through their writings and public intellectualism from the Civil Rights era through the 1980s. Here public intellectual is defined as one who speaks to a broad public, typically through the written word, beyond the confines of academia, ideally, with the public good in mind. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, this public intellectualism among members of the LGBTQ community often involved an activist dimension and ethics of care that meant writers helping writers find work, outlets for one another’s work, with LGBTQ themes, and, at times, providing one another with food and shelter.

                                                    James Baldwin; Attribution: R. L. Oliver, Los Angeles                                                                                                     Times, CC BY-SA 4.0 

James Baldwin ultimately espoused a gender-queer politics within an intersectional framework that was largely pragmatic in essence when compared to other writers at the height of the AIDS crisis. Baldwin’s concerns about LGBTQ rights were in many instances secondary to his concerns about Black equality as expressed in his civil rights activism and public intellectualism. Here I am primarily making a delineation between Baldwin’s literary Black queerness, as juxtaposed with his public intellectualism, and his activism as a civil rights advocate. His social justice activities never completely encompassed his queer politics. He did not audaciously immerse himself in LGBTQ+ activism and community in the ways that other queer writers and activists did though these subjects were clearly central in his writings. This was not the case for writers such as Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam who actively operationalized their queer blackness beyond the utility of literary convention to advance a praxis of politics that encompassed community building and social justice work through the height of the AIDS crisis. Baldwin and Lorde were interlocutors who often discussed with one another the major issues confronting Black Americans.

Audre Lorde, poet, essayist, writer, and activist, advanced a queer praxis in her writings and social justice work. Subjects such as racism, sexism, illness, self-care, motherhood, and feminism feature prominently in her work through the 1980s as she became a more prominently recognized literary voice. In the 1980s, Audre Lorde was a central figure among a group of writers who shaped the rise of Black lesbian literature. These writings include essays, poems, and novels by women such as Ann Allan Shockley, Cheryl Clark, and Barbara Smith. This genre of literature emphasized an intersectional approach to understanding Black women’s experiences by focusing on racism, sexism, and homophobia as overlapping social systems of power and privilege. Lorde’s work paralleled the intersectional framework that defined Baldwin’s writings as they both emerged from the same tradition of Black women’s intellectualism. Lorde, at this time, became a well-known essayist and outspoken supporter of LGBTQ rights amid the rising AIDS crisis. 

                                        Audre Lorde; Attribution: Photo by Elsa Dorfman, CC BY-SA 3.0 

In her work, for reasons more obvious than not, Lorde aligns more succinctly with the tradition of Black feminism later embraced by Beam with whom she maintained a regular correspondence. Lorde was more attuned to the functioning of patriarchal white supremacy and the erasure of Black lesbian voices in the queer Black literary imagination. By relying assiduously on the tradition of intersectionality developed by Black women intellectuals, Lorde wrote about race, gender, and sexuality including about the violence and exploitation experienced by Black women in patriarchal societies. An interrogation of patriarchy is at the center of much of her writings. For Lorde, Black men were a part of the patriarchy and this afforded them a certain level of male privilege as compared to the position of Black women in western society.

In her conversations with Baldwin, Lorde astutely points out the masculinist nature of his protest epistemology. She reminded him in an interview published in Essence magazine in 1984 that, “there are power differences that come down” between Black men and women despite the common foe of racism. In this same interview, Lorde also points to the struggle between Black men and women over these power differences including the violence sometimes leveled against Black women from cross-gender conflict within the Black community.

              Lorde was a committed grassroots organizer. Her activities as an activist intellectual were intersectional and transnational. She was a part of the ground-breaking Combahee River Collective of Black women feminists organized to criticize the shortcomings of white feminism and amplify the concerns and needs of Black women from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. Lorde also helped to establish the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix in 1981 that was dedicated to assisting women who suffered sexual abuse and SISTA (Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa), a group organized to help Black women who were impacted by Apartheid. Beam, like Lorde, understood that solidarity across sex/gender boundaries within Black society meant Black survival. In Black feminism, he found a praxis of politics that included ideas about collective work, self-care, and systems of shared support and co-nurturing.

In the early 1980s, Joseph Beam’s work began to appear in the leading newspapers and magazines consumed by the LGBTQ community at the time, including Changing Men, Blackheart, Gay Community News, Philadelphia Gay News, and the Advocate. He won an award from the Lesbian and Gay Press Association in 1984 for his work as a writer. While addressing the concerns facing the gay community in his writings through the mid-1980s, Beam also became noticeably involved in several LGBTQ associations concerned with social equality (such as the Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Friends Service Committee and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays) while he worked to compile an anthology of writings by Black gay men. He became the editor of the journal Black/Out published by the National Coalition in 1985, and this put him in contact with a broad community of Black gay writers with whom he sought to build alliances to improve social equality and representations of African Americans in the larger LGBTQ society. In his writings, he expressed a concern for the alienation of Black members of the LGBTQ community and issues of social justice from an intersectional point of view that included a discussion of race, gender, class, and sexuality more broadly. Beam stated in the “Introduction” section of In the Life (Red Bone Press, 1986) that he had “grown weary of reading literature of white gay men” because none of their work “spoke” to him as a “Black gay man.”

Audre Lorde was a friend, mentor, supporter, and patron to Joseph Beam. Lorde and Beam maintained regular correspondence, and Beam interviewed Lorde for several literary outlets. In one of their interviews, both expressed concerns about the lack of visibility of writers from the LGBTQ community.  “It’s not only the literary establishment that renders us invisible” Beam noted.  “The gay and lesbian community contributes to this invisibility.”Both agreed in this interview that the LGBTQ community needed to build their “own institutions.” This was demonstrated with Lorde’s creation of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press that was developed in association with the National Black Feminist Organization in 1980. Lorde was active in the Combahee River Collective from 1974 through 1980 and formed the Women of Color Press with Black feminists such as Barbara Smith in response to what they saw as the failures of liberal white feminism. In the writings and actions of Lorde and Beam, we see a commitment to active grassroots level community building and shared support between members of the LGBTQ community.

[Annual non-favorites series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?]

Stephen A. Maglott, “Joseph Beam,” Ubuntu Biography Project, Ubuntubiographyproject.com, December 30, 2017 Found at: https://ubuntubiographyproject.com/2017/12/30/joseph-beam/ Accessed January 1, 2019.

Maglott, “Joseph Beam,” Ubuntu Biography Project, Ubuntubiographyproject.com, December 30, 2017.

Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin, “Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde,” Essence, 1984.

Joseph Beam, “Introduction,” in In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology: A Black Gay Anthology edited by Joseph Beam (RedBone Press, 1986), xix.

Joseph Beam, “Audre Lorde: The Lost Interview,” Lesbian News February, 1997, 22, no. 7 p. 39-41.

February 17, 2023: Songs I Love: “Pink Venom”

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to share a handful of recent songs I’ve loved. Share recent songs, albums, artists you love for a crowd-sourced weekend post with heart eyes!]

Look: sometimes I want to get soulful, sometimes I want to get political, sometimes I want to get personal, sometimes I want to get romantic, and sometimes I just want to dance and sing along with a badass quartet of South Korean girl group members. The quartet of which I speak is Blackpink, and I can’t front even a little bit, their kickass 2021 anthem “Pink Venom” was one of my very favorite songs of the year (yes, even though more than half of the lyrics are in Korean—I can use context clues with the best of ‘em!). To anybody who might make fun of me for that taste, I say simply “get ‘em, get ‘em, get ‘em”! (Nah, I say “de gustibus, non est disputandum”—and I look forward to sharing your tastes this weekend!)

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So once more with feeling: What songs or artists have you been lovin’ on recently?

February 16, 2023: Songs I Love: “The Barka-Darling River”

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to share a handful of recent songs I’ve loved. Share recent songs, albums, artists you love for a crowd-sourced weekend post with heart eyes!]

I’ll confess that a year ago at this time I believed my childhood favorite rock band Midnight Oil had released their last new music, so the entirety of their awesome 2021 album Resist took me by very pleasant surprise. I love every one of that album’s 12 excellent songs, but would single out especially the second song, “The Barka-Darling River,” which links lead singer Peter Garrett’s frustrating time serving in the Australian Parliament to the climate crisis and the need for real systemic change. Here are three lines that capture this song’s scope and power:

The angry and impassioned opening verse: “Standing in the house of the founding fathers/It’s a house that’s not been well looked after/Now there’s a fatal flaw in the mighty rafters/There’s a rule of law written by the cotton masters”

The transition to the quietly mournful second half: “Who left the bag of idiots open?/Who drank the bottle of bad ideas?/Who drew the last drop from the bottom?/Good people, good people are forgotten”

And the yearning for something else with which that mourning concludes: “Let’s shake some truth out of the jar/Let’s kick the crooks out of the kitchen/We’ll tell some stories at the bar/Good people, good people are forgotten”

Last song I love tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What songs or artists have you been lovin’ on recently?

February 15, 2023: Songs I Love: “Quiet Town”

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to share a handful of recent songs I’ve loved. Share recent songs, albums, artists you love for a crowd-sourced weekend post with heart eyes!]

I’ve written about my favorite 21st century rock band The Killers on multiple prior occasions in this space, and so it’ll come as no surprise that a new album of theirs like 2021’s Pressure Machine is always gonna inspire the love in this AmericanStudier. I especially love the album’s deeply personal nature, its connection to lead singer Brandon Flowers’ childhood and hometown community, threads that carry through the entire album and build to the beautiful final song “The Getting By” (inspired by something his mom said about his dad). But among all that goodness, it is the album’s second song, “Quiet Town,” that stands out most for me, as perhaps the greatest song this great band have ever released: I love so much about “Quiet Town,” but love most the way in which just when you think it’s done it’s builds to one more level that also comes full circle from its opening. And if I thought I couldn’t love “Quiet Town” any more, then my sons went ahead and put it on their homework bangers playlist—and that love built to one more level as well!

Next song I love tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What songs or artists have you been lovin’ on recently?

February 14, 2023: Songs I Love: “Before You”

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to share a handful of recent songs I’ve loved. Share recent songs, albums, artists you love for a crowd-sourced weekend post with heart eyes!]

I wanted to share young singer-songwriter Benson Boone’s newest single “Before You” on Valentine’s Day itself for two reasons. The more obvious one is that this is a long song, and a particularly sweet and moving one at that. But the more important one is that I know of this song and of Boone at all because of my two greatest loves, my sons. Boone is one of the first artists they’ve really fallen in love with, and when his new song dropped late last year we spent quite a bit of time playing and replaying it. I don’t think I could love any song, or anything, more than that!

Next song I love tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What songs or artists have you been lovin’ on recently?

February 13, 2023: Songs I Love: “Soul Days”

[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to share a handful of recent songs I’ve loved. Share recent songs, albums, artists you love for a crowd-sourced weekend post with heart eyes!]

As part of last year’s Thanksgiving series, I highlighted Bruce Springsteen’s new album of soul covers, Only the Strong Survive. My favorite song from the album remains the one I mentioned in that post, “Night Shift” (and I think I love that hyperlinked video about as much as I do the song). But a very close second, and an even better thesis statement for the album as a whole, is Bruce’s cover (featuring Sam Moore) of the great Dobie Gray track “Soul Days.” You can’t go wrong with Gray’s version either, but you know I’m especially lovin’ on Bruce’s (and can’t wait for some summertime soul days in a few shorts months)!

Next song I love tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What songs or artists have you been lovin’ on recently?