"Because the VICTIMS ARE BLACK": William Lloyd Garrison on Racism, Double Standards and Harriet Beecher Stowe

"The Liberator", William Lloyd Garrison's journal, established 1831

"...We are curious to know whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the white man, under all possible outrage and peril, as well as for the black man; whether she is for self-defense on her own part, or that of her husband or friends or country, in case of malignant assault, or whether she impartially disarms all mankind in the name of Christ, be the danger or suffering what it may...That all the slaves at the South ought, "if smitten on the one cheek, to turn the other also"—to repudiate all carnal weapons, shed no blood, "be obedient to their masters," wait for a peaceful deliverance, and abstain for all insurrectionary movements—is every where taken for granted, because the VICTIMS ARE BLACK."-William Lloyd Garrison reviewing Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in The Liberator, March, 1852.

William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist's abolitionist, was fierce and fiery in his rhetoric, absolute in his stance against slavery, and he was, as all good critics are, first and foremost a self-critic, calling out his own decision to support colonization and gradual emancipation in the first issue of The Liberator, pledging that in the cause of emancipation, "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice." Garrison had endorsed colonization while a member of Lyman Beecher's church in Boston and, human beings being what we are, human, I think some of this must have been on his mind when reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin", Reverend Beecher's daughter's book. His review of Stowe's best selling novel in The Liberator is not personal, nor does Garrison attack her as a "sentimentalist" or question whether it is appropriate for a woman to write on controversial subjects like slavery (criticisms based in a nineteenth century sexism that followed Stowe for the rest of her career). Rather, what Garrison is asking Stowe to do is to defend her novel, to defend her character Tom as the embodiment of nonviolence, to defend her implicit endorsement of colonization by ending her novel with her characters leaving for Africa via Canada.   

And, he is calling her out on a double standard, really, one of the well known family traits of the Beechers to pull back from endorsing anything as "radical" as immediate and full emancipation for enslaved Africans or full integration with free blacks (as Joan Hedrick references in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life", Lyman Beecher, while President of Lane Seminary, told his students that, "If you want to teach colored schools I can fill your pockets with money; but if you will visit in colored families, and walk with them in the streets, you will be overwhelmed"). At the same time he is also addressing well-known white fears of a massive slave revolt in the South, one which lingered behind the visceral brutality of the slave system, and not just in the South but also in places like New York City which had seen - and brutally punished - several slave revolts during the time slavery was legal in the North. 

All of this history was well known to Garrison's audience, and it was equally well known to Stowe, herself, who declined to publicly debate the matter with him.

Henry Ward Beecher, New York Public Library Archives

Garrison's question to Stowe in this 1852 review is ironically prescient: "When it is the whites who are trodden in the dust, does Christ justify them in taking up arms to vindicate their rights?" In 1856, months before John Brown and his sons murdered pro-slavery settlers in Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, Stowe's brother, the famous Henry Ward Beecher, is quoted in the New York Tribune endorsing the use of guns by individual, anti-slavery settlers: 

"...He (Henry W. Beecher) believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well. . . read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in Sharp's rifle."

This endorsement led to the Sharps Rifle being nicknamed "Beecher's Bible", and it gave a moral argument to men like John Brown who believed in arming the growing conflict over slavery on a grassroots level.

One of the tragedies of history is that Harriet Beecher Stowe, herself, for whatever reason, never had this public debate with Garrison over violent and nonviolent resistance to slavery. Stowe became an overnight celebrity after the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and, although she used that celebrity wisely in many ways to further the cause of anti-slavery, she declined to set the tone at this critical moment as far as the question of nonviolence was concerned, she declined to clarify whether nonviolence was to be equally embraced by both whites and blacks, by both free and enslaved people, she declined, right then, to publicly reply to an insightful, critical review of her work, and one cannot help but wonder what she would have said if she did. It remains a large, missed opportunity in the life of a remarkable, important woman writer. 

The Dullness of Painted Hands

"Painted Hands: A Novel" by Jennifer Zobair, to be published June 11, 2013 by Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN-13: 978-1250027009

When I was a student living in Germany, I clearly remember sitting in a dormitory for Eastern European asylum seekers, sitting on a friend's bed, reading a paperback book of Camus essays and being so incensed that I ended up literally throwing it across the room with so much force that it smacked the opposing cinder block. I have also loved books so much I've started re-reading them immediately upon finishing them, I have carried them around with me like so many lucky talismans; I have folded their pages, and written in their margins, and treated them like a beloved thing from childhood that shows the affection lavished upon it by its own wear and tear. 

Unfortunately, when I finished Jennifer Zobair's "Painted Hands: A Novel", I was bored.

Before continuing, I should note that Jennifer Zobair and I are friends, and even though reviewers ideally shouldn't let their personal feelings peek through when evaluating another friend's art, I was, genuinely, rooting for this book. I wanted to like it. It addresses issues of feminism and multiculturalism in the text, and these are issues I am passionate about. The problem with the book is that it does it in a way that is unsubtle, inserting multiple debates on Islam in the text and sacrificing good story telling along the way. For instance, Zobair has written into her story an Ivy League debate at Harvard between Chase, a right-wing talk radio personality, and Taj Fareed, an academic, on the subject of Islam, but instead of transporting us there, instead of making us feel like we are in the room listening in, we are told, "The debate, or at least the first three quarters of it, was a civilized affair." The lack of a sense of place is a consistent problem throughout the text: we are taken to the Correspondents' Dinner and the most evocative thing we are told is that it, "was a blur of red-carpet frenzy, tame Rich Little jokes, carnivore-friendly food, and the pretense of not being completely starstruck"; we are told we are at "Porter Square Books" without any sense of what this place is or why it is important as a setting, and - most egregiously - we are taken to "Peet's on Labor Day weekend" without knowing, from the story, that Peet's is an iconic coffee shop in Harvard Square. To get any sense of Greater Boston in this book, the reader needs to have gone there first, experienced it first, in real life, before picking up on these brief mentions of location. Needless to say, this is not how good story telling happens. 

In addition to rushing from one scene to another, Zobair has written one of three main characters with such an implausible story line and such inexplicable motives that I found myself laughing out loud when confronted with her chapters. "Hayden" is a white, female lawyer from Colorado who falls in love with "Fadi", a man she meets at an abruptly cancelled wedding, who is engaged to a friend of her close friend, Amra (Amra meets Fadi through Hayden before meeting him later at Amra's friend's engagement party - unfortunately no hijinks ensue). 

Hayden, then, converts to Islam.

A (conveniently, from the point Zobair is hitting us over the head with) conservative strain of Islam that creates an arranged marriage for her with the female leader's son, who she eventually walks out on while he is asleep. While journeying through these implausible plot points we are treated to contrived moments of experiencing Islam for the first time as a convert ("But there were even more rules than she had imagined"), and tedious lectures on the evils of feminism ("Well, of course, I am just suggesting that perhaps women don't need to insinuate themselves into everything"). The point is clear: as a reader, you are supposed to empathize with Hayden and see through her eyes the extremes of Islam, so that you may safely fall back into the arms of self-determined feminism. 

The point is clear, it is so very, very clear that you have to thrust your feet in waders as you slog through the scenes with her character, navigating your way between dress codes and conservative talking points toward some high moment of plot resolution that never comes, because Hayden just sneaks out the back door.

Zobair's other main characters, Zainab and Amra, also have some moments of grappling with being contrived (Zainab, a campaign operative for a female, Republican candidate, inevitably has a relationship with Chase, the aforementioned, right wing talk radio host, while Amra navigates her parents' efforts to marry her off). However, there are moments when Zobair allows these two characters to deal with real problems as real women, and this is when the book shines. Amra's working-woman-while-pregnant stress is poignant and real, and the section where she gives birth to her daughter via an emergency C-section is written with care and compassion. Zainab also has a strong moment when, after a bombing attempt by two American converts to Islam, she refuses to issue her own statement condemning the bombing, a statement which would have been, as Amra puts it, "public and infantilizing and worse."

These exceptional moments are unfortunately few and far between, and by the end of the book the reappearance of another friend, Rukan, and a second boyfriend, and a wedding to make up for the one that was previously cancelled, hardly makes the journey to get there worthwhile. When I did get there, when I ended this book, I felt neither enlightened nor enraged, neither inspired nor in the throws of torrential sorrow, I was just bored, which is a terrible way to end what should have been a much more transportive and transformative book.

Being Smart, and a Size Zero, In a Dove Ad World

My first job after college was student teaching in the inner city in Los Angeles, and my first experience of Los Angeles was staying at the dorms at UCLA, during the first year of Teach for America, when they, and me, and all of us flown in together, were all just trying to figure things out. This was, and likely still is, a great metaphor for LA as a city, a place that is always just on the cusp of figuring things out, just on the edge of leading the rest of the country into some unknown territory of "pure air bars", botox, and the next concoction of tweaked, "natural" health and beauty tips that will somehow ensure that we all live longer, stay healthier, and, as an unspoken consequence, reach the end of that great pursuit of happiness that our country has promised us, complete with cake, and ice cream, and a chocolate egg to celebrate.

None of which, of course, will add to our waistline (see Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life" for the LA ideal of heavenly, guilt-free, indulgent eating).

LA was also the first place that I heard stories of sorority hazing that involved each woman dressing in a bikini, standing up on a table in front of her peers armed with permanent markers, and allowing them to draw circles around her "problem areas", bumps of cellulite on the hips, arms that weren't perfectly toned, etc. etc. LA was the first place where I recall walking along the beach, on a paved, public, pedestrian pathway and glancing into un-curtained windows opened to the sea, one of which contained a woman, fully naked, surrounded by people who looked dressed for a dinner party (I didn't linger long enough to see what all of them were doing, and why - one learns to quickly walk past these things living in LA).  

LA is a city of commercial beauty, one that praises youth and money, never accepting the simple fact of life that, for most of us, these two things don't occur simultaneously. As a young woman, I girded myself against most of it, most of its cynicism, by thrusting my intelligence before me as some nerdy sword and shield, using the armor of the drumbeat of my childhood, when I was labeled ugly, and a loser, as the defensive definition of who I was, and trying my best to ignore the passes, personal, professional, and in passing, that were thrust upon me almost daily.

The real me, un-made-up, sweaty, hiking Toadstool Geologic Park last summer

Since my time in Los Angeles, I've been a size 6, a size 16, and everything else in between. I am now a size 0. I've seen the features of my face fluctuate in the mirror with my changing weight and age, I've added a smallish amount of looseness around my stomach that most women who have had children have (and camouflage), and I've acquired an addiction to anti-aging eye cream that makes me blush just admitting that it exists.

The one thing that has remained a constant throughout all of this is the predictability of society's reactions to me based on the shape of my body. When I am thin (as I am now), I have to, seemingly, want the attention of anonymous men, I have to, seemingly, want to have a champers and hampers lifestyle, full of all of the frivolity that entails. When I was not thin, I was "real", "interesting", "quiet" and a "good mother".

To riff on that line from Sunset Boulevard, I am real, it's society that has gotten fictional.

That's what bothers me the most about this controversial ad Dove has put out there, one that's already been criticized for praising thinness, and a haltingly coy lack of ownership of one's own beauty. One's own sexiness.  It engages in this same fictionalization of beauty equaling happiness, equaling thinness, equaling something resembling enlightenment. I have yet to see a similar ad featuring a man looking at the representation of his features and talking about how important his personal beauty is to him as a parent, how much it will help him professionally, how it "couldn't be more critical to his happiness." This is what this is really about, after all, not beauty, or body perception, but happiness, that ethereal thing floating just outside our fingertips, promised to us in small packages beautifully wrapped, seen in others but not in ourselves, and seen in ourselves by others, because of what we look like, because of the assumptions made about the totality of one's life based on a dress size. 

To fix that, to fix the disease of expectations, internal and external, requires more than a few pencil sketches and some self-help books. It requires unflinching honesty, about who we are, and what we are, and what we want, and what sort of society all of us want to see, without mythologizing, without carefully crafted branding, and with the courage to just live, as we are, and accept others, as we encounter them. This is beyond the scope of a soap ad, granted, but talking about something as silly as a soap ad, with honesty, is a start.

On Wisdom, and Writing a Love Poem, Not About Boston, After the Bombing

Last night, after an afternoon of reading, and re-tweeting, and sorting through the small bits of news coming from the bombing of the Boston Marathon, after confirming that friends and family were safe, I wrote a love poem. Not a deeply profound poem, there was no "we must love one another or die" in its verses, there was no urgent encapsulation of the events of the day. It was just a poem, written to the one person I always write to, as most writers do, and it talked about eating great food, and raiding the wine cellar, and fixing a fountain in the center of town, one that had been dry but that's running, now, thanks to sent instructions, and personal initiative, and the assistance of passersby.  

It seems inappropriate talking about writing about it, and talking about it today, the day when everyone's appropriately, understandably, searching for answers, and opinion makers, and politicians, and religious leaders, are searching for a way to provide them. I am not criticizing any of this, the unspoken architecture of how we respond to disaster. There are wise men and women in great quantity in our society who will battle back and forth with passionate words and genuine belief about what happened, and why, and what we should do about it. Again, there's nothing wrong with that, this is how a free society should respond.

But I think there are times when we lose our wisdom in our need for immediacy. I think there are times when the answers, the correct ones, are still trapped in their seed coat, buried under a few inches of enhanced dirt, and we need to wait, and watch, and give them the time they need to show themselves. I think a part of that is being willing to risk a little silliness, a little love, in the middle of the unspeakable awfulness spoken, and broadcast, and tweeted. We need to take all that in, all the horror, all the tragedy, and then remind ourselves of the reason we are alive, the love of a shared pun falling flat, the memory of friends seen and the happiness of looking forward to seeing them again. 

I think it is when we allow ourselves to immerse in these things, just for a few moments, that the answers awaken, and start to show themselves, pointing green shoots up at the morning sun, and we find our way.

Prayers and love to the people of Boston right now, and the city that I love, that taught me what a city was after leaving the Nebraska prairie. It is, as people have noted, resilient, and strong, and wonderfully curmudgeonly in its dry New England manner, and all of that, and all of the people, there, together, will heal it in the coming days.

Stay strong, Boston, as you always are, and know that we are, too, and that we have your back.

On the Nature of Hate: James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son"

"The Miscegination Ball", a racist political cartoon, circa 1864, criticizing the Republican Party and playing on white fears of racial intermingling. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction #LC-USZ62-14828.

Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Writers write about love, constantly. Personally, as a writer I love to drown myself in love, in the genuine, real feeling of it, experienced personally, seen across mass movements of people coming together to demand justice, even felt as a spiritual thing, across the ages, reading another person's words or staring into their art and feeling that love, that inexplicable connection that makes us human. As humans we like to think that this is what humanity is, love, and that the opposite of it, hate, is something inhuman, not a part of who we are, a discarded emotion best left locked outside to freeze in eternal night.

This view of humanity, that we are all lovers to the exclusion of hate, is anemic at best, and in its insistence at covering over our very human faults it fails to let us see clearly who we are, what we are capable of, and what that capacity has done to build the structures of social injustice.

James Baldwin had no such illusions. In his essay, "Notes of a Native Son", first published in 1955 in Harper's Magazine, he opens with his father's death, and explores the meaning of his life, a life which was, as Baldwin describes it, full of mistrust and, yes, hatred of white people. Set against the backdrop of race riots in Detroit, Baldwin describes driving his father's body to the graveyard, writing, "the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us." His father's mother was born during slavery, and his father was "of the first generation of free men." Physically, Baldwin describes his father as "very handsome", "very black" and "certainly the most bitter man I have ever met." He appears to have been mentally ill, "eaten up by paranoia." He was committed and eventually died of tuberculosis.  

As a child, Baldwin was befriended by a white woman, a school teacher who his father never trusted, "always trying to surprise in her open, Midwestern face the genuine, cunningly hidden, and hideous motivation." Later he warned Baldwin about his white friends in high school, telling him that he, "would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep the Negro down." It wasn't until later in life, when Baldwin was living and working in New Jersey, and experiencing the full thrust of Northern white racism and white supremacy, that he started to understand his father's admonitions. He was refused service at restaurants, in bars, in bowling alleys, at diners, in places to live, forcing him to frequent places he normally wouldn't, adding to his reputation at work, until, "It began to seem that the machinery of the organization I worked for was turning over, day and night, with but one aim: to eject me." It was then that he contracted a malady, "the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels." It was the disease of rage, culminating in another restaurant, and another denied service, and Baldwin throwing a water-mug at the waitress and fleeing immediately afterward.

This time in New Jersey, experiencing daily systemic racism, gave him an insight into his father's word view, into that bitterness and paranoia. 

This is the emotion of the disempowered, the basis of the rage that underlies the hate. For those who are empowered, who are white (like me), straight, male, the hate is not based on real experience but on the fantasy of expectations, a Candy Land of fear similar to Grimm's Fairy Tales, and much like those stories I've seen the joy in the eye of another white person telling them to me, trying to "warn" me against "mixing with the wrong kind", the guilty look pleading acceptance after relating a racist joke that "isn't really racist", the unspoken glance after a black man or a Latina leaves the room, that one that, again, attempts to establish camaraderie over the happenstance of pigmentation. It is most pronounced in places like Selma, Alabama, home to both Brown's Chapel and the grave site of Nathan Bedford Forrest, where you are gently persuaded, if you are white, to visit the latter and not the former. It is more subtle in places like Nebraska, where I grew up, where "them black boys can sure play basketball" is meant as some benign compliment (one which would never be spoken but in a room of white people, only).  

Instead of running away from this emotion, this rage, this fear, this desperate grasp for acceptance, instead of labeling it as "inhuman," we need to accept it for what it is, all too human, all too a part of ourselves, and all too tragically understandable, for it is only when we accept what we are, and what we can be, good and bad, that we can honestly talk about the evil we do in the world, as people, to each other, and start to change it, person by person, together, and move to something that looks like justice.