I love this conversation and it really gets to the heart of things I've wrestled with not only about race but about social categorization in general, especially around gender. The rapid rise of non-binary identity, for example, seems very akin to Thomas's claim at the end: I am neither. As is the counter-claim by the "which side are you on" respondent to his NYT piece. The song that phrase comes from, from coal country, is "They say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there/You'll either be a union man/Or a thug for J.H. Blair." And this is one of the key clues for me: when we claim a battle, we also want as many people on our side as possible. And so whenever there is oppression, we create divisions, based in reality or not. We tend to want our battles to be inevitable, sewn into the fabric of the universe like so many fantasy stories (not to mention religious fantasies like Paradise Lost) but this points to something else that happens: when we war, we do the sewing, or more like we do the rending.
A phrase I keep coming back to about American race construction is "a lie made real" and I hear that echoed here. And because it's been made real, and people have both spent their lives and had their lives spent without their consent in that reality, it is real. But WHY it is real remains unaddressed. No one wants to know they have invested their lives in a lie. Not about nationhood, not about ancestry, not about gender, not about anything. It's an appalling thought.
My dad believed in ancestry category as a determiner of character and quality. And ancestry DOES matter, in that who my ancestors were is an essential part of who we are, as much as our relationship to gender and sexuality is. But his insistence that we look at African ancestry and Jewish ancestry and east-coast and midwest US ancestry (I never said this made any sense) as the determining aspect of ancestry that he wanted to pay attention to in others—and himself—ended up blinding him I think. And in restrospect, the point is that it ceded the argument's frame without ever intentionally doing so. Once you accept that category implies inherent quality, and take that as your starting point, all your arguments will end up flowing through that postulate. I don't agree that individualized and atomic identity, and broad human identity are the only two rational bases. We do form nations and families and religions and those are important. But the point here is that we recognize when we have ceded an argument.
For myself, one of the key bits that's missing in some discussion of American race is the idea that Black American history, culture, and persons are essential to what it means to be American. Whenever we try to deny that history, to hear it fully, we deny part of America as a whole. We form a lie, a lie as pernicious as the one that forms the basis of American racial categorization. It's a lie about a lie. What fascinates me is how and why this lie, the lie of Black peripherality, is formed and reinforced, sometimes inadvertently in the name of not erasing Black identity. I have wondered about the thought exercise, as a white American, of constructing a US history with the black experience at its center. In essence, this is what the 1619 project is about. What if Black people and the broad experience of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and a persistent, stubborn desire to be seen as fully and inextricably American and human, were in fact the single thread that runs through all of what we are as a nation. I don't accept that this narrative is the only singular narrative, any more than the powerful-politician-and-rich-person thread narrative is. But just as we expect a novel to be self-contained and confident, I like the way that this kind of narrative is beginning in my lifetime to actually be centered, to be put next to all the other narratives.
As always, there's a lot of food for thought here. A few initial musings: I think the non-binary thing is a bit different in kind because that seems to be about demanding recognition from others of something that I'm not convinced really exists: a bit like asking people to see you and address you differently because you are an Aries. Beyond awkward pronoun use, I don't know what treating a non-binary person differently would even entail.
I'm not a fan of the 1619 Project, either. I don't think slavery was central to the reasons for America's founding or to the reasons for the American Revolution. An America without slavery would have been a lot truer to the revolutionary spirit. It took some bizarre mental acrobatics to justify slavery in that context. As Samuel Johnson put it, "Why do we always hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?" But I do think black culture—music, literature, writing, fashion, sport, soul food—is absolutely central to American culture, even THE driving force behind modern American culture. Black Americans as a group have really punched above their weight there.
There is a history book I love and recommend to everyone that centres the black experience (across the pond): David Olusaga's Black and British—really thorough scholarship and a nuanced exploration of the issues involved. In particular, he puts paid to the myth that the British should somehow get credit for ending slavery. That's like giving a violent guy credit for having stopped beating his wife. I absolutely think individual abolitionists deserve recognition, but that abolition should be some kind of point of British pride? God no.
To me the question 1619 raises is not whether slavery was central to the aspects of American history that end up as the central narrative in our orthodox national history, but whether those aspects are themselves properly THE central tentpoles of our nation. And I think there's a VERY strong case to be made that the story of enslavement and the maintenance of group oppressions based solely on ancestry in the face of a theoretical structure based in liberty, is in fact the central story of America, that the political freedom from Britain was always in tension both with slavery and with the nation's relationship to the continent's indigenous peoples. And later with a variety of other non-Anglo populations. But centrally, from the start (from 1619), Black people and (from 1492) indigenous Americans. And while I don't agree with everything Heather Cox RIchardson says, I think her underlying insight that there's fundamental conflict embedded in this country's history as 13 colonies, between slave economies and polities, and free economies and polities, and that battles for dominance between those two broad centers of American economic and political power form a continuum from the nation's starting point. That to me is also the takeaway from 1619: the continuum. The counterargument tends to be one of slavery and the oppression of Black people as a freak accident of history that we're all done with now, and nothing about the American order we inherited has race-based oppression built in, at least not any more. Which I do not buy in the least. That I loved about your conversation with Thomas is that it felt like an inquiry into the shape and subtle texture of that relationship and history, not presuming that race is anything other than a construct, and that we need to hold it up to our actual personal ancestries to test the truth of the stories we tell about group ancestry identities.
I think I disagree about race-based oppression being baked in, but I'm not familiar enough with US history to argue this point. I'll give it some more thought, though, as I always do when you comment!
Mar 8, 2023·edited Mar 8, 2023Liked by Iona Italia
Sincere thanks for passing along this heartfelt exchange. I’ve had an eye on Mr Williams for a while and will be getting that book of his. A few months after this correspondence, as the racial drop zone reeled in response to the Floyd killing amidst covid disruption, he posted a reading list that included some of the works he had alluded to in your letters. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, so am still working on it.
The issues are personal for this aging white guy. At 14, 3 years after my mother passed at home in the small midwestern town where I’d done most of my growing-up, I took my place in a new household with my dad’s new partner and her three daughters. Ethel was a light-skinned black woman while Mikki, Claudia and Renita were all darker. The arrangement was awkwardly possible in our new town, a near suburb of LA, because it was undergoing a rapid demographic transformation. It lasted almost three years, ultimately collapsing under the burden of, among other factors, a 30+ year age gap between the two adults in the equation.
The old man and I stayed in the house and I graduated from the high school down the street on schedule, but well in advance of the still below-the-radar movement toward a level of racial mixing that is now visible and widely accepted. As a nearly clueless young swain I was prone to many missteps, but the conviction that my black and brown friends, classmates and teammates were irreplaceable had become permanently rooted. I was able to parlay that into a secondary school teaching career across the tracks from my adopted town (ironically self-appointed “The All-American City” in the years before it underwent the change) because, despite my paleface, my comfort level was sufficient to the task of commuting to ‘South Central’ for (most of) the last 30 years. I’m happy to have had the opportunity, comfortable in the role of aging white boy.
And the ties that bound the patched-together step-family have been renewed on a friendly and positive footing. We’ll be having a wee bit of a get together in about a month. The strife of history demands some accounting of course, but that is played-out on a different stage. The more intimate level of connection is what we carry around in our heart of hearts, and it can’t be effaced. We’re slowly arriving at the place it can call home. Let more keep coming.
Loved these letter then and Iove them now! I credit you, Kmele, and Thomas with realizing that race is a negotiation between the individual and their neighbors.
I love this conversation and it really gets to the heart of things I've wrestled with not only about race but about social categorization in general, especially around gender. The rapid rise of non-binary identity, for example, seems very akin to Thomas's claim at the end: I am neither. As is the counter-claim by the "which side are you on" respondent to his NYT piece. The song that phrase comes from, from coal country, is "They say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there/You'll either be a union man/Or a thug for J.H. Blair." And this is one of the key clues for me: when we claim a battle, we also want as many people on our side as possible. And so whenever there is oppression, we create divisions, based in reality or not. We tend to want our battles to be inevitable, sewn into the fabric of the universe like so many fantasy stories (not to mention religious fantasies like Paradise Lost) but this points to something else that happens: when we war, we do the sewing, or more like we do the rending.
A phrase I keep coming back to about American race construction is "a lie made real" and I hear that echoed here. And because it's been made real, and people have both spent their lives and had their lives spent without their consent in that reality, it is real. But WHY it is real remains unaddressed. No one wants to know they have invested their lives in a lie. Not about nationhood, not about ancestry, not about gender, not about anything. It's an appalling thought.
My dad believed in ancestry category as a determiner of character and quality. And ancestry DOES matter, in that who my ancestors were is an essential part of who we are, as much as our relationship to gender and sexuality is. But his insistence that we look at African ancestry and Jewish ancestry and east-coast and midwest US ancestry (I never said this made any sense) as the determining aspect of ancestry that he wanted to pay attention to in others—and himself—ended up blinding him I think. And in restrospect, the point is that it ceded the argument's frame without ever intentionally doing so. Once you accept that category implies inherent quality, and take that as your starting point, all your arguments will end up flowing through that postulate. I don't agree that individualized and atomic identity, and broad human identity are the only two rational bases. We do form nations and families and religions and those are important. But the point here is that we recognize when we have ceded an argument.
For myself, one of the key bits that's missing in some discussion of American race is the idea that Black American history, culture, and persons are essential to what it means to be American. Whenever we try to deny that history, to hear it fully, we deny part of America as a whole. We form a lie, a lie as pernicious as the one that forms the basis of American racial categorization. It's a lie about a lie. What fascinates me is how and why this lie, the lie of Black peripherality, is formed and reinforced, sometimes inadvertently in the name of not erasing Black identity. I have wondered about the thought exercise, as a white American, of constructing a US history with the black experience at its center. In essence, this is what the 1619 project is about. What if Black people and the broad experience of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and a persistent, stubborn desire to be seen as fully and inextricably American and human, were in fact the single thread that runs through all of what we are as a nation. I don't accept that this narrative is the only singular narrative, any more than the powerful-politician-and-rich-person thread narrative is. But just as we expect a novel to be self-contained and confident, I like the way that this kind of narrative is beginning in my lifetime to actually be centered, to be put next to all the other narratives.
As always, there's a lot of food for thought here. A few initial musings: I think the non-binary thing is a bit different in kind because that seems to be about demanding recognition from others of something that I'm not convinced really exists: a bit like asking people to see you and address you differently because you are an Aries. Beyond awkward pronoun use, I don't know what treating a non-binary person differently would even entail.
I'm not a fan of the 1619 Project, either. I don't think slavery was central to the reasons for America's founding or to the reasons for the American Revolution. An America without slavery would have been a lot truer to the revolutionary spirit. It took some bizarre mental acrobatics to justify slavery in that context. As Samuel Johnson put it, "Why do we always hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?" But I do think black culture—music, literature, writing, fashion, sport, soul food—is absolutely central to American culture, even THE driving force behind modern American culture. Black Americans as a group have really punched above their weight there.
There is a history book I love and recommend to everyone that centres the black experience (across the pond): David Olusaga's Black and British—really thorough scholarship and a nuanced exploration of the issues involved. In particular, he puts paid to the myth that the British should somehow get credit for ending slavery. That's like giving a violent guy credit for having stopped beating his wife. I absolutely think individual abolitionists deserve recognition, but that abolition should be some kind of point of British pride? God no.
To me the question 1619 raises is not whether slavery was central to the aspects of American history that end up as the central narrative in our orthodox national history, but whether those aspects are themselves properly THE central tentpoles of our nation. And I think there's a VERY strong case to be made that the story of enslavement and the maintenance of group oppressions based solely on ancestry in the face of a theoretical structure based in liberty, is in fact the central story of America, that the political freedom from Britain was always in tension both with slavery and with the nation's relationship to the continent's indigenous peoples. And later with a variety of other non-Anglo populations. But centrally, from the start (from 1619), Black people and (from 1492) indigenous Americans. And while I don't agree with everything Heather Cox RIchardson says, I think her underlying insight that there's fundamental conflict embedded in this country's history as 13 colonies, between slave economies and polities, and free economies and polities, and that battles for dominance between those two broad centers of American economic and political power form a continuum from the nation's starting point. That to me is also the takeaway from 1619: the continuum. The counterargument tends to be one of slavery and the oppression of Black people as a freak accident of history that we're all done with now, and nothing about the American order we inherited has race-based oppression built in, at least not any more. Which I do not buy in the least. That I loved about your conversation with Thomas is that it felt like an inquiry into the shape and subtle texture of that relationship and history, not presuming that race is anything other than a construct, and that we need to hold it up to our actual personal ancestries to test the truth of the stories we tell about group ancestry identities.
I think I disagree about race-based oppression being baked in, but I'm not familiar enough with US history to argue this point. I'll give it some more thought, though, as I always do when you comment!
Sincere thanks for passing along this heartfelt exchange. I’ve had an eye on Mr Williams for a while and will be getting that book of his. A few months after this correspondence, as the racial drop zone reeled in response to the Floyd killing amidst covid disruption, he posted a reading list that included some of the works he had alluded to in your letters. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, so am still working on it.
The issues are personal for this aging white guy. At 14, 3 years after my mother passed at home in the small midwestern town where I’d done most of my growing-up, I took my place in a new household with my dad’s new partner and her three daughters. Ethel was a light-skinned black woman while Mikki, Claudia and Renita were all darker. The arrangement was awkwardly possible in our new town, a near suburb of LA, because it was undergoing a rapid demographic transformation. It lasted almost three years, ultimately collapsing under the burden of, among other factors, a 30+ year age gap between the two adults in the equation.
The old man and I stayed in the house and I graduated from the high school down the street on schedule, but well in advance of the still below-the-radar movement toward a level of racial mixing that is now visible and widely accepted. As a nearly clueless young swain I was prone to many missteps, but the conviction that my black and brown friends, classmates and teammates were irreplaceable had become permanently rooted. I was able to parlay that into a secondary school teaching career across the tracks from my adopted town (ironically self-appointed “The All-American City” in the years before it underwent the change) because, despite my paleface, my comfort level was sufficient to the task of commuting to ‘South Central’ for (most of) the last 30 years. I’m happy to have had the opportunity, comfortable in the role of aging white boy.
And the ties that bound the patched-together step-family have been renewed on a friendly and positive footing. We’ll be having a wee bit of a get together in about a month. The strife of history demands some accounting of course, but that is played-out on a different stage. The more intimate level of connection is what we carry around in our heart of hearts, and it can’t be effaced. We’re slowly arriving at the place it can call home. Let more keep coming.
Thank you so much for sharing that vivid and atmospheric account of yourself. I feel as though I got a little snapshot into another world there.
Loved these letter then and Iove them now! I credit you, Kmele, and Thomas with realizing that race is a negotiation between the individual and their neighbors.
Thank you, Jessemy! A negotiation, indeed!