What I want to write about for today is how Haiti went from a brutally oppressive slave plantation to an independent nation, but what I mostly know about Haiti is how little I know. I just find it intriguing, for several reasons: how widespread the revolt was, a real grassroots movement. How they defeated England, Spain, and Napoleon, for heaven’s sake. How the successful revolt by slaves got the attention of US Americans: definitely that of northern abolitionists and southern newspapers, who commented on it, and surely that of enslaved people as well. The question of whether the Haitian revolutionaries were inspired by the US war of independence (seems likely enough), in which case there is an elegant circling-round, with our revolution partially inspiring theirs, then theirs in turn inspiring our “next revolution,” the Civil War. The interesting personalities of the leaders, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Boukman Dutty (I’m finding myself wanting to read a biography of each, and I almost never read biographies). How complex the racial and class relationships were, with a caste of black landowners, maybe even an aristocracy, such as never existed in the antebellum US South. How after the Haitians established a free republic, they waged a war to free the slaves of the Dominican Republic. How, nevertheless, their leaders were not agreed on whether to sustain a democracy or set up new autocracies.

If there were any sense of fair play in world politics, everyone would keep their hands of Haiti–a country that had overcome so much, the only one where slaves reasserted their rights and took over to the point of establishing a new republic, should be hailed and helped by all democracies from then on. (I know, naive. I also have this idea that people who survive cancer should all live to old age and never die of something as ridiculous as a car accident.) Obviously it doesn’t work like that, and not only because Haiti’s leaders vacillated between democracy and dictatorship. The US, far from seeing Haiti as a sister in freedom, invaded in 1915 and set up a puppet government, just one of many cases of the US invading a Caribbean or Latin American country at the behest of corporations. Of course, then-president Wilson was such a white supremacist that, far from rejoicing to see a former slave state gain freedom and equality, he probably found it galling. Again, if black people could run a country, what did that say about his harsh judgment about “governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes” after the Civil War? (Read his chapter on Reconstruction in his History of the American People, volume IX, if you can stand it.) We’ve meddled in Haiti ever since.

This year I have a somewhat different internet-related practice: not to use the internet as entertainment. In his poem “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot prayed, “Teach us to sit still.” It’s something I strive to learn, and the net is amphetamines for my monkey mind. So although I will appear on Facebook, I will endeavor not to fritter. Right now I want to go over there just to see what’s going on. That’s the kind of thing I’m planning to resist from now until Easter.

photo by JamesJen, used by permission (Wikimedia Creative Commons)

The line is fuzzy. Reading the week’s secrets every Saturday night at Postsecret seems like a spiritual practice, even though it sometimes affords all the satisfactions of gossip; reading others’ blog entries is serious but can easily drift into just fooling around; using Facebook to see how a friend is doing or take some political action honors the spirit of the practice, but can easily turn into mere entertainment. I will have to be attentive to what’s calling me to a webpage in order to know when to continue and when to stop.

My positive practice is to walk the labyrinth each day I’m at church. The first couple of days’ practice will be to restore it. It’s made of river stones, which are easily dislodged, and the path has actually been altered in at least one place, as I realized when I walked it the other day and discovered that once you get to the center of the labyrinth you can walk right out. There may be labyrinths with that design, but ours is the Cretan labyrinth and follows the same long path out as one took in. I for one need that contemplation time both going into the center and emerging.

I’m going to continue the support of justice work I began last year by putting much more time into the abolition work I’ve been neglecting. I have no desire, or evening time, to be on organizational boards. What I do best is write, speak, coach volunteers, and teach, so I think this is the time to dig out my notes for a UU abolition curriculum and get a draft done. I’ll also be helping the good folks at Aptos, which has the only anti-slavery action group of any UU congregation that I know of (if there are others, please chime in in the comments!), to have a strong presence at General Assembly (GA), where the Congregational Study Action Issue they proposed is being considered as the next official UU-wide issue and where they have a program on the GA schedule, bringing Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves to tell UUs what the problem is and what we can do about it. I already give to anti-trafficking organizations, but I’ll give a special donation for the season.

Do you have, or have you had, any practices for Lent? What are they?

I love children’s literature. If I didn’t have a child to read to, I’d just have to sit in the children’s section of the library without one. And of course, we have a large bookshelf full of the books we loved as kids.

The characters and the authors of these books are overwhelmingly white. Most of them were written before 1975, many long before, and few publishers then sought out people of color, or encouraged them when they came along. For that matter, as of 2001, one editor writes here, there were still very few African-American writers and illustrators in the field, and a 2007 book by an education professor observes the same thing. And yet, John Steptoe, who wrote and illustrated the gorgeous Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters during his sadly short career, said plainly: “I am not an exception to the rule among my race of people. I am the rule. By that I mean there are a great many others like me where I come from.”

When children read, they need to see people who look like them. This truism, once doubtful in my mind, has become a rock-solid fact since I began spending my days with a small child. The munchkin identifies strongly with people in the books she reads, and most of all with people like herself. To illustrate: she frequently, even obsessively, points to a character on each page and says “I want to be that person.” It is almost never an animal, and it is almost never a boy: it’s a girl. If the girls are only minor characters, she identifies with one of them, putting herself on the margin of the story (thank you, J. K. Rowling, for Hermione Granger–your wizarding world is still male-dominated, but you did put one smart, brave, complex girl in the marquee). If there are no girls in the story, she chooses no one. Fortunately, things have come a long way since A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien, and female characters are no longer merely a token presence in children’s books. But whom would she see who looked like her if she were black?

I would love to hear about your favorite children’s books that are by African-American authors and illustrators, and/or feature black characters.

Here are some of mine. An * means they have prominent characters who are black, an @ means they’re by a black author or illustrator, though of course I often don’t know anything about them but their name. In some cases, like Bette Greene and Ezra Jack Keats, I know they aren’t African-American, but I might be missing some who are.

* Island Counting 1 2 3 by Frané Lessac. Our favorite counting book, with terrific illustrations of an unnamed Caribbean island, and lots of fun things to find (e.g., on the “four” page there are four vanes on the windmill, four donkeys, four leaves on each plant, etc.).

@ Everywhere Babies, a board book I love for many reasons, but one of them is that families of all types and colors are featured without any comment, just as if families just come in all gender combinations, age combinations, and colors! Imagine!

* ABC A Family Alphabet Book, written by Bobbie Combs, illustrated by Desiree Keane and Brian Kappa. All of the parents are same-sex couples, and many are black.

* The Snowy Day, A Letter to Amy (naturally a childhood favorite), and the others about Peter and friends by Ezra Jack Keats

* Bear on a Bike, written Stella Gladstone and illustrated by Debbie Harter

* @ Lift Every Voice and Sing, words by James Weldon Johnson, illustrations by Elizabeth Catlett

* @ I Want To Be, written by Thylias Moss, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.

@ for that matter, anything illustrated by Jerry Pinkney

@ Freight Train and anything else by Donald Crews

* Chicken Sunday, Patricia Polacco (Polacco, who is white, has several books with prominent African-American characters–this is the only one of them I’ve read)

* the Max and Kate stories that are featured in each issue of Ladybug.

Moving on to books for older kids:

* Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe, Bette Greene

* Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, Louise Fitzhugh

And the best African-American picture book we haven’t seen:

A Little Bit of Soul Food, Amy Wilson Sanger. As far as I know, Sanger isn’t black, and if this book is like the others of hers we have, it shows no people, but they are such great portrayals of one aspect of a culture–its food. Yum Yum Dim Sum and My First Book of Sushi are perennial favorites in our house.

I bought for Munchkin, but haven’t read with/listened to with her yet, Hip Hop Speaks to Children. She seldom wants to listen to music, preferring audiobooks in the car. It looks great, though.

Your nominees?

It’s my drawing day, so I went looking for figurative drawings by African-American artists and found some beauties.

“At Rest,” by Charles White

“Study for Willie J.,” by Charles White

Self Portrait, by Samella Lewis. She was 19 years old.

“Morning Is Here, No Dawn,” by John Thomas Biggers (photo #4 in the slideshow). Actually, this one is a lithograph, but wow, what a draftsman.

Also, just today we went to SFMOMA and I was intrigued by the very different kind of work of Mark Bradford: very large collages, or assemblages–or given his process, maybe the term is disassemblages–made of many layers of found paper. By the time we got to that floor, the munchkin was very anxious to get to the children’s room, so I only got a peek. I will have to go back and spend a long time looking at these without a child in tow.

Pitchers and catchers are reporting. Looks like it’s time for a visit to the Negro Leagues.

Professional baseball was not really officially segregated; it didn’t have to be. After 1900, teams maintained their no-blacks status through a “gentlemen’s agreement,” to use one of the more bizarre misnomers in our language. Baseball’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, deserves a lot of the blame, as various managers tried to add black players to their teams (sometimes even passing them off as Indians or white) but were prevented from doing so by Landis. In the 19th century, baseball teams had frequently been made up of a mix of races.

If baseball had been integrated during his lifetime, Josh Gibson would very likely be remembered as the best player in major league history (as it is, he’s widely considered the game’s greatest catcher). In a short career–he died at age 35, a few months before Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers–he posted incredible stats, even allowing for the purported inaccuracy of Negro League and Caribbean records. He is sometimes referred to as “the black Babe Ruth,” but given Gibson’s approximately 800 career home runs (Ruth hit 714; the MLB record holder, Barry Bonds, hit 762) and his career batting average of .359 (Ruth’s was a mere .342), the Babe ought to be called “the white Josh Gibson.”

A particularly nasty strain of racism in baseball implies that black players don’t make good pitchers or catchers–not coincidentally, the brains of the team. Apparently the advocates of this point of view never heard of Gibson, or pitcher Satchel Paige either.

Some of the theological issues that engage me most are theodicy, the interplay between our lived experiences and our theologies, humanism, and naturalistic theism. As I prepared a talk last fall on humanism, theism, and naturalism, it became clear to me that I should be reading much more from black humanists. From the little I’ve read so far from such theologians as Anthony Pinn and William R. Jones, humanism as a whole (and the variety I know best, Unitarian Universalist humanism) could learn a few things from African-American humanists:

1. An emphasis on the evil done by human beings. Banjamin Mays is critical of humanism but makes an illuminating point that among African-Americans, it may be that humanist perspectives “do not develop as the results of the findings of modern science, nor from the observations that nature is cruel and indifferent”–here I would interject, “as they frequently have done among more privileged people”–”but primarily because in the social situation, the [black American] finds himself [or herself] hampered and restricted . . . Heretical ideas of God develop because in the social situation, the ‘breaks’ seem to be against the Negro and the black thinkers are unable to harmonize this fact with the God pictured by Christianity.” I am white and privileged in many other ways, yet this echoes my experience growing up Jewish and, from hearing the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust from a very early age, being fully aware of the almost unimaginable depths of human evil. As a result of its clearsightedness about human evil, black humanism offers…
2. …a liberationist perspective that, in contrast, has tended to be weak in the (mostly white) humanism I have encountered within Unitarian Universalism.
3. A positive declaration of what it means to be humanist.Like Unitarian Universalism as a whole, humanism within UUism can get stuck defining itself by what it is not. I haven’t read Pinn’s Why Lord?, but according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Pinn, in it he “notes that Black humanism has no interest in disproving the existence of God”; it is “not overly concerned with God as a negative myth, but rather God as a liberating myth that is nonetheless unsubstantiated.” Thus “African-Americans need not waste their time disproving God’s existence, but are simply better off seeking their liberation with the human tools of ‘desire for transformation, human creativity, physical strength, and untapped collective potential.’”
4. And the final, perhaps most obvious lesson of black humanism is: There are a lot of black humanists out there. Why aren’t more of them finding a home within Unitarian Universalism?

I gave blood today (thank you, Stanford Blood Center!), which always puts me in a good mood and gives me reason to reflect on Charles Drew, the surgeon who developed blood-preservation processes such as the separation of plasma that made blood banks possible.

Charles Drew (Drew is sitting on the table on the right). Collection of the National Library of Medicine.

His research came just in time to save thousands of lives in World War II–the “Blood for Britain” program sent US blood donations to English soldiers and civilians, and would not have been possible a few years earlier. However, when the US entered the war, the US military requested that the American Red Cross only accept blood from whites, and they complied. When humanitarian groups protested, the policy was changed so that all blood was accepted, but it was segregated so that white people would receive only white people’s blood, black people only black people’s, a ludicrous and dangerous form of discrimination that Drew publicly protested.

Drew died at age 45 in a car accident. The legend that he bled to death for lack of medical treatment–specifically, being refused blood–at a whites-only hospital  is just that, an urban legend that sounded probable enough but, according to reliable witnesses, was not true. It got its legs not only because the painful irony makes a compelling story, but because of its plausibility: African-Americans were routinely turned away from hospitals, with many deaths as a result. Spencie Love, author of One Blood, pairs the story of Charles Drew with that of Maltheus Reeves Avery, another man who died of car-accident injuries in the same county, in the same year, because the hospital to which he was taken–a different one–had no remaining “black beds.”

African-Americans’ warranted mistrust of doctors and blood banks still keeps many African-American potential donors from giving blood, piling tragedy upon tragedy.

A bright spot in the story, however, is that hundreds of millions of people have received donated blood since the development of the blood bank. It is a safe bet that if you’re reading this, someone you love is alive today because of Drew’s research.

You write today’s post: who’s your favorite black writer?

I asked my wife and she didn’t hesitate: “James Baldwin.” I thought Octavia Butler would have given him a run for his money, since Joy is a big sci-fi reader and loves Butler.

Both of those would be high on my list, as is August Wilson, but I’ll say Toni Morrison for the way she gets inside so many different kinds of people in creating her characters.

Over to you.

(ETA: Thanks, Thea. I’d originally written “Olivia Butler,” may OB’s spirit forgive me!)

Michelle Alexander’s recent book, The New Jim Crow, picks up the tale told by Slavery By Another Name. As she writes in her eloquent opening paragraph:

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

She goes on to write, “An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history.” Today’s disenfranchisement of African American men has come about through a system that is formally color-blind: the criminal justice system.

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind [with Jim Crow]. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.

And the new criminals–almost ten times as many as there were before the “war on drugs” was declared–are disproportionately black. Here are some things I thought before I heard Alexander speak last November, and what I now believe to be the truth.

What I thought before: black people use and sell drugs at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Sure, there’s racism in the criminal justice system, but one reason the prison population is disproportionately black is that African-Americans commit a large percentage of crime.

What I think now: black and white people use and sell drugs at about the same rate.  The National Institute of Drug Abuse reports of its studies of secondary-school students: “Contrary to popular assumption, at
all three grade levels African-American students have substantially lower rates of use of most licit and illicit drugs than do Whites. These include any illicit drug use, most of the specific illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.” (Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use: Overview of Key Findings, 2006) “Contrary to popular assumption” has to be the biggest understatement of the year. Why was this report not the top story of every newspaper in the country?

What I thought before: the “war on drugs” was declared because drug use was on the rise. It’s misconceived, but we had to do something about all that crack.

What I think now: drug-related crimes were falling when Reagan declared the war on drugs in 1982. The word “crack” was barely known–it certainly was not a media buzzword, or an epidemic of black neighborhoods.

What I thought before: the penal population has gone up somewhat over my lifetime.

What I think now: In the past thirty years, the population in the penal system has not risen gradually or modestly, but rocketed from 300,000 to over 2,000,000.

What I thought before: the United States’s  high rate of imprisonment is due at least in part to its having a higher crime rate than other countries.

What I think now: “Between 1960 and 1990 . . . official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period” (7). We don’t have a higher crime rate–we just deal with crime via much higher rates of incarceration.

What I thought before: Racism is present in the criminal justice system, the way it is present everywhere. It’s a problem that concerns me, but calling it the equivalent of Jim Crow is nothing more than a rhetorical flourish.

What I think now: The criminal justice system has been pressed into the service of an agenda that has changed form over the years but has not diminished: the social control of racial minorities, especially African-Americans. The means was once Jim Crow; now it is mass incarceration, which is truly, not just rhetorically, the new Jim Crow.

I’m devouring this book, even though every bite burns going down. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you get a chance to see Michelle Alexander in person, don’t miss it; her presentation was riveting.