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Black History Month, day 15
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.
Black History Month, day 14
I knew that terrible conditions continued to oppress black Americans after Emancipation, of course. I knew that lynchings and the unequal application of the law kept a boot on their necks. I knew, for that matter, that slavery is still going strong around the world. But I didn’t know half the stuff documented in Slavery By Another Name, aired yesterday and available for viewing here now.
If you want to place someone beneath the notice of the public, declare them a criminal–it will give you lots of leeway for abusing them without anyone being willing to intervene. If they haven’t done anything illegal, make new laws that criminalize things they are already doing. The former slaveholding states would tolerate neither the equality of black people with white nor the loss of all that free labor. And so the law against vagrancy–the inability to prove that one has a job–was “dredged up from legal obscurity” and used to sweep black men into prison. (Once again, in our own wave of high unemployment, we have political leaders proposing penalties for being poor: Judson Phillips, president of the Tea Party Nation, recently spoke approvingly of the 18th century law against voting if one did not own real estate. Last November would have been my first election! And actual prison sentences for debt are on the rise, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal, and despite federal debtors’ prisons’ having been abolished 180 years ago.) Defendants were required to pay for the expenses the state incurred in convicting them. If they couldn’t pay the fees to ” the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses,” they were in debt and had to work it off–again, laws created in order to manufacture criminals, i.e., slave laborers. Furthermore, contract laws were in place to penalize anyone attempting to leave a job before an advance had been worked off”–another form of thinly-veiled enslavement, practiced frequently today in countries such as India and the United States.
I wrote 1865-1945 because the author of the book Slavery By Another Name, Douglas A. Blackmon–another journalist with the Wall Street Journal–focuses on the scope of 80 years. It seems to me that this practice is far from over, but that’s for an upcoming post.
For today, please be aware that there are more slaves in the world today than there were in the entire 400 years of the African slave trade. Chocolate and flowers are industries with a lot of slave labor. If you want to give a Valentine to children in West Africa and women in South America, buy the chocolate or flowers that profit their ethical bosses, not the exploiters. Look for the fair trade symbol. One World Flowers is a good option for roses, and your local natural foods store probably carries non-slave-produced chocolate brands, such as Divine, Tcho, Theo, and Equal Exchange. (Whole Paycheck is not my favorite food store, but they are a good source for fair trade chocolate.)
Black History Month, day 9
Dan Harper, our Associate Minister of Religious Education, and I offered a class at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto called Current Issues in Liberal Religion. On January 24, 2012, our topic was “Race and Liberal Religion,” and I gave this presentation.
Black History Month, day 7
Project Implicit is a Harvard-based project studying the differences between the attitudes we think we hold and those we really do hold. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by the researchers, claims to “[demonstrate] the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods.” If you’re interested in the workings of your own mind, it’s fascinating.
I believe some of the barriers to racial equality are subtle racism, fear, guilt, and shame, all of which keep us from candid conversation. Certainly many of the white liberal and progressive people I know are afraid to talk about race, because they fear that they will be perceived to be, or discovered to be, racist. Knowing ourselves more fully can help us move through these barriers and toward a more honest conversation with others.
One question that interests the research team is whether people’s stated views on race match up with their unconscious attitudes, revealed through the IAT. To find out something about whether you prefer white or black people, or to take another test–others include one’s views on age, weapons, and various ethnicities–click here. And congratulations on taking the Delphic advice to know thyself.
Black History Month, day 5
A letter from a man named Jourdon Anderson, emancipated from slavery, to his former master, in 1865, has gone viral over the past few days. If you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy it, and if you have, enjoy it again:
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
Naturally, the question immediately arose whether this letter was genuine, as well it should considering the frauds that circulate the ‘net. As established by links from the wonderful website Letters of Note, there was definitely a person named Jourdon Anderson in the stated time and place, and the letter was printed in the newspaper at the time, with a preface explaining that it Mr. Anderson dictated it, as illiterate people do when they want to correspond with someone far away. (In Mexico City there is a plaza known for its many typists set up at small tables, to whom people bring their letters to be read, and to whom they dictate the responses, for a fee. Its use has declined in recent years, though I don’t know whether that’s because more people can read and write, the service has shifted to internet cafes, or almost everyone has access to a phone.) That doesn’t resolve the question of whether the letter was actually composed, or the language made more sophisticated, by the person who wrote it down, as some commenters have pointed out.
And so we move effortlessly from racism to classism: the assumption that someone illiterate and uneducated could not use language that is so clever and ironic. What percentage of the world’s population over history has never learned to read and write, both within literate societies and within oral ones? Is it so unimaginable that many of them have used the spoken word with style and subtlety, despite (or even because of) not using written language? I find it unimaginable that they would not, not just because of obvious examples such as (the disputed) Homer, but because developing the necessary into an art is what people do. Look at the gorgeous baskets and pottery people made thousands of years ago, not content to create something functional but making them works of the highest skill and art. Mr. Anderson was an artist with language, and I’m glad his letter has survived for us to read.
Black History Month, day 3
Another obstacle in the “Jim Crow obstacle course” was driving to the polls. The exhibit said that rumors would circulate on election day that black drivers would all be stopped; they were plausible enough, since harassment by the police and vigilantes was common. It also featured this chilling photo, from Life, showing a Clinton, Tennessee mob harassing black drivers. I believe the photo dates from when twelve black students in Clinton integrated the high school. I always wonder who the people in these pictures are and if they are proud, or ashamed, to show them to their grandchildren now. What must it be like to have one of your cruellest moments recorded in Life Magazine?
I also learned about the Green Book, the guide to where to find gas, lodging, food, and restrooms if you were traveling through places restricted by race–which included plenty of northern sundown towns, not just the Jim Crow South. Of course one would need something like this, but I never thought about all the things people did to accommodate a humiliating and potentially dangerous situation. Mark Knopfler wrote this song about a traveling band of gospel singers–clearly, the issue spoke to him decades later, as it does to me.
The lines “We’re a long way from home, just let’s pay the man and go” are such a concise expression of the weariness of living under daily discrimination.
You know the feeling you get when you go to another room for a distinct purpose and the moment you walk in, you forget what it was? I now get that with websites. “I know I opened this particular window for a reason . . . now what was I doing here?”
Spoiler alert: this post reveals the end of the movie Grave of the Fireflies.
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Joy gave an inspired gift to our Munchkin for Christmas: the complete films of Studio Ghibli. This is the great Japanese animation studio, headed by Hayao Miyazaki, that has produced My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and other excellent movies. Now Munchkin can watch Kiki’s Delivery Service over and over with no more video rental fees. (Pixar writers and directors, please take note! I know you adore Miyazaki and frequently pay tribute to his movies, so have you noticed how many of his main characters are girls? Not tokens, not supporting roles, but the stars? If he can do it, so can you.)
So we have been watching these movies, and some of them get into more grown-up territory than Kiki. Our Neighbors the Yamadas are short pieces satirizing family life very funny for grownups, but a little over the munchkin’s head: picture a less frenetic, more realistic The Simpsons. Munchkin enjoyed Whisper of the Heart, but it’s really a coming-of-age movie about a teenager’s falling in love and searching for a goal for her life. A few nights ago, we started watching Grave of the Fireflies, not knowing anything about it, and pretty soon I started to think we were in deeper than Munchkin or I was ready for. It takes place in Kobe, Japan, near the end of World War II, when the city was firebombed and much of it was destroyed. A teenage boy and his unbearably cute four-year-old sister are the main characters, and it isn’t long before we see the bombing that kills their mother.
Munchkin has a high tolerance for scary. She first watched Star Wars when she was about two. As she moved on to The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, Joy and I wondered at what point we’d have to skip scenes. It never happened; she watched them all with no ill effect. She loved Coraline at age three and only occasionally wants us to sit with her for the scariest part. She loves The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, we have a budding Tim Burton fan). Scary, scary things happen in these movies, including death, torture, and the disappearance of a child’s parents.
Yet with Grave of the Fireflies, I wondered if I should turn it off. The munchkin was doing okay, but I was trembling. Why? Because to her it is just a story, and to me it’s an account of something that really happened. I didn’t know at the time that it was based on the novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, who suffered through similar circumstances when he was a teenager taking care of his young sister. I just know that Kobe really was firebombed: that human beings, not people long ago in a galaxy far, far away, do these things to each other.
We watched about half an hour of the movie, and then it was bedtime. I looked it up on the Internet Movie Database to see how bad it was going to get, and discovered among the parental warnings that the little girl dies. That settles it (Munchkin would say, “That does it!”). We are not watching a movie about the death by starvation of a child her age. So I told Munchkin that it turns out the movie is pretty grown up and we’ll have to watch the rest when she’s older. She suggested, “When I’m seven?”–an age at which she imagines wondrously grown-up capabilities descend upon us. (The other mystical ages, judging from her games–which are dominated by her obsession with people’s ages–are 10 and 16.) For me, the question is terribly poignant. At what age is one ready to learn that children starve, that one’s own country drops fire on them? Seven, 10, 16, 30, 50? How does one prepare someone for the knowledge that life, not just fiction, is tragic?
Stop the Internet Blacklist Laws
Do you love the internet? Me too. Please click, act, and don’t let anyone take away your freedom.
That’s it from me. I’m on strike January 18, neither writing nor reading any websites, because I want to try to imagine what it would be like not to have today’s internet.
Continuing my researches on the prayers of contrition found in various traditions.
Buddhism
This is an amalgamation of two translations: one by Robert Aitken Roshi, of the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu, and one found on BeliefNet and attributed only to “anonymous”–which it is–it’s a very old Buddhist text.
All the evil karma, ever created by me since of old,
on account of greed, anger, and ignorance, which have no beginning,
born of my conduct, speech and thought,
I now confess openly and fully.
This Buddhist “Prayer for the Courage to Look Within” was posted by BeliefNet member kuliLinei:
May all sentient beings have the courage to look within themselves and see the good and bad that exists in all of us. May we open our hearts, shining the light of love into the dark recesses where doubt and fear reside. May we have the courage to step into that light and embrace whatever we find, letting it rise to the surface freed by the act of loving kindness.
Christianity
O my God,
I am sorry for my sins because I have offended you.
I know I should love you above all things.
Help me to do penance,
to do better,
and to avoid anything that might lead me to sin. Amen.
I find this one very moving despite the fact that I can’t in any way accept the idea that Jesus’s Passion atoned for us, so that I’d edit out “the most bitter Passion of My Redeemer.”
Forgive me my sins, O Lord,
forgive me my sins;
the sins of my youth,
the sins of my age,
the sins of my soul,
the sins of my body;
my idle sins,
my serious voluntary sins;
the sins I know,
the sins I do not know;
the sins I have concealed for so long,
and which are now hidden from my memory.
I am truly sorry for every sin, mortal and venial,
for all the sins of my childhood up to the present hour.
I know my sins have wounded Thy Tender Heart,
O My Savior, let me be freed from the bonds of evil
through
the most bitter Passion of My Redeemer. Amen.
O My Jesus, forget and forgive what I have been. Amen.
Paganism
. . . or is it Neo-Paganism? I don’t know the origin of this prayer, just that it is published in A Book of Pagan Prayer by Ceisiwr Serith (York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2002). I found it on BeliefNet. I like the prayer’s being directed to various guides.
A Prayer to the High Gods at Bedtime
As I go to bed, I pray to the High Gods.
I offer you my worship, and ask you to bless my family.
I ask if I have done anything today to offend you.
If I have, I ask for forgiveness and for guidance,
that I might walk the sacred path in peace and in beauty.
As I go to bed, I pray to the gods of my household.
I offer you my worship and ask you to bless my family.
I ask if I have done anything today to offend you.
If I have, I ask for forgiveness and for guidance,
that I might walk the sacred path in peace and in beauty.
As I go to bed, I pray to the Ancestors.
I do you honor and ask you to bless my family.
I ask if you I have done anything to offend you.
If I have, I ask for forgiveness and for guidance,
that I might walk the sacred path in peace and in beauty.
As I go to bed, I pray to all numinous beings.
I do you honor and ask that you extend your blessings over me and mine.
Sermons in Stones 
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