Harvard University Press Blog

Honoring the Work of Patricia Williams

This Friday, Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law will host a day-long symposium honoring the work of Patricia Williams, the school’s James L. Dohr Professor of Law. Each year the symposium honors a senior scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the field of gender and sexuality law, and Williams now joins past honorees Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Upon granting her one of its fellowships (the so-called “genius grant”) in 2000, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Williams for having created “a new form of legal writing and scholarship that integrates personal narrative, critical and literary theory, traditional legal doctrine, and empirical and sociological research.”

We’ve twice published books by Williams, including her first, 1991’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights. From its very first lines, Alchemy announced itself as a deeply personal work, braver and far more vulnerable than most anything else on a university press’s law list:

Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it’s a bad morning. I am very depressed. It always takes a while to sort out what’s wrong, but it usually starts with some kind of perfectly irrational thought such as: I hate being a lawyer.

That very incongruence—the disconnect between Williams’ writing and the impersonal analysis that would generally be expected from the work of a law professor—reflects the ideas of the book itself, run through with defiance of society’s need to limit by categorization.

In the book’s opening essay Williams recalls being pressed by her sister to explain what the then-in-progress Alchemy would be about. Her reply:

I am interested in the way in which legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem; I am trying to challenge the usual limits of commercial discourse by using an intentionally double-voiced and relational, rather than a traditionally legal black-letter, vocabulary. For example, I am a commercial lawyer as well as a teacher of contract and property law. I am also black and female, a status that one of my former employers described as being “at oxymoronic odds” with that of the commercial lawyer. While I certainly took issue with that particular characterization, it is true that my attempts to write in my own voice have placed me in the center of a snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries. On the one hand, my writing has been staked out as the exclusive interdisciplinary property of constitutional law, contract, African-American history, feminist jurisprudence, political science, and rhetoric. At the same time, my work has been described as a “sophisticated frontal assault” on laissez-faire’s most sacred sanctums, as “new-age performance art,” and as “anecdotal individualism.” In other words, to speak as black female, and commercial lawyer has rendered me simultaneously universal, trendy, and marginal. I think, moreover, that there is a paradigm at work, in the persistent perceptions of me as inherent contradiction: a paradigm of larger social perceptions that divide public from private, black from white, dispossessed from legitimate. This realization, while extremely personal, inevitably informs my writing on a professional level.

Her willingness to confront rather than conform to that “snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries” gave the book a deep resonance while also establishing an interdisciplinary approach that became a model for generations of scholars. Alondra Nelson, of Columbia’s Department of Sociology and Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and a moderator of one of the symposium’s panels, recalled for us the book’s influence on her as an undergraduate: “As an aspiring academic, I was captivated by this book that featured its fearless black feminist author on the cover; she was a mentor from afar. I was forever transformed by the book’s equal measures of poetry and prose, erudition and plain-spokenness, wit and candidness.”

Reducing Land to Plantation, Human Being to Hand

Most of the cotton grown in the Mississippi Valley in the 19th century was the hybrid strain Gossypium barbadense, otherwise known as “Petit Gulf.” The strain was patented in 1820 and prized for its “pickability,” as Walter Johnson explains in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, new this week. Petit Gulf’s singular dominance in the region produced what Johnson characterizes as a “radical simplification” of both nature and man: “the reduction of landscape to cotton plantation and of human being to ‘hand.’ ”

These two simplifications were intimately linked, but their limits differed. “Cotton mono-cropping,” writes Johnson, “stripped the land of vegetation, leached out its fertility, and rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.” The land, then, could become what was made of it, at least for a time. Human beings, though, could not so readily be reduced, as scholars have long been helping us to see.

And yet, according to Johnson, some of the undeniably important work on slave subjectivity has by now perhaps distanced us from the facts of life in the Cotton Kingdom. From River of Dark Dreams:

The history of the enslaved people who toiled in those fields has generally been approached through durable abstractions: “the master-slave relationship,” “white supremacy,” “resistance,” “accommodation,” “agency.” Each category has been indispensable to understanding slavery; together they have made it possible to see things that otherwise would have been missed. Increasingly, however, these categories have become unmoored from the historical experience they were intended to represent. The question of “agency” has often been framed quite abstractly—counterpoised against “power” as if both terms were arrayed at the ends of some sort of sliding scale, an increase in one meaning a corresponding decrease in the other. But “agency,” like “power,” is historically conditioned: it takes specific forms at specific times and places; it is thick with the material givenness of a moment in time. “Agency” is less a simple opposite of “power” than its unfinished relief—a dynamic three-dimensional reflection. The history of Gossypium barbadense suggests that beneath the abstractions lies a history of bare-life processes and material exchanges so basic that they have escaped the attention of countless historians of slavery. The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.

While it is easy to lose sight of the elementally human character of labor—even that of forced labor—in light of the salutary political effect of labeling slavery “inhuman,” it is important to recognize that slaves’ humanity was not restricted to a zone of “agency” or “culture” outside their work. When slaves went into the field, they took with them social connections and affective ties. The labor process flowed through them, encompassed them, was interrupted and redefined by them. Slaves worked alongside people they knew, people they had raised, and people they would bury. They talked, they sang, they laughed, they suffered, they remembered their ancestors and their God, the rhythms of their lives working through and over those of their work. We cannot any more separate slaves’ labor from their humanity than we can separate the ability of a human hand to pick cotton from its ability to caress the cheek of a crying child, the aching of a stooped back in the field from the arc of a body bent in supplication, the voice that called time for the hoes from that which told a story that was centuries old.

Johnson’s first book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, did a great deal to document the inseparability of hand from humanity. Soul by Soul, published in 1999, is one of the 100 significant books we’ve chosen to highlight from our first 100 years, and over at our centennial site you can read an excerpt detailing how slaves could sometimes “create themselves in the slave market,” braving great risk to shape their own sale.

Tracing the Ties that Bind Blacks and Jews in History and Myth

Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”

Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.

Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”

In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:

Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.

The Odyssey of Gregory White

Last spring the Washington Post published an article by Gregory White, an ex-convict whose life was changed by a book we published in 1997. After reading a review of Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, the then-incarcerated White began to think of the sea as his chance to do something with his life that he’d consider worthwhile.

White, who’d served in the Navy as a young man, contacted the book’s author, Jeffrey Bolster, who assured him of the possibility of an ex-con becoming a merchant marine. Soon after that exchange, White obtained a copy of Black Jacks and read it over and over:

The story of African American seamen left an indelible impression on my heart and soul. I identified with the story of those who had been imprisoned or enslaved and had plied the maritime industries as a means to survive or to be liberated. The trying conditions of slavery far outweighed the handicaps of my modern incarceration. The men and women storied in Black Jacks became my inspiration. I made a willful and deliberate decision that I would change my attitude and redirect the course of my life. Going to sea became the central passion of my life.

As he detailed in the Post, White maintained a relationship with Bolster, whose brother eventually gave White his first job at sea. White went on to become a documented U.S. Merchant Mariner, travelling the world over.

The story told in Black Jacks that so captivated White presents the rich history of African Americans at sea from the late 1700s until Emancipation. Indeed, seamen wrote the first six autobiographies of blacks published in English before 1800, a fact that both indicates the opportunities then offered by life at sea and illustrates Bolster’s contention that seafaring men “fired the opening salvo” of black abolitionism. But their story has been largely eclipsed by the myth that black seafaring in the age of sail was limited to the Middle Passage:

In lieu of these politically astute and worldly black sailors, an image of manacled ancestors crammed together aboard slave ships has triumphed as the association of African Americans with the sea. It reinforces whites’ belief that blacks were acted on, rather than acting; that blacks aboard ship sailed as commodities rather than seamen. Yet until the Civil War black sailors were central to African Americans’ collective sense of self, economic survival, and freedom struggle—indeed central to the very creation of black America.

Bolster himself spent a decade as a commercial mariner, and Black Jacks was inspired by his search for a bridge between the many black West Indian sailors he met in those years and historic slave sailors like Olaudah Equiano, whose Interesting Narrative Bolster read at sea. “How,” he asked, “could one understand early black America without recognizing that plantations were connected to a larger world of black people, as well as to world markets, by black seamen?”

This Tuesday, February 5th, the Boston University African American Studies program will host White and Bolster for a discussion of White’s life and the book that changed it. “The Odyssey of Gregory White” is open to the public.

The Lost Histories of South Asian America

The Immigration Act of 1917, enacted by the United States Congress over presidential veto, created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” from which all people attempting to migrate to the US were to be turned away. The zone included much of Asia and the Pacific Islands, this in addition to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants that’d been in place since 1882. Then, in 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any East Indians who’d made it into the country prior to 1917 were ineligible to become citizens, casting them as permanent outsiders.

In a series of congressional hearings in 1945, a pair of Indian men lobbied the U.S. government to revisit the laws of Indian exclusion. As Vivek Bald recounts in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, the pair had differing interests but came to rely on a shared approach of stressing the contributions of Indian scientists, engineers, scholars, and businessmen. They achieved their goals, with a 1946 naturalization bill making already resident Indians eligible for citizenship, and an immigration policy designed to focus on skilled professionals rather than the working class, much as U.S. immigration policy still does.

In the midst of those 1945 hearings, with their focus on upper class “desirables,” a remarkable letter written on behalf of the silent majority of laboring Indian immigrants by a Bengali named Ibrahim Choudry was admitted to the record. As Bald describes it, Choudry’s letter was a lone but forceful voice of advocacy for “a shadow population of migrants, spread across the country, who had dropped ‘out of status’ as the immigration laws changed around them.” Choudry wrote:

I speak for the many. I am not speaking for the transient element—the student the business man, the lecturer, the interpreter of India’s past and present, whose interests and ties in this country are temporary, the man or the woman whose roots are in India and who eventually returns home. I talk for those of us who, by our work and by our sweat and by our blood, have helped build fighting industrial America today. I talk for those of our men who, in factory and field, in all sections of American industry, work side by side with their fellow American workers to strengthen the industrial framework of this country… We have married here; our children have been born here… I speak for such as myself, for those of my brothers who work in the factories of the East and in Detroit… I speak for the workers and the farmers of our community whose lives have been bound to this country’s destiny for 23 years or longer. I speak for these men who while they themselves have no rights under oriental exclusion have seen their sons go off to war these last years to fight for a democracy which they—their fathers—could not themselves enjoy. I speak for men who… expect to die in the country to which they have given their best years… [W]e simply ask you for justice—American justice.

The men, families, and communities for whom Choudry spoke are the focus of Bald’s book, itself part of a larger, ongoing multimedia documentary project. These Indian migrants, Bald writes, provide us with a different picture of “assimilation,” in that they didn’t form ethnic enclaves as was so common, nor did they follow “the iconic path of immigrant upward mobility.” Instead, Indian Muslims formed networks embedded in working-class communities of color, and Bald’s work reveals a lost history of intermarriage and inter-ethnic community-making in which Muslim men from regions of present-day India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan married and started families with African American, Creole, Puerto Rican, and Afro-Caribbean women in cities from New Orleans to New York to Baltimore to Detroit. These stories from a time when Indian immigrants were vilified, criminalized, attacked, and excluded show them also to have found other kinds of belonging. They remind us as well, in this post-9/11 climate of skepticism, that Muslim immigrants and their descendants have been a part of life in the United States for more than a century.

When Bald named this project “Bengali Harlem” it was focused on a particular set of Bengali immigrants. Over years of research, though, the history he was reconstructing went far beyond New York, and grew to include many people who weren’t Bengali. “Over time,” he explains, “the name has become metaphorical rather than literal, standing for a particular set of encounters and possibilities tied to South Asian life making and place making in U.S. neighborhoods of color.”

You can explore Bald’s larger project at bengaliharlem.com, and, below, listen to him discuss the project with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer:

 

What Was the South Seceding To?

Forgive us, please, for continuing to dwell on Spielberg’s Lincoln. It’s not often that we have a rich trove of books on the very subject captivating the nation’s conversation. Wait, strike that, it’s pretty often, actually. It’s kind of our thing.

Anywho.

The film has a scene in which Lincoln and Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens have retreated from the grand reception of the president’s second inauguration down to a messy White House kitchen. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln, driven to engineer the passage of the 13th Amendment, is trying to convince Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, to temper his usually-forceful demands for racial equality, so as not to scare off the moderate votes required for the bill’s adoption. The scene, packed with quick Kushner dialogue, witty and wise, is one of the film’s great depictions of politics as art of the possible.

In the course of their volley Lincoln expresses his admiration for Stevens’s “zeal,” but explains why he’s had to act with greater restraint than the congressman had wished:

If I’d listened to you, I’d’ve declared every slave free the minute the first shell struck Fort Sumter; then the border states would’ve gone over to the confederacy, the war would’ve been lost and the Union along with it, and instead of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do in two weeks, we’d be watching helpless as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.

That reference to South America is one of the very few moments in which Spielberg gestures towards the global context of the American Civil War, and it’s all the more striking for how matter-of-factly it’s dropped into conversation. The standard popular and historical gaze back at the Civil War—embodied pretty accurately by the film, save the above—sees the coming of the conflict as territorially bounded by regions that were only delineated by the war itself. The narrative, in other words, reads the parties created by the war as those that started it.

As Walter Johnson argues in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, a much-anticipated book whose publication is but a couple of months away, we need to ask not just what “the South” was seceding from, but what it was seceding to:

It takes no great insight (only a taste for heresy) to say that the story of “the coming of the Civil War” has been framed according to a set of anachronistic spatial frames and teleological narratives. It is resolutely nationalist in its spatial framing, foregrounding conflict over slavery within the boundaries of today’s United States to the exclusion of almost every other definition of the conflict over slavery. Because of the territorial condition of the regions under debate and the character of federal recordkeeping, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act produced tremendous archives that American historians have used to terrific effect. Yet for many in the Mississippi Valley (and for the president of the United States, who in 1852 devoted the first third of his State of the Union address to the topic), the most important issue in the early 1850s was Cuba, an issue that was related to but certainly not reducible to the question of territory gained through the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850. Similarly, for many pro-slavery Southerners, especially in the Mississippi Valley, the issues of Nicaragua and the Atlantic slave trade were more important than the question of Kansas (dismissed by many as a fight over a place where no real slaveholder would ever want to live anyway) and more important than what was happening in Congress, from which they, in any case, expected very little. The standard narrative, that is to say, projects a definition of spaces which resulted from the Civil War—no Cuba, no Nicaragua, no Atlantic slave trade—backward onto its narrative of the description of the conflict over slavery before the war.

Much of this work has been done through the category of “the South,” which serves in its dominant usage as a spatial euphemism for what is in fact a conceptual anachronism: those states which eventually became part of the Confederacy. But what the “Southern position” was on any given issue... was subject to fierce debate at pro-slavery commercial conventions of the late 1850s, which are generally seen as hotbeds of secessionism. About the only things upon which those conventions could agree was that there was something called “the South” that was worth fighting for and that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would be grounds for secession. The ultimate grounds for secession represented a sort of lowest common denominator, a platform defined by what everyone involved agreed “the South” could not be.

We recently had a chance to speak with Johnson about pro-slavery imperialism, the political economy of slaveholders, and the inherently-expansionist logic of cotton monocropping:

 

Incidentally, there’s another striking moment in Lincoln, in which the president and his Secretary of State are directly pleading for Kentucky congressman George Yeaman’s support for the amendment. “I saw a barge once, Mr. Yeaman,” Lincoln says, “filled with colored men in chains, heading down the Mississippi to the New Orleans slave markets. It sickened me, ‘n more than that, it brought a shadow down, a pall around my eyes.”

Those New Orleans slave markets are the subject of Johnson’s earlier work, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. The book—recently the focus of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Effete Liberal Book Club”—lays bare the chilling day-to-day workings of the commodification of human beings. It’s a deeply effecting work, and a must-read for anyone unsettled by the tendency to reduce the era to faceless statistics and the congressional jockeying of white men. 

Historians Respond to Spielberg's Lincoln

One of the great effects of the spectacle of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln has been the public space its release has afforded professional historians. While there are affirmative things to be said for a society that’s moved beyond restrictive reliance on the academically credentialed, it’s been a refreshing jolt to see qualified experts get their turn with the megaphone usually hogged by pundits and columnists in the appraisal of cultural events.

Among scholars weighing in on the film are two whose books on Lincoln we’ve published just this year. Lincoln’s Hundred Days author Louis Masur, writing in the Chronicle Review, assesses this new film’s corrections to a lineage of cinematic portrayals of Lincoln that reaches all the way back to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, and also sees Lincoln as a challenge to a “decades-long scholarly, if not popular, vision of him as halfhearted and reluctant in his efforts to eradicate slavery.” He catalogs some of the reasons for the growth of that vision:

The civil-rights movement focused attention not on emancipation but on the disappointing results of freedom: poverty, disenfranchisement, segregation. Martin Luther King Jr. paid homage to Lincoln at the beginning of his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, but lamented that a century after emancipation, “the Negro still is not free.” Others were less generous to the Great Emancipator. In a magazine article in 1968, and again in his 2000 book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor of Ebony, denounced Lincoln as a racist and white supremacist whose actions against slavery were dilatory and halfhearted at best.

Parallel to the civil-rights movement was a shift in scholarly focus away from elites and toward the social history of ordinary people. Historians examined the lives of the enslaved and began to grasp the role they played in shaping their own destiny. That trend culminated in the 1990s with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which began in the 1970s and, over the decades, has unearthed tens of thousands of documents and published multiple volumes that have revolutionized our understanding of the lives of African-Americans in slavery and freedom. The voices of the supposedly inarticulate were being heard.

This new film, Masur writes, “restores for our time a vision of Lincoln as a tireless opponent of slavery and, in the process, speaks to the political problems we face as a nation today.”

In doing so, the film diverges from history on both minor details and, as some argue, in its depiction of the determining forces of abolition itself. At the Daily Beast, Spielberg’s willingness to take liberties with the historical record is somewhat amusingly highlighted by Harold Holzer, who served as a “Content Consultant” to the film. Holzer, author of literally dozens of books on Abe, including our recently-published Emancipating Lincoln explains that “not all of [his] suggestions were adopted.” Which affords us the strange pleasure of seeing one of the nation’s leading authorities on Lincoln fact-check the work of filmmakers who had his expertise at their disposal.

Most interestingly, Holzer takes aim at the veracity of the film’s very first moments:

As for the Spielberg movie’s opening scene, in which a couple of Union soldiers—one white, one black—recite the words of the Gettysburg Address to the appreciative Lincoln, who is visiting the front toward the end of the war—it is almost inconceivable that any uniformed soldier of the day (or civilians, for that matter) would have memorized a speech that, however ingrained in modern memory, did not achieve any semblance of a national reputation until the 20th century.

Despite such historical inaccuracies, Holzer, who also wrote the film’s authorized “companion book for young readers,” holds that “Spielberg has traveled toward an understanding of Abraham Lincoln more boldly than any other filmmaker before him.”

Presidential Identity Politics

The American presidential election—taking place a mere three weeks from tomorrow—pits the country’s first African American president against the first Mormon to receive a major party’s nomination. This would seem to be but a restatement of widely recognized biographical detail, but for the fact that apparently 40% of Americans polled by Gallup this summer were unaware of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. And so, in this cycle we’re seeming some commentary reflecting on the omission of race and religion in the campaign, rather than impact.

Earlier this month, for instance, John G. Turner wrote in the Washington Post about the “non-issue” of Romney’s Mormonism. Turner, the author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (one of our most acclaimed fall books), compares the focus on JFK’s Catholicism in 1960 to the relative lack of concern with Romney’s religion this year:

Romney, by nearly any measuring stick, is much more devout as a Latter-day Saint than John F. Kennedy was as a Christian. Moreover, both Catholics and Mormons were religious outsiders in nineteenth-century America. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism were significant political movements, and both Catholics and Mormons suffered at the hands of violent mobs.

Anti-Catholicism remained significant through the 19th century, but it peaked during the pre-Civil War years. Mormonism, by contrast, continued to grow as an object of political concern through the 1880s. Mormons, unlike Catholics, occupied and controlled a huge chunk of real estate, nearly fought a war against the U.S. Army in 1857, and openly practiced polygamy until 1890.

Despite this shared history, there are obvious reasons why Kennedy’s faith was a much bigger concern in 1960. Catholics comprised around a quarter of the American population in 1960, as opposed to the nearly 2 percent of Americans who affiliate with the LDS Church today. Only the truly paranoid can foresee a Mormon takeover beyond the horizon of a Romney victory. Kennedy’s campaign and victory, moreover, smoothed the way for future religious outsiders like both George Romney (who ran in the 1968 Republican primaries) and his son Mitt.

Meanwhile, in an American Historical Association roundtable discussion of the first Obama-Romney debate, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, noted the complete absence of race from the night’s conversation:

Rodney King's Legacy

Last week, in advance of a march planned to protest NYC’s stop-and-frisk policy, we quoted Khalil Gibran Muhammad describing how the tactic casts all young men of color as potential criminals. You can see scenes from that march in this short video:

 

Just hours before the march, the body of Rodney King was discovered at the bottom of his LA swimming pool. King, whose videotaped 1991 beating at the hands of the LAPD led to days of uprising and heightened scrutiny of police brutality nationwide, was 47.

Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, explained to Tavis Smiley last year that the beating of Rodney King “crashed in” on his college days, diverting him from what had then been a path toward a career in business. “From that point forward,” he told Smiley, “I was fundamentally shaken by the position of being a young Black man in America and really had a lot of unanswered questions about where I fit in the world and what the future held for me.”

Yesterday, Muhammad reflected on Rodney King’s legacy, and how policies like stop-and-frisk can be traced to a “crisis of legitimacy” that arose after the treatment of King and others came to light:

Looking back over the past two decades through the lens of King’s life – including the acquittal and mistrial of the four officers (two were later convicted of civil rights violations in federal court) and the 1992 LA uprising that followed – reveals that police intimidation and/or violence has become a normal rite of passage for millions of black people in America today. Since 2006, in New York City alone, roughly a half million black and Latino people every year are treated as would-be criminals through a perfectly legal policy of racial profiling known as stop, question and frisk. Required to prove their right to pass freely in the financial and cultural capital of the free world, those stopped are almost all innocent of any criminal offence.

…

The raw violence [of the King beating] did not match three decades of post-racial mythology, where the only racism supposedly left in America was affirmative action. King’s tape and others that followed, along with greater federal scrutiny of police agencies, compelled criminal justice officials and politicians to re-engineer or rig the system into a labyrinth of ostensibly race-neutral policies – such as stop, question, and frisk or stand your ground laws. It is now this system that legitimates the routine targeting of young black men for harassment or violence and that is now under attack as witnessed by yesterday's silent march in New York City.

You can read the rest of Muhammad’s piece at the Guardian.

The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1932 that “Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.” Last year we asked Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness and Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, whether the statement still characterizes life in America:

Do I think that a statement like that holds true, even to this day? Yes. If I were to give the glib, short answer: yes. And it comes in many forms. One form is the case of New York, where we know explicitly about a policy like stop-and-frisk. A policy like that exists on the rationale that, in black and brown communities, you’ll find the most street level crime, mostly revolving around drugs or contraband guns, and so those communities should be subjected to extreme forms of surveillance, like stopping and searching people, frisking them. That is a form of accusation, the very form of surveillance and policing in those communities is, in effect, taking individual black and brown young men, and accusing them of potential criminality. There is something about the ability and the willingness for us as a society to accept that kind of treatment of young black men whose innocence should be presumed, and not in question, when they are encountered on the streets.

The statistics on the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy are staggering, with the New York Times reporting that in 2011 the NYPD stopped people 685,724 times, and that 88% of those stopped were not arrested or even ticketed. And 87% of those stopped were Black or Latino.

Scrutiny of the policy is at a high, with the NAACP organizing a silent march to protest stop-and-frisk in NYC this Sunday, June 17th. As the NAACP explains, silent marches have a tradition that dates back to 1917, when Du Bois led the organization’s first major public protest and demonstrated the power of thousands of people marching silently through the streets:

Silence is a powerful force that, like other forms of non-violent protest, holds a mirror to the brutality of one's opponents. On June 17, we will hold up a mirror to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. It is not only discriminatory, it actively seeks to humiliate innocent citizens—particularly African American and Latino men—and criminalize otherwise legal behavior.
 
Right now in our nation’s most diverse city, NYPD officials are legally empowered to stop and pat down any individual based on nothing more than their own suspicion. In 2009, the most common justification for a stop was a vague category called “furtive movements.”

The result? Blacks and Latinos are nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by police, and the searches overwhelmingly target young men of color. In one eight-block area of an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police made 52,000 stops over a four-year period—an average of nearly one stop per resident each year.

And the vast majority of those stopped are innocent. In 2011, the NYPD stopped and questioned 685,000 New Yorkers. Of those, 605,000 walked away with no charges—only a feeling of humiliation and anger.

 People of color should not be afraid to walk down the street in their own city. On June 17th, we will proudly walk with them to assert that right. Like thousands of activists before us, we will channel the power of our silence to bring public attention to the use of racial profiling by the New York Police Department.

Also this week, the Times released a short documentary, The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk, focused on a young man in Brooklyn who says he was stopped more than 60 times before age 18. It’s a powerful story: