Harvard University Press Blog

What Does it Mean to Represent a Race?

Kenneth W. Mack’s Representing the Race is a collective biography of a group of African American civil rights lawyers during the era of segregation. Mack moves away from the standard telling of 20th century American race relations (“stories of protest and accommodation, heroes and villains, assimilation and black separatism, movement building and backlash, progress and retrenchment”) to focus instead on what he calls an “enduring paradox” of race relations:

From their beginnings, Americans imagined that they inhabited a country composed of distinct racial, ethnic, and religious groups that somehow constituted a unified nation—an idea that, for some, is encapsulated in their historic national motto, e pluribus unum. Just as assuredly, since the time of the nation’s founding Americans have imagined that certain minority groups fit uneasily, or perhaps not at all, into the national whole. Among the most prominent of these groups have been African Americans, and what has connected this particular minority group to the larger nation has been its representatives—those who claimed to speak for, stand in for, and advocate for the interests of the larger group.

The usual story of black civil rights lawyers in American history is that these lawyers represented the interests of a unified minority group that wanted to be integrated into the core fabric of the nation—or, as more-recent accounts have described them, perhaps these lawyers failed at their task of representation. But the story was not so simple as either of these accounts would have it. Rather, from their beginnings, black civil rights lawyers were people caught between the needs and desires of the larger, white-dominated culture, and those of their own racial group, and there was no simple way out of that dilemma.

We recently spoke with Mack about the book, and in the video below he describes how the career of Thurgood Marshall, the most famous figure he discusses in Representing the Race, demonstrates the challenging melding of authenticity and exceptionalism still demanded of those said to “represent a race.”

 

Kenneth Mack will discuss Representing the Race at the Harvard Book Store’s Friday Forum this afternoon at 3pm.

A Literary History of The Autobiography of Malcolm X

This week the late Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X was quite rightly awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention gives us as clear a portrait of the man as we’re ever likely to have, and in the process sifts through many of the stories and myths that Malcolm X told about himself. Many of those stories are best known through Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malclom X, an absolute classic of American letters that now sees itself superseded as historical document by Marable’s work. In the piece below, excerpted from A New Literary History of America, David Bradley considers the life of The Autobiography as spark of a movement, mainstay of colleges and prisons both, social science, prophecy, and postmodern literature. A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, is available in paperback this spring.

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On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. The Saturday Evening Post, though it had published an excerpt from the forthcoming Autobiography, eulogized him as “a violent and baffling young demagogue” and wondered “did he really have a major role to play?” Time magazine pronounced him “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred” and “creed was violence.” Doubleday terminated the contract for his autobiography.

Enter Grove Press. And when The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, enter Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the New York Times, calling it “an eloquent testament.” And enter I. F. Stone, in the New York Review of Books, predicting for it “a permanent place in the literature.” Enter also Truman Nelson, in the Nation, lauding “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose.”

Nelson also praised Haley who, he said, provided “the great revelation” in an epilogue, written with Malcolm X’s permission but independent of his control. In fact, the epilogue offered a series of revelations: that the interviews, which took place late at night, when Malcolm was usually exhausted, often seemed more like interrogations or therapy sessions; that when Haley served coffee he purposely provided only paper napkins, so he could later analyze Malcolm X’s doodlings; that he kept two sets of notebooks, one for Malcolm X’s thoughts, one for his own.

The epilogue, more than the narrative, revealed a faceted Malcolm X, who, certain the room was bugged, initiated interviews with, “Testing—one, two, three,” who “went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying,” who cried out in frustration, “We had the best organization the black man’s ever had—niggers ruined it!” It revealed also a subplot, in which Malcolm X, who once called Haley “one of the white man’s tools,” came to trust him “twenty-five per cent,” and finally said simply, “I’ll trust you”—while the middle-class, ex-military Haley, whose Playboy interview suggested a distaste for Malcolm X, confessed, “I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met.”

And the epilogue told the story Malcolm X could not tell: how he “walked out onto the stage, into the applause” . . . and the gunfire; how he was carried to a hospital on a makeshift stretcher, where “surgeons cut through his chest to attempt to massage the heart”; how “the effort was abandoned at 3:30 p.m.”

According to Time magazine he had been, “in life and in death . . . a disaster to the civil rights movement.” Certainly many who’d grown impatient with nonviolence heard in his voice a cadence more compelling that King’s “soul force.” In June of 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a six-year veteran of the nonviolent trenches, survivor of two dozen arrests, punctured the orotund rhetoric of yet another peaceful march with the Malcolm-esque cry, “Black Power!” The civil rights movement, and its rhetoric, would never be the same.

But Malcolm X’s voice was heard beyond the political arena. The day after his death, playwright LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, formed the Black Arts Repertory Theater, the crucible of a Black Arts movement that would influence two generations of black writers. Three years later, at a celebration of Malcolm X’s birth, a group of musicians later known as the Last Poets fused percussive rhythm with politics-and profanity-laced lyrics into a sound that came to be called rap.

Recorded and amplified by The Autobiography, Malcolm X’s voice spoke to black men languishing in prisons in language they could comprehend, inspiring some to their own tough, uncompromising eloquence: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother.

“Warning: Black People at Leisure”

Andrew W. Kahrl is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University and author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. By exploring how beaches and waterfronts became sites of racial contest, The Land Was Ours gives us a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of racism and resistance. In the piece below, Kahrl looks to the history of segregated leisure in an effort to contextualize the nationwide discussion of race occasioned by the killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin.

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Earlier this month, in the face of outrage over the killing of Trayvon Martin, the conservative columnist John Derbyshire penned a wide-ranging racist screed offered in the guise of “a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids.” In the piece, which eventually led to his dismissal from the National Review, Derbyshire posited that nonblacks planning a trip to a beach or amusement park know to “find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks.” Those objecting to the implication of widely-held and casually blatant racism in Derbyshire’s remarks should look to the history of the urban island park Belle Isle, where we find evidence of white America’s strategic retreat from integrated public leisure spaces. Look also to Twin Lakes, the gated community where Martin was gunned down by a neighborhood watchman, and where we see the kind of space to which many whites retreated. Indeed, the historical forces that led to the tragic death of Martin and those that have steadily re-segregated and privatized America’s leisure spaces are deeply entwined.

It was perhaps fitting that, on the day after Derbyshire’s piece was published, the state of Michigan announced plans to charge entry fees to Belle Isle in order to fund improvements and eventually make the park an attractive place for “corporate outings” and other private events. Once considered one of the nation's finest urban parks, Belle Isle suffered serious budget cuts and deterioration after being mostly abandoned by whites. For, in the summer of 1943, Belle Isle provided the spark that lit one of the nation’s worst race riots. On a hot summer afternoon, an estimated crowd of one-hundred thousand whites and blacks jostled for space to picnic and swim on the island. Fights erupted and soon spilled over onto the mainland. When the dust settled two days later, twenty-five African American and nine white Detroiters were dead. It was neither the first nor the last time that an attempt to draw (or erase) a color line in the sand would descend into deadly violence.

While we tend to think of segregated beaches and public parks as among the most irrational excesses of the Jim Crow era (how absurd, after all, is the notion that one can demarcate a color line across a body of water), racialized leisure space served an important function in the maintenance of white supremacy. In Jim Crow America, working- and middle-class whites came to see public beaches and parks as their own private domain—a publicly funded “country club” for the common (white) folk—and understood desegregation as the theft of “their” beaches and parks at the hands of privileged white public officials. That these public officials were themselves often members of private swim clubs and owners of summer vacation homes, thus experiencing fewer direct effects of desegregation, served only to fuel white backlash against civil rights, and cynicism toward government in general.

But while some whites defended what they saw as their “rights” to segregated leisure by greeting African Americans at the park and on the shore with chains and baseball bats, those who could afford it instead retreated to new, commercial theme parks, safely located in remote outposts of suburbia, accessible only by automobile. Or, they implemented a host of racially laden but ostensibly color-blind measures of exclusion designed to make public beaches “public” in name only. During the years when African Americans stepped up demands for the right to enjoy public beaches, many wealthy shoreline municipalities, especially along the northeastern seaboard, adopted entry fees (with different rates for residents and non-residents), removed public locker rooms, or—in some cases—placed outright bans on non-resident access.

Meanwhile, towns with comparatively large numbers of poor and minorities steadily abandoned public beaches altogether and sold portions of their beachfront holdings to private developers. Other towns targeted by civil rights protests proposed designating certain days on the summer calendar when poor blacks from the inner city, under the auspices of the Fresh Air fund and other charitable organizations, could visit the beach—and, presumably, allowing locals to do as Derbyshire would later advise: make other plans. We see this form of strategic avoidance on display at public beaches and parks across the country today, where on certain holidays and pre-scheduled annual events, large crowds of African Americans and other minorities gather to enjoy a moment in the sun while whites retreat to their backyards and private clubs. Indeed, the irony of the outrage among white liberals over Derbyshire’s “talk” is that so many of them already teach those same lessons simply by virtue of their choices of where (and when) to take their children for pleasure and amusement each summer.

Forward Into Things That No One's Ever Heard Before

For years Robin D. G. Kelley has been one of the most well respected scholars of American History, especially within the interdisciplinary circles of American Studies. The publication in 2009 of his wonderful biography of Thelonious Monk helped to propel Kelley’s work to a broad audience outside of the academy, and we’re thrilled to have worked with him on a new book that builds on that study. In the excerpt below, and in the accompanying video, Kelley explains the meditation on modernity that he presents in Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, and how his work helps us to reconsider the origins of jazz itself.

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By exploring the work, conversations, collaborations, and tensions between both African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization, I examine how modern Africa figured in reshaping jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s, how modern jazz figured in the formation of a modern African identity, and how various musical convergences and crossings shaped the political and cultural landscape on both continents. This book is not about the African roots of jazz, nor does it ask how American jazz musicians supported African liberation or “imagined” Africa. Rather, it is about transnational encounters between musicians, or what the ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek calls “intercultural collaboration,” and encounters between musicians and particular locations (such as Lagos, Chicago, New York, or Cape Town). In other words, it hopes to explain how encounters with specific places, people, movements, cultures, provided fertile ground for new music and musical practices.

As a nod to the great critic and poet A. B. Spellman, whose Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966) serves as a model for this book, I focus on four artists and the various groups they led during the age of African decolonization (roughly 1954–1963). Two of these artists, pianist Randy Weston and bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, hail from the United States (or, more precisely, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn); drummer Guy Warren is Ghanaian; and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is South African. Each of these artists was propelled by the upheavals of the 1950s to seek new musical forms, new collaborations, new fusions across time and space. They shared neither a common agenda nor a common culture, though they recognized and often embraced cultural commonalities, “jazz” being one. Nor did they always succeed. On the contrary, they occasionally clashed with fellow artists, or bumped up against prevailing assumptions, the intransigence of the market, an oppressive state that viewed their music as a threat to order, or consumers whose own stereotypes made them incapable of hearing and appreciating the work.

Yet they all shared a vision of jazz as a path to the future, a vehicle for both Africans and African Americans to articulate and realize their own distinctive modernity while critiquing its Western variant. And, from their vantage point, standing at what appeared to be the precipice of freedom for Africa and black America, the continent represented a beacon of modernity blazing a new path for the rest of the world, but one tempered by deeply spiritual, antimaterialist values. Indeed, I suggest that African American musicians were seeking new spiritual and ideological alternatives to what they saw as a declining West that led them to a deeper exploration of African music and culture. Likewise, African musicians who were drawn to jazz as a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity also saw the need to infuse it with the music of their homeland. Echoing the late poet Aimé Césaire, in the atomic age, when colonialism and the Holocaust left the West spiritually wanting, Africa represented both an ancient, pristine past possessing a higher spiritual order and a modernizing force able to maintain its humanity precisely because it presumably would not relinquish the best elements of its traditional values. This sort of Janus-faced modernism is key to understanding the nexus of jazz and Africa in the age of decolonization. As Veit Erlmann warns, we have to resist the easy binary of modernity and tradition, especially when the subject is music. “Modernity and tradition,” he writes, “are not only the two most significant historical fictions here but also the tropes whose role in the Western discourse about itself and the others is reflected and configured in the very grammar of musical performance itself.”

 

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

History and The Help

One of the most-nominated films for this year’s Academy Awards (ceremony this Sunday!) is The Help, directed by Tate Taylor and adapted for the screen by Taylor and Kathrynn Stockett, from the latter’s mega-selling novel of the same name. The film is up for four awards, including Best Picture. A brief synopsis of the plot (via IMDB):

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maid's point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

So, The Help is about race, never an easy subject for Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of literary pedigree. The Help’s tangled layering of a white woman (Stockett) telling the story of a white woman telling the story of black women has been a fairly obvious target for commentary. As has been the Academy’s embrace of the film. No one seems to question the worthiness of the nominated performances by the film’s African American stars Viola Davis (Actress in a Leading Role) or Octavia Spencer (Actress in a Supporting Role). The profession of their characters, however, has not escaped notice. From a NYT opinion piece by Brent Staples:

The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.

Staples’s argument is more about the racial politics of the film industry than about The Help itself, and Davis, for her part, has argued against this position, saying that “The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy.” Nevertheless, the film’s own presentation of race in the 1960s in the South has come in for widespread critique, including in a recent open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) to fans of The Help:

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

The Journey of Mary Walker

There’s a claim, one with quite a lineage in both historical analysis and social science circles, that slavery destroyed African American families. It was compelling evidence against that claim, found in both Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and Alex Haley’s Roots, that led historian Sydney Nathans to shift his focus years ago from work on nineteenth-century American political leaders to the social history of African Americans. Now comes the completion of a book he started researching in 1988, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker.

Nathans first learned of Mary Walker in a remarkable letter referenced in Gutman’s book. Sent in 1859 from a University of Pennsylvania professor named J. P. Lesley to Mildred Cameron, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest women, the letter was written on behalf of “Mary Walker, formerly in your family,” a polite way of referring to Cameron’s ownership of Walker. Cameron would have well remembered Walker, for Walker’s family had belonged to the Camerons for generations, and though Walker herself had escaped eleven years prior, her children and mother remained. From Lesley’s letter:

I have been lately touched to the heart with a case of heart breaking distress which you have it entirely in your power I find to cure… I have come to know one Mary Walker formerly in your family, and I have seen how sick at heart she is about her mother and especially her two children… She thinks of nothing but her children, and speaks of nothing else when she speaks of herself at all, which is very seldom. Her mother-heart yearns unspeakably after them… She has saved a considerable sum of money to buy them, can command more from friends, and will sacrifice anything to see them once again and have their young lives renew the freshness of her own weary spirit. It is in this behalf that I address you,—to realize this hope of hers.

Walker had fled from slavery while accompanying the Camerons to Philadelphia, only making the agonizing choice to leave her family behind in North Carolina after her master threatened to banish her to an Alabama plantation. In the years between Walker’s escape and Lesley’s letter to Mildred Cameron, Walker had made a life for herself in the North with the aid of a network of allies and friends. To Free a Family is based on thousands of letters written by these allies, chiefly the Lesley family, and by Walker’s adversaries, the Camerons.

We recently spoke with Nathans for an episode of our podcast (which you can listen to below), and he explained some of the particulars of Walker’s story, as well as some of its broader implications:

The larger story is that we think of antislavery people as single-minded, focused on the attack against slavery and on the emancipation of the slaves—which they were. But at the same time, a good number of them were engaged in trying to help individual slaves recover family members… For a good many of them, they had no idea when emancipation would come about, when antislavery would triumph, and so these personal cases were their ways of dealing with slavery on a human basis, one by one.

 

With To Free a Family, Nathans has restored a story as indelible as that of Harriet Jacobs, whom Walker knew. The book now serves as a tribute to the memory of a brave woman—and as a reminder of how history is painfully, triumphantly lived.

You can learn more about Mary Walker in stories from Radio Boston and WBUR, or read an excerpt from To Free a Family at the Ms. Magazine blog. Those in the Boston/Cambridge area can also catch Sydney Nathans on February 23rd at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, which is the current occupant of the Brattle Street Blacksmith House once owned by… Mary Walker.

Of Color in America

In January, we’ll publish Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. The book examines a hidden history of transnational cooperation towards the freedom of the “colored world.” Below, Slate considers the role of that sort of solidarity within America’s evolving racial composition.

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Fifty years from now, the United States will no longer have a “white” majority. The significance of this demographic change will hinge on what it means to be non-white or, in an oft-repeated but ill-defined phrase, a “person of color.”

Take the case of Nikki Haley, the Indian American governor of South Carolina. In January 2011, Benjamin Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged Haley to stop flying the Confederate flag in front of the state capitol. Jealous appealed to Haley as South Carolina’s “first governor of color,” referenced the history of linkages between the civil rights movement and the Indian freedom struggle, and challenged Haley to consider, “What would Gandhi do?” His historical references might have been different if Jealous had known that Haley, when asked to identify her race on South Carolina’s official voter registration card, had checked the box for “white.”

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, for much of American history, immigrants from India had to claim legal whiteness if they wished to become citizens. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, naturalization was expanded to those of African descent. All other ethnic groups were relegated to a gray zone in which citizenship rights depended on proof of whiteness.

Between 1908 and 1922, at least sixty-nine Indians gained United States citizenship by successfully claiming to be white. In Savannah, Georgia in 1910, Abba Dolla, a native of Calcutta, arranged for a doctor to testify to his “pure Caucasian blood.” The presiding judge described Dolla as follows: “The applicant’s complexion is dark, eyes dark, features regular and rather delicate, hair very black, wavy and very fine and soft.” Uncertain about Dolla’s racial identity, the judge asked him to pull up his shirt sleeves. Fortunately for Dolla, the judge concluded, “The skin of his arm where it had been protected from the sun and weather by his clothing was found to be several shades lighter than that of his face and hands, and was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly.” Impressed, the judge granted citizenship.

The ability of Indians to gain legal whiteness ended in 1923, when the Supreme Court ruled against granting citizenship to a U.S. Army veteran, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh American like Nikki Haley. After 1923, many Indian Americans came to connect their persecution as a racial minority to the struggles of other non-white Americans. Jagjit (J.J.) Singh, an influential Sikh businessman and the leader of the most prominent Indian American organization in the 1930s and 1940s, established close links with Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP. While Mahatma Gandhi inspired opponents of American racism, African American struggles attracted sympathy throughout India. Many Indians came to see themselves as part of a global struggle for the rights of “colored people.”

When, in 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he globalized the color line, referring not only to the “millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea” but also to “the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere.” Over the course of the twentieth century, immigration rendered Du Bois’s inclusive conception of color vital to understanding race within as well as beyond the borders of the United States. While the ethnic diversity of the United States has always exceeded the black/white dichotomy, rapid increases in the population of Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and other non-black people of color has made it especially important to understand the long history of relationships between minority groups. That history can help us understand the origin of tensions between ethnic groups. It can also remind us that inter-ethnic relations have been marked by cooperation as well as tension, cooperation inspired for many by a colored cosmopolitanism.

The racial ambiguity that marks the history of South Asian Americans also colors the history of other ethnic groups. For decades, immigrants from throughout the world struggled to prove their whiteness. Americans from as far afield as the Middle East, Mexico, and Japan marshaled notions of Caucasian identity or pointed to the bare fact of white skin. While immigrants no longer need to prove their whiteness in order to become citizens, the racial ambiguity of many immigrant communities complicates their relationships with each other and with an America struggling with persistent racial inequality and ongoing debates concerning the proper role of race in the public sphere. Will Barack Obama win the Latino vote? Should Korean Americans and Cambodian Americans be lumped together as “Asian Americans” for the purposes of affirmative action? Many of the most pressing issues regarding race in contemporary America relate to the vexed question of what it means to be a “person of color,” a question that hinges on how non-white Americans view each other. The history of colored cosmopolitanism offers hope for a solidarity between non-white Americans that is neither anti-white nor blind to racial inequality. It matters how Nikki Haley understands her racial identity. It matters what she thinks when she walks by that Confederate flag.

Two Takes on Two Migrations

Earlier this fall we published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz. The book is a deeply researched examination of the legal machinations that have left the United States with a criminal justice system that seems no longer to be ruled by law. Writing in the New York Review of Books, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens praised Stuntz for accurately describing “the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today—its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans,” and described the book as containing “a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement.”

Stuntz opens the book with a chapter titled “Two Migrations,” in which he considers the massive influx of European immigrants to the United States in the seventy years after World War I together with the northern migration of African Americans in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The two migrations had many structural similarities, and both triggered urban crime waves, which Stuntz notes is mostly to be expected: “Millions of mostly poor young men uprooted from their homes and moving into crowded slums sounds like a recipe for violence and lawlessness.” But, despite their similarities, Stunts shows that the crime waves actually differed enormously; the first was “short-lived and mild,” the second “long-lasting and severe.”

Comparing these two situations is an incredibly complicated exercise, and Stuntz’s willingness and ability to accept the challenge of such complexity is central to the accomplishment of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Of the many factors he points to in his consideration of the differing outcomes of these two migrations, one to which he gives great weight is the discrepancy between the political accomplishments of European immigrants and African American migrants: “By the late nineteenth century—when crime in immigrant-dominated cities was mostly falling, not rising—working-class immigrants and their offspring largely governed the justice system that governed them. Even today, African Americans have no such power.”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, newly available in paperback, also addresses the differing outcomes of these two migrations. The book chronicles the emergence of a now-deeply embedded cultural notion of African American criminality, one that Muhammad shows to have grown from a dangerously misguided reliance on statistical “evidence.” He contrasts the treatment of African Americans in the urban North to that of working-class whites and European immigrants, and, like Stuntz, helps us to understand how those historical episodes continue to shape our society. 

Stuntz’s book, while wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, is based in his work as a legal scholar; Muhammad’s reflects his training as a historian, and his deep interest in the social sciences. Where Stuntz gives a focus on legal developments and statistical comparison, Muhammad sifts through the cultural and scholarly discourse surrounding those developments and statistics. And for Muhammad, a key to understanding the differing criminal patterns of these two migrations is the fact that the sociological establishment mobilized itself to argue for the integration of European immigrants, but left African Americans out of that effort, believing as they did that black people committing crimes were merely reflecting either their cultural or racial inferiority, and that sociological resources shouldn’t be wasted on them. As Muhammad explained it to us in a recent conversation:

By and large, the entire edifice of sociology (was) deploying its resources against eugenics and Social Darwinism to say that immigrants are not infecting American society with their degenerate blood… “They’re providing real energy and effort to our labor pool, they’re helping us build America. And that some of them should fall into a life of crime is more our fault than theirs, because we haven’t given them a fair opportunity. We stigmatize them, and our nativist proclivities make it very difficult for immigrants to live the lives that they came here to pursue.” And basically they never put black people into that equation. They left black people out of that kind of very structuralist, environmental critique of the origins of white European or white ethnic criminality.

You can hear Muhammad make that point and others in the video below.

 

So in the comparison of these two migrations, where Stuntz shows us political advancement for European immigrants and subsequent demographic shifts that largely prevented African Americans from making similar gains, Muhammad highlights a formidable social apparatus undergirding the rise of one group and helping to maintain the lower status of the other.

These two books, covering similar ground in different ways, help to remind us how important it is to reach across disciplinary lines in our attempts to understand the world in which we live. 

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.