Prejudice
Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books
On August 27th, I posted a mid-to-late 1940s photo of two Black sailors browsing books in a library section marked “Negro Books." In response, a couple people on my socials expressed outrage or sadness over the segregation they thought they were seeing. That makes sense if one doesn’t consider the book titles I mentioned or the link to a related post here titled Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation.
Thing is, though, books could be powerful wherever librarians made them available in their collections and discoverable by their readers. That’s why I see in the image two sailors browsing books in a thematic library display that highlighted a selection of books of probable interest to Black people. The photo’s provenance also suggests as much: the U.S. Navy Department’s Office of Public Relations produced it, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture preserved it. What’s more, there is the photo’s suggestive chronological proximity to the end of the war and to Harry S. Truman’s desegregation order for the U.S military in 1948. Yes, the photo was taken in a broader context of prejudice and segregation, even atrocity, but the story does not end there.
We can’t allow our knowledge of historical and present-day racism to blind us to signs in the image of people with agency who worked toward a more just world. Someone in the navy’s PR office decided or was ordered to take and distribute such a photo, or have this done. One or more people in a navy library ordered and displayed the books that caught the photographer’s eye, perhaps owing to the cataloging innovations of Dorothy B. Porter. Moreover, someone shaped the command climate in which these things transpired.
Whatever led to these particular sailors posing for this picture, the camera recorded two young black men doing something about their present and future. We see them serving their country. We see them acquiring knowledge about it that had emancipatory potential.
Of course, nothing in this kind of framing can negate the history of racism in this country. What thinking about individual agency can do is open our eyes to the humanity and strength of the people who endured and made lives for themselves despite the oppression. The books on the shelves written by Black authors were also evidence of such spirit. And the unknown characters behind the making of this photograph? It is productive to think of them as individuals who made choices within a specific institutional, social, and cultural matrix. Human agency matters.
We need a president who reads widely, not one as ignorant and crudely cynical as the former president quoted in this piece is. www.politico.com/news/2024…
“Scientists identify victim of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in mass grave” (Washington Post) archive.ph/DPC5e.
“We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”
This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, section: “The Call of the Void”.
Reading about Israel's Universities during War
"Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown", The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2024.
Teaser: “Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists.”
Takeaway: This piece shows just how far academic institutions in Israel have been willing to go in order to serve the state’s goals at the expense of academic freedom, free speech, and the rule of law.
Question: How are universities governed in Israel? How vulnerable are they to outside political pressure under less fraught conditions? I am wondering about the political effects of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, on one hand, and the broad effects of the current wartime climate, on the other.
Children Watching
“The Children Were Watching,” dir. Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, USA 1961, 25 min. – This documentary doesn’t feel as old to me as I wish it did. In part that’s because I watched it in Trump’s America during an especially difficult year, but something deeper is at play. The film’s ongoing relevance represents an ambiguous answer to its directors' main question: What were the children of a New Orleans neighborhood learning as they watched their parents during the conflicts surrounding school integration in November 1960?
An Encounter between our Enslaved and our Immigrant Pasts
I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.
– Frederick Douglas, quoted in Patrick Young, “When a Ban on the Chinese Was Proposed and Frederick Douglass Spoke Out,” Long Island Wins, February 8, 2017.
Intersections
After fleeing the Nazis, many Jewish refugee professors found homes at historically black colleges. And they were shocked by race relations in the South.
– Heather Gilligan on Timeline, February 10, 2017
Don’t be a Sucker (1947)
There is an infectious simplicity about this film, which rings true politically in these times, even if the history it tells was more complicated.
Source: U.S. War Department, Prelinger Archives, hosted by the Internet Archive.
Hate Speech and Fresh Air
Hate speech is like mold: Its enemies are bright light and fresh air.
– Howard Gillman, “Bigots at the Gate: Universities Shouldn’t Duck the Fight against White Nationalism," Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2016.
‘Black Man Driving’
A woman I met way back when my son and her daughter were still in kindergarten or the first grade has written a piece that drives home the unfortunate contradictions in what passes for a national conversation in these United States. It's not preachy or partisan, just personal, the kind of thing that can make you think, even if you don't happen to know the man in question.
My husband of twenty-seven years is a police officer. He’s a decent man, a kind man, the kind of police officer you’d want if you were in trouble. He’s also a black man. A black man who I worry about more when he is out of uniform than when he is wearing one.
Read the whole piece: Black Man Driving.
McCain’s Ethnically Charged Scare Tactics
See this post as it was cached on the Internet Archive The low resolution images work better in that context. – MRS, 10/27/2024
Human Rights in the History Survey
I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was "Politics and Human Rights."
If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.
Ron Paul: Paranoid Racist
James Kirchick published a piece called Angry White Man in The New Republic on January 8th. Kirchick waded through some three decades' worth of Ron Paul’s newsletters, which he quotes extensively. I do not want to repeat the inflammatory racist and paranoid language he found, but Kirchick’s summary of the newsletters' source value bears repeating.
What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
Normally I would just ignore a right-wing crank like Paul, but he’s been gaining too much respectable attention lately. I’ve also seen well-meaning opponents of the Iraq War support him who would be horrified by his decades-long history of racism and fear-mongering. The more blog posts about this subject the better.
Maybe the mainstream media will finally pick up on it for the presidential debates. Who knows? Maybe Ron Paul’s fellow Republicans will show some backbone and call him out on this too. Or are they afraid of losing the votes' of Paul’s supporters after he loses the primaries? Something needs to happen. As Kirchick writes,
Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week’s Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a “straight-talker.”
The truth about this man deserves the widest possible audience.
See also Selections from Ron Paul's Newsletters. Hat tips to Deborah Lipstadt for pointing out Kirchick's article in her blog and Ian Thal for pointing out the separate piece summarizing highlights from the newsletters.