Hello! And welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! Extra special welcome to the new subscribers this week, courtesy of some shares by some friends. I appreciate your being here and joining us on this journey of prose. This week has been all right for me, certainly productive from a reading standpoint. I have a link to a review I posted extramurally, in DigBoston, to share. There’s also two works of history, one work of journalistic history, and a fantasy novel reviewed. I wrap it all up with a recipe that gives me a slight twinge of COVID-time nostalgia. Dig in, and if you enjoy, please share with your friends!
CONTENTS
REVIEW LINK-
“Age of Illusion” in DigBoston
REVIEWS-
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers
Naomi Novik, His Majesty’s Dragon
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
LAGNIAPPE-
Recipe: Channa Peter-Style
REVIEW LINK-
In the first of what should be a monthly review feature with the fine folks at DigBoston, Boston’s leading independent newspaper, I have reviewed Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions. I’m interested in efforts to push the historiographical envelope towards the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, so this book, on the nineties and oughts, fit right in. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it: https://digboston.com/age-of-illusions-bacevich-looks-at-americas-lost-time/
REVIEWS-
Lillian Faderman, “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” (1991) – I was raised more or less to believe in a straightforward arc of history that progressed towards greater and greater acceptance and freedom. Any real learning of history complicates this picture, showing that “progress,” to the extent it exists at all, is highly uneven and given to major setbacks. Lillian Faderman illustrates this in her history of American lesbian communities in the twentieth century. Beyond a preference on the part of women for women, there’s nothing about lesbian communities, in Faderman’s telling, that is predetermined, that isn’t given to influence from the society at large.
Faderman begins her story with the Victorian period, where a degree of intimacy between women, even to the exclusion of intimacy with men, was considered normal and wholesome, if not the norm. This is not normally how we think of that period, but it makes sense. These “romantic friendships” were accepted in no small part due to a prevailing gender ideology that held that women were basically non-sexual beings, and so no one thought there was anything sexual about two women basically being in long term love relationships with each other. Faderman is unclear whether these couples did, in fact, have sex, or whether that would even be germane. These couplings were by and large limited to middle and upper class women who did not need to rely on marriage to a man for economic support, and received a boost with the opening of women’s colleges and of careers for (again, mostly middle and upper class) women such as social work in the late nineteenth century.
Things took a turn once, around that same time, the (almost exclusively male) sexologists got a hold of things. Many of them, like Havelock Ellis and even to an extent Sigmund Freud, tried to relativize gay and lesbian behavior by explaining it as congenital. But they still pathologized queerness and brought lesbianism to the public consciousness as something defined by sexual behavior and as abnormal.
From then on, the conditions of the now-defined lesbian community had a number of ups and downs. In large part, these were occasioned by changes in the economy and social order at large. It’s hard to have a lesbian community without independent women and relatively safe spaces for community gathering. Good economic times, like the 1920s, were generally better for the community than bad times, like the 1930s, though of course results will vary by social class, race, and other factors. The forties were something of a boom time for lesbianism, Faderman writes, as the military and wartime employment both brought many women together in relatively male-light environments and allowed them a degree of independence previously unknown. The political and cultural lockdown around the Cold War threw all that out the window and lesbians were targets of the lavender scare along with gay men.
A consistent theme in this book is the ways in which social class conditioned what lesbian communities looked like. In the wake of the crackdowns in the fifties, working class and younger lesbians developed an elaborate culture around the tiny enclaves of relatively safe space they could build around lesbian bars. This centered around the dual roles of the butch and the femme, and in an echo of the gender conformity all around them, Faderman writes, lesbians enforced subscription to these roles strongly (something tells me this may be something of a controversial point). Upper and middle class lesbians, for their part, avoided the bars and tried to blend in with mainstream society, in an echo of the “romantic friendships” of yesteryear. You didn’t get the sort of class mixing you got in gay male environments, according to Faderman, anyway.
This arrangement was partially upended by the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies. If there’s one thing I’d ding Faderman for it’s not any of the lesbian history — I’m hardly in a place to criticize there — but in the way she sometimes summons a hazy “spirit of the times” as an actor in her history. But whether attributed to a spirit or to socioeconomic/political factors, the sixties were indeed a decade of change for lesbians. Attitudes loosened, organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis got together, and at the end of the decade, the Stonewall uprising ignited a general gay and lesbian surge into the public sphere.
Faderman is a little vague as to how it happened, and given what we know about counterculture/New Left sexuality I’m not sure I would place as much explanatory weight on the “hippie spirit” of “liberated” sexuality as she does, but seemingly overnight the phenomenon of a specifically lesbian feminism rose to prominence in the seventies. This proposed to remake society (or, anyway, to carve out niches within or outside of society) through liberating the essential goodness of woman, away from the corruption and violence of men. Not that I’m the target audience here, but I’m of a few minds about this one. On the one hand, I think it denies agency and full humanity to anybody to say they are not capable of the full panoply of human expression, and a brief look at the history of women given power over others, from Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi on down to many of the assistant managers across the broad land, will show they are indeed capable of expressing the very human attributes of aggression and love for power. On the other hand, given the miserable history of relations between men and women, you really can’t fault women for wanting to pitch in the shitty hand they’ve been dealt and try something, anything else. Luckily, the women of the world, neither in the seventies before I was born nor today, haven’t exactly been knocking my door down to know my opinions about their political options, so I think we’re safe to leave it at that.
For her part, Faderman seems sympathetic towards, even a little wistful about, the lesbian feminist utopian project of the seventies. She ultimately judges it too utopian, too impractical, it’s youthful proponents given to “fanaticism,” by which she means given to rigorous application of a program. A lot of lesbians at the time, excited by the potential for creating their own communities, chafed under the pressure to conform to expectations like performative non-aggression, refusal of patriarchal beauty standards, the wiping away of previous generations of lesbian culture as “politically incorrect,” a term apparently used unironically by lesbian feminists at the time. One lesbian Faderman talked to lamented that no one was allowed to play as a butch or femme, even as they all looked butch in the accepted uniform of overalls and sweaters. This, in turn, led to a reaction the other way, as lesbian cultural militants attempted to unleash a more robust and active female sexuality, complete with s&m, (negotiated) gender roles, and other aspects the utopians deemed patriarchal and taboo.
All was not for naught, however. While lesbian utopia broke up in the conservative turn in the 1980s (I don’t remember the eighties, but I do remember it’s slag collecting in the nineties, and the way tropes derived from lesbian feminist utopianism found their way into everyday reactionary expression), aspects of it carried over into the increasingly out and integrated lesbian communities that came to exist. These included a concern for inclusion; indeed, many of the inclusionary measures we use in leftist organizing today come from lesbian feminist organizing culture, it seems. Faderman seems to land on a sort of Goldilocks conclusion for where the community was at in the late eighties/early nineties as she was writing. Having (mostly) rejected separatism for increasing opportunity in the mainstream and also having (mostly) rejected sexual radicalism in favor of the tried-and-true serial monogamy, contemporary lesbians take the best from both and leave the rest, though Faderman saw the involvement of lesbians in AIDS activism as a sign things might get more militant in the future.
I am, by definition, “out of the loop” here. I do hear rumblings of rejection of the assimilationist compromises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, critiques of “homonationalism” and the like. Faderman seems more worried about attack from outside of the community, of denial of opportunity, than about what taking these opportunities costs (and who they’re still denied to), understandably enough, I think. The rise of the far right in this country complicates the picture further, as does the participation of queer people (anyone remember that Yiannopolous guy?) in it. I don’t know what the future holds, or what the thinking of the future will mean for how we conceptualize the lesbian history Faderman tried to tell. I will say that this book was informative and readable. Faderman ranged impressively widely to get sources, including many interviews with lesbians of all ages, races, and social classes, many of whom were speaking about their experience for the first time. Their resilience, having lived through hard times and always under the shadow of persecution, was heartening to see. From the cheap seats, this was a pretty good introduction to American lesbian history. ****
Naomi Novik, “His Majesty’s Dragon” (2006) - Probably not the best way to begin a review of a book to talk about another book altogether, but I really should get around to reading “Master and Commander.” I have a copy of it sitting on a shelf. I’ve read “Master and Commander But In Space,” i.e., one of David Weber’s space navy books. And now I’ve read “Master and Commander But With Dragons,” or, the first in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. I can’t even be sure how many of the shared tropes are really in the original work, but from context and what I remember of the Russell Crowe movie, it seems like there’s a lot. The new commander, earning the respect of their crew; learning the rites and rituals of the service; intimacies both warm and structured by custom and chain of command, on and on.
All that, but with dragons, is the premise of “His Majesty’s Dragon.” Everything about the world seems normal circa 1804 -- there’s no additional magic -- but dragons exist and are an important part of warfare. Royal Navy officer Will Laurence captures a French ship with a dragon’s egg. The egg hatches and the dragon imprints on Laurence, who names the dragon Temeraire. This imprinting means Laurence has to leave the Navy and join the dragon-borne Aerial Corps, a wild, wooly, and declasse bunch. At first Laurence is put out by this, and gets dumped by his sweetie, but he and Temeraire become close, flying is cool, and he’s an English officer, dammit, he does his duty.
Ships of the line were probably the most technologically advanced and complex systems of their day, and part of the “Master and Commander” genre appears to be immersing the reader in the management of and vocabulary adhering to keeping them going. Scifi writers like David Weber enthusiastically adopted this practice to allow them to geek out over their spaceships. There’s a lot going on with dragon combat, too, in Novik’s world. Much of the book is taken up with Laurence and Temeraire’s training and integration into the Aerial Corps. They fly around the Scottish countryside with other dragons, and we hear a lot of names of dragon breeds and their attributes. Laurence adjusts to such novelties as women officers (some of the dragons will only let women fly them). Novik describes the harnesses that allow bodies of men to stay aboard flying dragons throughout their combat maneuvers, dragon-borne battle tactics, etc.
Novik made the interesting decision to have her dragons come out of the egg capable of speech. I guess being a novel, she couldn’t go the “How To Train Your Dragon” route of having them just sort of mug and pantomime to communicate. Temeraire the dragon is somewhere between a cat and a child, supercilious, curious, fiercely attached to Laurence, basically good-hearted. As it turns out, he is a special breed with special abilities that come out in the nick of time to prevent a disaster. Pretty much all the fighting comes in the last fifth or so of the book. Truth be told, the balance between training and fighting being so heavily in favor of training didn’t really do it for me. The descriptions of aerial combat were all right, but not anything to write home about. And I am further biased: while I am critical of Napoleon, who in many ways wrecked the legacy of the French Revolution, I have a hard time getting myself to support the British aristocratic oligarchy against him, despite the efforts of two hundred years worth of propaganda, much of which has found its way into foundational tropes in a lot of fiction genres. For many readers, the premise -- the Napoleonic Wars with dragons! -- will be enough to get this book over. It is indeed a compelling premise, and Novik doesn’t waste it, but it was a little slow for my taste. ***
Vincent Bevins, “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World” (2020) - This made for an interesting read in the current moment. I had known about the massacre of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of communists and suspected communists in Indonesia in 1965 for quite some time. I remember picking up the popular strategy board game “Twilight Struggle,” where the two players play the two sides of the Cold War, and remarking that out of all the events depicted in the game as playable cards or other features, there was nothing about this, the destruction of the third-largest Communist party in the world in the world’s fourth-largest nation. That’s just one minor instance of how under-reported this event is. More germane, in all my years teaching world history core classes to undergraduates, I don’t recall any of the instructors I TAed for making much of it, or even mentioning it. I did when I was instructor of record, but not in that much detail, I admit.
Vincent Bevins works as a reporter, and he worked both Indonesia and Brazil, the two countries that loom largest in this story (other than the United States, I suppose). He tells the story of the massacres in Indonesia in more detail than I had previously seen it, and ties it in with the larger story of the American-led anticommunist campaign. Using secondary sources, newly-declassified primary sources from the American security state, and interviews with survivors, Bevins reconstructs the chain of events that led to the massacres, though some of the events involved remain murky. The initial inciting incident of the massacres was the killing of several Indonesian army generals by a group of young officers. This was blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), with scanty evidence- the PKI had been committed to working within the system set up by vaguely-socialist-flavored nationalist Indonesian leader Sukarno. The CIA (and British intelligence) definitely had been laying the groundwork for Sukarno’s overthrow in favor of a more reliably anticommunist leader, and they’re not above creating inciting incidents out of nothing, but we’ll probably never know the real story.
In most respects, it doesn’t matter. The story the Indonesian army, led by general and soon-to-be dictator Suharto, told was so embroidered with ghastly fabricated filigree -- including Communist witch women mutilating the genitals of the dead generals in a blood frenzy -- that it might as well have been spun out of whole cloth by a horror writer. But I guess you can’t afford to be subtle when your goal is to inspire people to massacre their neighbors. And that’s what the army, police, Islamist militias, and ordinary Indonesian citizens proceeded to do: imprison, torture, and murder hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of civilians innocent of any crime except membership in a party that until a few weeks or days before had been a part of the governing coalition, or suspected membership in or allegiance to same.
Bevins depicts pre-massacre Indonesia as a lively society, experimenting with various forms of political organization for their post-colonial society and making a splash on the international scene, where Sukarno attempted to organize other recently decolonized countries and other poorer, browner nations into an international bloc to compete with those organized out of Washington and Moscow. At first, the Americans were relatively willing to let him do it (the Russians basically don’t enter into this story- as usual, they let their notional allies in the developing world be violently repressed without a peep). Bevins is a little vague as to what changed between the Truman and Johnson administrations to make Sukarno’s overthrow a goal. What’s clearer is that the CIA always regarded Sukarno and the relatively open (relatively- he was a “guided democracy” guy) society he represented as an impediment to anticommunism in the region. This led to situations where the CIA was sponsoring separtist rebellions in some of the country’s many islands at the same time that the State Department was increasing ties with Sukarno. But they all got on the same page by 1965 to collude in the massacre, including giving lists of suspected communists for the Indonesian army to go kill.
After the massacres, Indonesian society, in Bevin’s telling, was not lively, or experimental, and it abruptly withdrew from the non-aligned movement and Third World leadership. Suharto remained in power for decades and kept a firm hand on political organizing and expression. Money’s always a big part of these things, of course, and the Suharto regime saw to it that American interests were free to exploit the country’s vast natural wealth, with what proceeds that stayed in Indonesia going to Suharto and his clique of corrupt generals. With Washington’s approval, Indonesia mounted a genocidal war in East Timor. There was never any accounting for the 1965 massacres, or the East Timor war, and while Suharto’s gone, it doesn’t look like his successors are going to prioritize truth and reconciliation any time soon. Other than the threat of Islamist terror or Chinese influence, Indonesia is basically as safe as houses as far as Washington is concerned, fifty-five years later.
Far from a crime or a warning, what happened in Indonesia became a model for anticommunists in much of the rest of the developing world, spurred and in part coordinated by the CIA and other Washington actors. This was made explicit in Chile with the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the rise of Augusto Pinochet in 1973. “Jakarta is Coming” graffiti cropped up in Santiago, and the generals and spies who plotted the overthrow and the tension campaign leading up to it cited Indonesia as a model. They were aided in this by the anticommunist military dictators in Brazil, who followed a similar script a year before the Indonesia massacres to rid themselves of a vaguely populist leader in Joao Goulart. The Brazilian military didn’t massacre as many people as did their Indonesian counterparts, but they exported their methods of political manipulation, torture, and murder to Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, from Argentina to Guatemala, and the world.
On a side note, American fascists today like to use imagery from Latin American right wing dictatorships such as that of Pinochet. “Weren’t they all communists?” right-wing thug “Tiny” Toese responded when asked by a journalist about his “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t-shirt. I’ve always thought that was a little pathetic, even for them- these big bad American nationalists modeling themselves off tin-pot dictators in our traditional playground. Now I wonder why they haven’t called for emulation of Indonesia in 1965. It might come. I suppose one difference is that the Latin American massacres were undertaken by Christians who saw themselves as white (however much the exigencies of American race-thought would categorize them as “Latino”), whereas the Indonesia massacres were done by brown-skinned Asian Muslims. Who knows?
These massacres didn’t win the US the Cold War, Bevins argues. The Soviet Union collapsed on its own, and as mentioned above, barely protested when most of these movements or regimes were crushed. But they did shape the world in line with the interests of the US, or, anyway, the interests of the American elite and the rabid anticommunists they kept on a long leash in their intelligence services (to the extent they weren’t the same people). The massacres killed the hopes of the Third World in the fifties and early sixties. This left the Third World easy pickings for “structural adjustment,” neoliberalism, and religious and ethnic sectarianism to fill the void left by more hopeful forces. Leftists the world over noticed that the Soviets were unlikely to help them, and that the only leftist forces that survived in the Third World were those sufficiently well-armed and willing to suppress domestic opposition, like you saw in Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam, where even after killing at least a million and probably more Vietnamese, the US lost. This was a lesson figures like Pol Pot learned all too well. But in the end, even armed leftists wound up marginalized in the world the massacres made.
The point has not been lost on me (and from looking at his twitter, has not been lost on the author) that while the admixture of military involvement to civilian participation varied massacre by massacre, all of them involved the enthusiastic assent of at least a portion of the civilian population (and in all of them, the police were instrumental). Perhaps this is what we in the biz call “a presentist reading” but it seems to me that even in countries with no anticommunist tradition, like Indonesia, somewhere around twenty percent of the population are, to put it bluntly, violence-craving meatheads. They want to see blood, preferably the blood of people marked as “other” (there was a notable ethnic component to the Indonesia massacres, where a lot of Chinese Indonesians were targeted) and that of do-gooders and reformers. They don’t care if they miss out on opportunities to make their own lives materially better, they don’t care if they wind up worse off, possibly seriously worse off, they want blood.
And, sorry “both-sides”-ers, there is no equivalent population that, say, wants to see the blood of their social superiors at all costs. I’ve spent a long time on the left and can tell you, it’s not there. Historically, you get two kinds of mass bloodshed on the left. One is in the heat of a revolution, where people act out on long-held grievances or are terrified that their oppressors are going to come back and so kill people they think are liabilities. The numbers of people killed this way don’t add up to the sort of figures you get in massacres meant to suppress revolutionary activity. Uncoordinated crowds without a tradition of mass violent action (as distinct from populations used to sectarian or racial violence) are inefficient killers. The bodies stack up more in the second category of mass leftist bloodshed, that pursued to keep a given regime in power. Structurally, these resemble the massacres of any other regime, as harped on by those who love the Nazi-Soviet equivalency. There’s nothing uniquely leftist about them. To the extent left-leaning regimes rally their civilian populations behind their atrocities, they use much the same language and imagery as rightist killers- the enemy within, the threat to the country, subversives, and the dynamic winds up benefiting those who already hold power, just as it does in right-leaning countries. It just happens those holding the power are party bureaucrats instead of landowners or whoever.
No- if it were “both sides,” if there was an equivalent bloc of the population that sought the blood of social superiors in the way there is one that seeks the blood of social inferiors (and those who’d advocate the downward distribution of power), then America would look quite different right now. I always want to ask the chuds- if antifa were dedicated to destroying civilization, and would stop at nothing to do so, why haven’t some of us just bought assault rifles and walked into a megachurch or a mall? Of course, I’d get some alternate-reality answer like reference to the “Bowling Green massacre.” One of the right’s important abilities, as illustrated by “The Jakarta Method,” is to be able to imagine themselves as victims even when they’re the ones victimizing. From Jakarta to Brazil, the world has been inundated by their crocodile tears. I’ll be honest: this dynamic, where a lot of people will kill for the sheer joy of keeping others down and most people will let them, has led me to wonder what the point is of a people-centric politics. I was never a believer that most people are good. It’s in fact the insight that most people aren’t that has driven me left- I want to see power distributed downward and ultimately scattered because I don’t trust people to have power over each other. Still… that stubborn twenty percent (at least) is a major stumbling block, in practice and in theory.
Anyway… that was just one unfortunate vista of thought this book opened up for me. The stories Bevins tells, and especially the global connections between them, deserve to be much better known. I am glad to see this book getting traction- I’ve noticed multiple non-historian friends talking about it. I would compare it to Mike Davis’s “Late Victorian Holocausts” for its potential ability to break open accepted, underthought assumptions about global history and show what’s underneath. “The Jakarta Method” is not a tour-de-force of scholarship like “Late Victorian Holocausts.” Bevins is a journalist, not a historian, and the book is written for a broad popular international (he explains what the KKK is to readers who might not know) audience. This means it can be a little light at times, but in all that’s a good thing, as it will hopefully help it reach as many people as possible. Here’s hoping it’s not too late for its lessons to help make a better future. ****’
Ibram X. Kendi, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas” (2016) (narrated by Christopher Dontrell Piper) - “Stamped From the Beginning” demonstrates the pitfalls of what historians call “presentism” - and, if such a historiographical sin may be permitted a positive side, its benefits. You never know how much authors, as opposed to publishers, decide things like book titles and subtitles. But Kendi doesn’t shy away from big claims and claiming, at the beginning of one’s academic career (he’s about three years older than I am), to have written THE definitive history of racist ideas, is a big one indeed.
Does he back this claim up in the book? Forgive me, reader: I am going to split the difference. I think that Kendi’s methodological choices limit this work from being anything a historian would call “definitive.” His choice to organize “Stamped From the Beginning” around five lives -- Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis -- and interweaving the larger societal changes in racial/racist ideas around them could be called methodologically conservative, if I thought he was doing so out of an idea that great men (or women) are the engine of intellectual history. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it just provides a narrative hook to the book, which is aimed at a wide educated audience- think NPR listeners. Either way, I don’t think the method allows for the degree of exploration of the dynamics of the history of ideas that other methods might. Arguably, it’s not the point of works of history to be “definitive” as in “ending the discussion” at all, but that’s another conversation.
But what makes something “definitive?” Kendi bids to make an impact on the larger conversation around racism in America, not one restricted to nerds like me who care about methodology and historiography. To that end, “Stamped From the Beginning” is less “definitive” in the sense of “marshaling all of the methodological resources of the field and answering all of the questions” and more “definitive” in the sense of “providing a set of definitions and applying them widely.” Because Ibram Kendi has definitions, and he wants you to use them as thoroughgoingly as he has. If it works, then his subtitle makes more sense.
In this book, Kendi defines racism as the belief that there is something wrong with black people. Antiracism is opposition to that belief and the actions undertaken under its auspices. There are three basic positions available to everyone in the world of this book. Two are racist: the segregationist position, that holds that black people are inferior and always will be, so they should be segregated away from white society, and the assimilationist position, that holds that black people are inferior but aren’t stuck that way, that they can join white society by imitating it. Then there’s the antiracist position that black people are not inferior. Everyone in history from the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century on down can be slotted into one of these definitive and never-changing categories.
The issues this raises should be obvious. Let’s dispense with the methodological quibbles about unchanging and possibly anachronistic categorization schemes for now and start with an activist objection I’ve seen in a few places and that I wondered about as I listened. A lot of rhetorical labor has gone into redefining the word “racist” away from an emphasis on personal comportment and towards an emphasis on the use of power, and the job is by no means finished. The equation in organizing circles, as far as I’ve seen, is basically “bigotry + societal power over the target of bigotry = racism.” This means black people, effectively, cannot be racist, at least not against whites and maybe not against anybody, depending who you ask. I’ve been quietly ambivalent about this. I basically agree it’s more useful from an organizing perspective. But it’s also been a pretty transparent instrumental move, a scramble on the part of antiracist thinkers and organizers to deprive the right of its beloved cries of “reverse racism.” On the one hand, I think it’s wrong to deny any part of the human experience to any part of humanity, and that includes the worst bits, like racism. On the other, language evolves, and a term that includes both “the worst human oppression” and “little Skyler got his fee fees hurt because someone called him ‘a honky,’” like the old definition of racism did, is worth evolving beyond. I am, as I said, ambivalent, and basically willing to go along with the consensus of organizers who’ve thought more about it and have more “skin in the game.”
Well, if Kendi has any ambivalence about calling black people racist, he does not display it in “Stamped From the Beginning.” I don’t recall him talking about segregationist black people (though he does talk about separatists like the Nation of Islam, a little). But there’s plenty of assimilationist black people, or it might be more accurate to say, black people who hold to assimilationist ideas. Anyone, after all, black or white, can dispense with their previously held ideas and become antiracist. This is roughly the character arc Kendi ascribes to W.E.B. Du Bois. But, according to Kendi, assimilationism is a racist idea, holding a racist idea means the holder is a racist, therefore, any and all holders of assimilationist ideas are racist, black or white, no exceptions. Among the exceptions that Kendi pointedly does not make are those for Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Wright (the latter of whom Kendi dismisses almost entirely as a writer and man).
For an effort at definition, this raises many more questions than it answers. For one thing, Kendi’s definition of racism is a ratchet: it only goes one way. You’re a racist if you entertain any racist ideas, even if you also hold antiracist ideas, as Kendi graciously grants Douglass, King et al did. That’s not reversible- the holding of antiracist ideas don’t make you an antiracist in spite of your racist ideas. For another thing, Kendi’s concept of assimilationism is probably the most presentist of all of the ideas presented in this book- frankly, it reeks of twitter. The list of black heroes who hold to some idea that could be called assimilationist -- which, especially in the early parts of the book, means any suggestion that anything in black communities need change other than their experience of oppression -- is basically coextensive with the list of black heroes pre-... well, pre-twitter, basically, though Kendi would make an argument for Angela Davis. This includes figures that Kendi praises as antiracist. I’m reading a biography of journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, as courageous a figure as you’ll find in American history. Kendi cites her as an antiracist. Well, in her early days at the very least (I just started the biography), Wells very much believed black people needed lessons in “civilization” - the dreaded “uplift/suasion” (not sure how it’s written in the book). I’m not sure if she changed her mind. We’ll find out.
But more pertinently than “throwing under the bus,” to use the current and kind of insufferable phrase, generations of black leaders who fought and suffered for the rights of their people, there’s another activist conundrum here. My understanding, from the cheap seats, was that it was basically accepted that generational trauma has, in fact, created serious problems within the black community, and indeed, every other community that has ever been oppressed. That’s not to say it’s the community’s fault- many operating in the trauma framework seem to basically not bother with “fault” or else find it with oppressive structures and those on top of them. It’s not to say other communities don’t have the same problems but use their privileged positions and generally broader margins for error to avoid the brutal consequences oppressed communities face. But it’s also not to say there’s nothing wrong with the communities affected. Mass illiteracy within the community of freed people after the US Civil War was a problem, one the freed people strove mightily to solve. Every black freedom rally I have ever been to has included black speakers calling for an end to gun violence within their communities, generally to widespread applause from black attendees. Are all of these people assimilationist racists?
The nineteenth century lacked much of the vocabulary for things like “intergenerational trauma” or “structural racism” that we now have. What it did have was an idea of “civilization,” a progressive hierarchical grading of societal capabilities and niceties. There were a lot of problems with this conception, as, no doubt, there are problems with our conceptions that future generations will point out to us. It definitely loaned itself to racism, by anyone’s definition of the term. But I think that people used the concepts they had to express the truths in front of them. A lot of civilizational “uplift” thought and action seems aimed at making up for the toll generations of oppression will inevitably take. They didn’t always have the best ways of talking about it, by our standards or maybe by anyone’s. As Kendi would no doubt point out, racist ideas were intertwined with antiracist ones in the best of cases. But they worked with the framework they had, and the reality of the wounds left by generations of oppression in front of them. There was a whole range of opinion and action surrounding black community self-improvement. Lumping it all in as assimilationist racism is anachronistic at best.
There exist two candidates for the nadir of anachronism in this book. Worse in terms of anachronism, for my money, is the aforementioned wedging of black community efforts to self-improve -- I’m not talking Booker Washington appeasement here, I’m talking real accounting with the wounds of slavery -- into a twitter disputant’s notion of assimilationism. Worse in terms of simply being a series of low blows, from where I sit, is Kendi’s treatment of the civil rights movement and integration. I get criticism of the Brown v Board of Education decision and think the logic that black kids need white kids around to feel good about themselves does, indeed, smack of exactly the sort of assimilationist racism around which Kendi partially structured the book. But he comes perilously close to supporting “separate but equal.” In so doing, he trashes the legacy of the millions who fought segregation. They weren’t all assimilationists and they weren’t stupid people in need of Kendi’s categorization scheme to see the light. They knew that separate but equal was a lie and always would be. Kendi takes his trashing to the literary sphere when he basically kneecaps Richard Wright for his supposed assimilationism and upholds Zora Neale Hurston, integration opponent and literary black darling of the libertarian right, as the real deal, not to mention engaging in some deeply selective readings of James Baldwin.
The book gets better as it goes on and works its way towards the present, reasonably enough for a book with a presentism problem. The segregationist-assimiliationist-antiracist triptych makes a fair amount of sense for American history starting at around the rise of the Black Power movement, though it would remain controversial and questionable as it would still posit many black people as racist. That’s when the discourse settles into something like the recognizable contemporary form, with the rhetorical framework that allows for discussion of problems in oppressed communities that doesn’t sound like, to use the current term, “victim-blaming.” His history of the rise of “color-blind” racism in tandem with the Republican southern strategy and the “New Democrats” is as good as any I’ve seen. He ends on a high note, encouraging his readership to abandon uplift/suasion and educational efforts at eradicating racism and embrace an antiracist framework that emphasizes doing away with racist policies, for which racist ideas are cover. Get rid of the policies and the ideas go away. Seems about right to me.
This is a big, long book that covers a lot of time (I really don’t have the early-modernist chops to critique his handling of the beginnings of racist ideas) and tries to convey much to a popular audience. Many of the pleas he makes to the reader -- especially that of the relationship where racist policies make racist ideas necessary -- are good correctives to other received ideas, though I’d say even those are open to some critique (where do racist policies come from?). I am ambivalent about how to rate it, and not just out of nervousness as a white critic judging a living and working black writer writing about racism.
As I listened to this book, its author has been the subject of some public comment. Kendi’s newer book, “How To Be An Antiracist,” is a bestseller in difficult and divisive times, which gets him a lot of attention. I’ve seen some highly complimentary profile pieces. Pieces from the right-wing press, notably Reason Magazine and I think First Things if I remember right, have been wringing their hands over Kendi proposing a federal-level “Department of Antiracism” and getting a fat check from Jack Dorsey, twitter’s founder, to pursue his work. And I just recently read a piece from Black Agenda Report denouncing Kendi, taking Dorsey’s gift as evidence (along with some stuff from “How To Be An Antiracist,” which I haven’t read) that he is a stooge for the racist capitalist power structure. Apparently, in “How To Be An Antiracist,” he plumps for “antiracist capitalism.” In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi refers to capitalism and racism at twins, deriving from the same origin point in the early modern slave trade. Rare and virtuous- Kendi seems to be the only contemporary writer who uses twin metaphors who acknowledges, even implicitly, that twins aren’t photocopies. They live separate lives, have separate experiences, develop separate attributes, and die separate deaths. So it makes sense in his conception -- if not in reality -- that capitalism and racism can be separated. I happen to think that’s wrong, and even if it were right, capitalism, however “woke,” would still be an oppressive system and one our planet cannot sustain. I don’t regard myself as the fit judge of Kendi’s organizing potential. I will say Jack Dorsey’s faith in him reduces mine. If he was that dangerous to the status quo -- if his frankly cack-handed scheme for a federal department of certified antiracism experts sniffing out racial inequities in government programs was a threat to anybody with power -- he would not be sitting where he is today.
Let’s put it this way: Ibram Kendi occupies Elie Wiesel’s old chair at Boston University. Wiesel wrote at least one important book and did a lot of good things for Holocaust remembrance. He left an indelible stamp on how we process that particular historical event- for good and for ill. He was a Zionist (wonder where Kendi stands on Palestine), a moralizer, and a contributor to the idea of the Holocaust as utterly unique and ineffable, an idea that is coming back to haunt us. I can’t imagine Kendi, with his prioritization of the Atlantic slave trade as the fulcrum of history, agreeing with his predecessor there. There were other Holocaust writers, like Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, without Wiesel’s baggage. There are other writers on racism and antiracism out there today who lack Kendi’s conceptual issues and his platform, and presumably jealousy over the latter helps drive criticism, right and wrong. But in neither case does it make sense to dismiss their contributions entirely, if nothing else because of the prominence of their platform and the ways they reflect the times. Time will tell if Kendi makes the sort of impact Wiesel did, but in many ways, he is an ideal successor. ***’
LAGNIAPPE-
Recipe: Channa, Peter-Style
It is a little melancholy, relating this recipe, as it is traditionally what I make for my vegetarian and vegan friends who attend my birthday party. Peterfest this year was, alas, a virtual affair, so I did not make channa. I make it less spicy on those occasions than I would were I cooking for myself.
INGREDIENTS-
2 28 oz cans of whole tomatoes
4 16 oz cans of chickpeas, washed
1 medium white onion, chopped
4 cups white rice
Salt (to taste)
Cumin (to taste)
Curry Powder (to taste)
Sugar (to taste)
Pour olive oil or whatever oil suits you into the bottom of a good-sized pot/pan. I use a pot with a panhandle. Is it still a pot? Who’s to say. Turn on the heat to medium. Let it heat up a little. Then add your onions. Add some cumin and curry powder. Cook and stir until the onions turn soft and transparent.
Dump out two 28-oz cans of whole tomatoes into the pan/pot/whatever. Add salt, a little bit of sugar, some more cumin and curry powder.
Smoosh up the tomatoes with a potato masher and/or a wooden spoon. Use the edge of the pot as a smooshing surface. Stir and smoosh, smoosh and stir, for about half an hour or until the tomatoes have been thoroughly smooshed. There will be some chunks in any event and that’s ok.
While you’re doing that is a good time to put some white rice on. I prefer to use a rice cooker to save burner space because while preparing for Peterfest, I am also usually making my paella. Do we need to rehearse how to make white rice? Make it however you normally make it. I make about four cups.
Once the tomatoes are well-smooshed, dump in four 16-oz cans of chickpeas, washed. I’ll level with you, newsletter reader: I don’t remember how many cans of chickpeas I actually use. It’s been a while. I always buy four. It might be only three fit. If you find that to be the case, use three cans, and save the fourth for later. If you find your pot overflowing with chickpeas, for the love of God, don’t add more. But do add a little more salt and spice, cumin and curry powder. Stir. Taste occasionally to see if it needs more of any spice.
Keep stirring until the rice is done or until you think the beans are warm. It won’t take long.
This next step is controversial. “Why don’t you keep the rice and the channa separate so guests can mix it themselves?” people ask me. No. Some sucker will come along, take too much rice or too much channa (my guess is the former), and throw the whole thing off. I love my friends but do not entirely trust them. Instead, take a big bowl, dump in the rice, and dump in the channa. Mix them up.
Serve! Should feed a lot of people, many hungry vegetarians/vegans, even omnivores take some channa on their Peterfest plates along with paella. The rest can be preserved for at least a week in the refrigerator.