Sunday, August 11, 2019

SOME THOUGHTS POSTED BY MY SON, PROFESSOR TOBIAS BARRINGTON WOLFF, ON HIS FACEBOOK PAGE

During the period of American history when the institution of chattel slavery defined much of the country's daily life, subjecting millions of people to torture, rape, kidnapping and murder on a regular basis and shaping most of our national politics, there was an important strain of abolitionist advocacy that focused on the corruption of the moral status of White Americans that resulted from these evil practices. One might think of this as the non-liberationist strain of abolitionist thought. The concern was not the human rights of Black people. Some proponents of the idea may also have cared about human rights and Black lives, but that was not the focus of their argument, and many in fact did not care. The concern, rather, was the degradation of the spirit and the moral integrity of White people that came from these evil practices. To put the argument in the most unvarnished terms, some White people were worried about what they were doing to themselves by participating in slavery practices or propping up that system. They were concerned about impacts on labor and the treatment of White workers, impacts on family and the way that White men would treat their wives, as a consequence of the relentless inhumanity that the practice of slavery required. That school of thought continued through the Civil War and played a role in the crafting and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and the formal disestablishment of the chattel slavery system.
In the great betrayal that was Reconstruction and its aftermath -- the failure or refusal to follow through with any kind of meaningful reparations, to establish and permit enduring Black political power, or to promote civil and social equality -- the idea of concern about White moral integrity was warped and perverted. White Supremacy survived Reconstruction undiminished, and the concern for the moral status of White people propping up or participating in practices of torture and oppression was largely forgotten in favor of a renewed commitment among many White Americans to insist on their social and cultural superiority. Whatever redemptive potential the concern about corruption of White morals might have had during the abolitionist movement, it was mostly abandoned and lost.

Strains of that same argument can be found in the advocacy of great Black leaders of the early to mid twentieth century like James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells and, later, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, stressing the unavoidable connectedness of Black Americans and their White countrymen and the need, as Johnson put it, to fight for the survival of Black America's body and White America's soul. But the periods of time when this way of thinking became ascendant, either among Black leaders and the communities they worked with or among White Americans who joined with them in common cause, were limited and episodic.

I have been thinking a lot about this history since our present crisis began, and particularly since this administration started deliberately brutalizing children and families in concentration camps at the southern border of the United States. The human rights of those brutalized people -- their lives and their physical and psychic integrity -- are the most urgently important priority, as was true of the lives and human rights of Black Americans when the institution of slavery reigned. But the corrosive impact on the soul of White America is also part of this crisis. The gleeful, aggressive inhumanity that I see so many of my fellow Americans embracing -- the cheering, insistent, yawping eagerness that so many exhibit when they are given license to indulge their sadistic impulses -- that is a moral cancer that is colonizing our body politic, establishing beachheads throughout the corpus of our nation, metastasizing. If we do not find a way to beat back that progression, then I fear we will be lost.

14 comments:

  1. A very powerful piece. Your son inherited your literary talent, but the "gleeful, aggressive inhumanity" that he so rightly becries has been with us as long as I can remember, in Guantanamo, in mass incarceration, in Viet Nam, in the Jim Crow south, in the violent suppression of the protest demonstrations in northern Black neighborhoods in the 60's, in the hardhats (the construction workers who violently broke up anti-war marches), etc.

    That gleeful, aggressive inhumanity is part of America and from what I can see, it's part of being human. It's there in all societies and it's coming out of the closet.

    I disagree with him that if we don't beat back that progression, "we will be lost". They're always going to be with us, and we, those with a bit more empathy towards immigrants and towards those who society has marginalized and excluded in general, are not lost. We do what we can to build a juster society, that's to our credit (as his concern to your son's credit) and I feel no more part of those who cheer on repression against immigrants or against black people than I feel part of Al Qaeda.

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  2. Also, just to piggyback on wallerstein's comments: that "gleeful, aggressive inhumanity" that Tobias rightly decries also is embodied in the vile career of DA Kamala Harris, whose candidacy he so hypocritically supports. Harris bragged about her aggressive inhumanity--her policy of threatening poor black mothers with jail if their kids skipped class, of keeping potentially innocent people on death row, of giving political cover to ICE. How does he manage to reconcile these words with supporting someone whose career is as rotten as hers?

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  3. This seems to me to be the crucial sentence: "But the periods of time when this way of thinking became ascendant, either among Black leaders and the communities they worked with or among White Americans who joined with them in common cause, were limited and episodic." It stands out because it's among the least mythopoeic, being a reluctant acknowledgement of incremental progress, rather than a proclamation about "souls" and "redemption." It speaks to the occasional effectiveness of division of labor. Not everybody needs to "care about human rights" if we can depend upon a devoted few to carry the burden.

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  4. I have a limited understanding of slavery and reconstruction. I've only read the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, his novella: the Heroic Slave, some of their individual speeches, and the beginning part of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. I took only one course on the Civil War in college. So I don't know alot about these time periods, but I know a little bit about them.

    "To put the argument in the most unvarnished terms, some White people were worried about what they were doing to themselves by participating in slavery practices or propping up that system. They were concerned about impacts on labor and the treatment of White workers, impacts on family and the way that White men would treat their wives, as a consequence of the relentless inhumanity that the practice of slavery required."

    I believe the concious minds of past northern, anti-slavery, Civil\Human Rights activists were more dynamic and multifaceted than professional historians might give them credit for. Yes, all of the above motives were factors to a degree (& reconstruction was a joke) but I believe there were many whites who also cared for African-American human rights more than just as a means to an end for other purposes and objectives. I actually believe their hearts wanted to free their fellow human beings from bondage.

    Think of a sergeant in the Union Army marching up a hill (perhaps for his last time) risking his life with his company to kill a company of Confederate soldiers who wanted to kill them. Is he doing it for fun? for recreation? or for love of marching? No. He's doing it mainly take the pain away from the slaves of the southern states of being slaves in America. I don't believe he has any apathy for the slaves in his mind. His apathy is for those Confederate soldiers instead. But what do I know? There existed no political polling of Americans during slavery and also during reconstruction.

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    1. I would think the Union general would be more likely to have been patriotically fighting against the insurrectionists in his nation, than for freedom for Southern slaves, per se (but that is just an intuition).

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  5. For the last line:

    Or, at least, I believe it to be the case...

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  7. A very nice piece, reminiscent of Baldwin. Unfortunately - or not, as soon as one reads the piece, as evidenced by s. wallterstein's comments, parallel moral cancers fill the mind. For example, just as Baldwin argues that the concept of the n-word was and is necessary to justify "the crime," the glorification of the Founders and the Constitution justifies - apart from slavery - the original crime of genocide, empire, and oligarchy. Candidates for president today cannot say a good thing about the Bolivarian Revolution or a bad thing about US policy toward Venezuela or Palestine. It's blasphemy for Tulsi to meet with Assad. One can only imagine the apoplexy that would ensue were she to point to the fact that since 9/11 the US, on average, has bombed someone once every three days. And the list goes on. Baldwin's emphasis on the panicky cowardice of the privileged to confront their crimes is insightful but personal self-criticism must be joined to criticism of our history and institutions. That is why the power of a militant anti-Trump movement may also be an opportunity to pull back the curtain so that we may envision a new world, one that we can slowly, but steadily, move toward, critically and self-critically.

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  8. Tobias's piece is on the mark. There is no contradiction between trying to aid the oppressed and trying to save our White souls. MLK knew that and skillfully used it. If, after we feel our souls are saved, we lose some degree of interest in helping the oppressed, shame on us, but at least we were on the right side, and the movement was the stronger for representing both interests.

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  9. Tom Cathcart,

    I guess some of us don't believe in the soul or in saving our souls, not even on a metaphorical level, the level on which, I presume, you are using the term.

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  10. s wallerstein,

    Yep, metaphorical, probably not too different from what you meant by "part of being human."

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  11. Tom Cathcart,

    I don't quite follow what you mean above.

    When I say that the "gleeful, aggressive inhumanity" is part of being human, I mean that it's a facet of human nature. Some of us control it, some of us repress it, some of us sublimate it, some of us relish in it and still others, for example, Mr. Trump, foment it for political gain. That's an empirical claim.

    Now as far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), the soul, even taken metaphorically, refers to a moralized view of a fairly constant self. It's different than the idea of character (which is also a view of a fairly constant self) since we use moral and merely descriptive terms to describe someone's character: he was very generous, but not very sociable: "generous" is a moral term with a descriptive component, while "not very sociable" is merely descriptive.

    Souls are good or evil or in purgatory. Martin Luther King's soul is good or saved, Nancy Pelosi is in purgatory and Trump is just plain evil or lost. When you speak of souls, there is no possibility for the strange mixtures which we find when we speak of characters. It may be that Nancy Pelosi might be a better seat partner for a long boring flight than Martin Luther King: she may be more considerate (important on a long flight)
    and better at small talk. I couldn't imagine Trump being a good seat partner (he is not considerate), but maybe Henry Kissinger is, even though on the level of souls, his is lost.

    So when we talk of souls, we use a very moralized view of human beings, which I try not to use myself and find very "awkward".

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  12. s wallerstein,

    I've always liked Descartes'notion that it's in the pineal gland. Also the medieval attempts to weigh the body just before and just after death. :)

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  13. 'this administration started deliberately brutalizing children and families in concentration camps at the southern border of the United States .. the gleeful, aggressive inhumanity that I see so many of my fellow Americans embracing -- the cheering, insistent, yawping eagerness that so many exhibit when they are given license to indulge their sadistic impulses -- that is a moral cancer that is colonizing our body politic, establishing beachheads throughout the corpus of our nation, metastasizing.'

    I would say 'that is a figure of speech'. I mean, 'colonizing our body politic', it's rather high-flown. Maybe this another impulse not to gleefully indulge. In any case, I figure that Guantanamo Bay is much closer to a concentration camp. The government, of course, is not murdering these children. The U.S. is not running “concentration camps” at the border. They’re referred to as "federal migrant shelters" or "temporary shelters for unaccompanied minors" or "detainment facilities" or the like. I mean, sure, I get that the Trump administration continually seeks new ways to stop people from applying for asylum, and to discourage others from attempting to. As I picture this, migrants are forced to wait for days or weeks on the Mexican side—often sleeping in makeshift shelters or fully exposed to the elements— there are no guarantees on how long migrants will have to wait. The overall effort appears to be to make it as difficult as possible to get a hearing to adjudicate those claims. Maybe there does need to be a conversation about this or such. About militarization and dehumanization or such. Maybe the conditions are in decline. I don't doubt it. But, looking the figure up, I find that 144,000 people were detained in May. I am not sure I know what to suggest..

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