My advisors had always told me that there is something about being a black male in academia that attracts well intentioned but often embarrassing special attention from some white faculty. I had not experienced this while at Little College because my professors seem to have been the most socially conscious, social justice oriented and culturally sensitive teachers ever. They were never patronizing or imposing and always critical but kind. Indeed, there were other professors at Little College who were known for being inappropriate or “too much” but I never studied with them. I was not prepared to not have this happen in graduate school, however.

.       .      .      .      .      .      .      

Prof. X is not so much inappropriate as he is overly paternalistic. Prof. X wants to “rescue” me intellectually, which is both nice because he is supporting my work, but weird because sometimes he talks down to me. In class, Prof. X points to me when he discusses any and all things “African American.” (This I can at least understand because my work is on the African American family but it has become a running joke in the class because he doesn’t realize he does it.)

Prof. X once asked me if I played basketball because I’m so much taller than him. I told him I used to play football. In front of the whole class, Prof. X then proceeded to tell me how he graciously helped (almost rescued) his previous inner city black student-athlete from his inability to read and write and guided the young man to become a multiple fellowship award winner (Fulbright, White House Internships etc.).

Hathaway’s experience is probably all too common given the absence of faculty of color on most faculties, let alone in top graduate programs.  As I recall, I worked with three black faculty in my decade-long college and graduate school career and no other faculty of color, compared to dozens of white faculty. 

Hathaway’s commentary is also a fascinating sociology of whiteness, particularly with respect to a major quirk among white faculty-types today:  obligatory dog companionship at all times.

I confess I’ve never been a dog person. Before I went to Little College, I had never known a friendly dog and I never knew anyone who had a dog. As a child I was taught to run or at least stay far away if I saw a stray dog because it probably had rabies or would attack me. (My Jamaican parents were convinced that there was something fundamentally different in American dogs as distinct from the dogs they owned “back home.”)

My parents and I thought it was crazy and sort of funny that on my freshman move-in day, a number of dogs were roaming the dorm halls and resting on the couches because a few students had brought their pets to see them off. (My father concluded that this was evidence of Little College’s “liberal” policies.) So, imagine my surprise when I visited my first year advisor’s office during freshman orientation and realized that her dog stayed in her office!

Advisor: Are you okay with dogs?
Me:……Sure…….

She lets the dog out of the pen and I sort of freeze up in my seat as it walks to me, sniffing my shoes and my bag. At this point I’m only half listening while my advisor is introducing herself because I’m trying to look as comfortable as possible around a dog that has quickly grown fond of my book bag. I missed most of what she said in the meeting but that day I learned that dogs are part of academic life.

Those of you who have been affiliated with a college like Hathaway’s will understand what he means.  In addition to a White Thing, the dog fetish must be a SLAC and elite school affectation–teaching at a public Aggie means that the only animals on my campus (aside from the occasional service dogs and Seminar, my commuter horse) are the patients in the off-campus Vet School emergency department and the ones hanging upside down in the Animal Science building awaiting their appointment with the meat cutting students.  In other words, animals have their uses here–and hanging out in faculty offices ain’t one of ‘em.  (And this is not the case because we on the faculty aren’t white, of course.  Like pretty much everywhere but at HBCs, we are overwhelmingly a white faculty.)

Go read the whole thing.  Good luck, Herlin Hathaway, and dog bless.

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Please enjoy this crackling fire while you warm up after your local MLK Jr. Day Parade. Touré is here in Potterville! That’s pretty big news.

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

Nick Kowalczk offers us a detailed look at historical re-enacting in “Embedded with the Reenactors,”  in which he ponders the fascination that some Americans have with reliving the bloody, imperialistic wars of the past.  I thought this article was noteworthy too because 1) they’re not Civil War reenactors, they’re  reenactors of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and 2) the Seven Years’ War guys (and yes, they’re mostly middle-aged guys, according to Kowalczk’s reporting and my own observations of all kinds of reenactors over the years) have been enjoying their 250th anniversary moment in the spotlight for the past few years. 

I found Kowalczk’s article fascinating, although it’s written in a more “new journalism” style that includes him as both participant and observer, and I kept wishing he would go deeper into some of the questions he raises about reenactors based on his participation in a battle of the Siege of Fort Niagara:

It’s not every 4^th of July you get to be around nearly 3,000 people inhabiting an amalgam of time, and especially in a place as lovely as Fort Niagara State Park. The water in Lake Ontario actually was blue. And the fortification, now known as Old Fort Niagara, has been well-preserved even though it was built by the French in 1726 and took a 19-day pummeling in July 1759, when a few thousand British and Indians out-maneuvered 600 Frenchman sitting pretty in a big castle protected by cannons and stone walls.

But being on the battlefield exactly 250 years later, I couldn’t help but imagine the 348 people who died and the many others who were injured or suffered. When they trembled for their lives could they ever have imagined that a bloodless, G-rated recreation of their deaths eventually would become someone’s hobby?  

Why bother with reenacting a 250-year old war, when Americans in 2009 can just go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see a bloody war for the empire up close?  Kowalczk doesn’t explore these questions, although for me as a seventeenth and eighteenth-century historian, they’re paramount.  It makes me wonder about the future of reenacting North American wars, when we have so many young vets with real-life experience in a war zone, many of whom are still coping with war-related injuries, disabilities, and trauma.

As it is in Kowalczk’s narrative, the reenactors seem a little strange, even almost “queer” for their love of reliving the past and their feelings of always being out of time in the present.  Sometimes his language makes the connection of reenacting as queer explicit, like when he writes about the importance of dress in reenactor events:  “Like drag shows, re-enactments hinge on sartorial panache.”  At other times, he emphasizes the man-out-of-time aspect of a reenactor’s life.  Here, he describes his main connection to the world of reenactors, a Kansas City man he calls “Old Hickory” because of his career as an Andrey Jackson reenactor and model:

He’s never been married or had children or pets. “I don’t think I’ve ever truly been in love either,” he said on the way to Niagara. These days he’s looking for an attractive, independent, middle-aged, single woman interested in history, who reenacts the 18^th century and sews. One imagines he may be looking for a while.

.       .       .       .       .

“In real life I’m just a wallflower,” he once confessed to me, before adding, on a brighter note, “but when I found reenacting everything changed.”

In 1992, at age 44, he took up black powder shooting and visited a War of 1812 site in Kansas called Fort Osage. There he met some F&I reenactors (anachronistic, yes, but who really cares), and he barraged them with questions. He bought clothes, a musket, and slept in his car at events. Some considered him “a suit” and “a mooch,” given his white-collar job and healthy diet, his constant requests for help and lack of handyman skills, but he paid those criticisms little mind. At events he was approached by the public, asked questions, even photographed. For the first time in his life he felt appreciated, like he had something to offer the world.

“Now when I’m in my street clothes I don’t feel like that’s my identity,” he said when I once asked him, Who are you outside of this?

In that conversation I drew a circle in my notebook and asked him to fill in the elements of his life — family, hobbies, friends, the job he’d quit, whatever — and to shade in the categories that involved reenacting. The exercise perplexed Old Hickory; he pushed my notebook away. “I don’t need to do that,” he said. “Reenacting is the circle. That’s it. There isn’t anything else anymore.”

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

In Kowalczk’s telling, reenactors really are different from you and me, but does that explain the popularity of reenacting?  Some enthusiasts might make it their whole lives, but it strikes me that the desire to live in the past (if only on weekends and special occasions) is a wish more widespread among white men in particular than among others.  Something that I and others have observed before is that only some Americans romanticize the past, because the rest of us recognize how much more awful our lives would have been (holding race and gender constant).  For example:  Chauncy DeVega  at We Are Respectable Negroes wrote recently about a story in which a white woman expressed a wish to live in the time period in which Gone with the Wind was set, saying to her African American friend, “Wouldn’t you have loved to be there?”  Only after a few startled moments did the African American woman point out the obvious:  “Cindy, I would have been a slave.”  Romaticizing the past, like reenacting, is a White thing. 

Perhaps this is what makes me uncomfortable about reenactors–their interest in reenacting violent events (warfare, principally) which from the first Anglo-Indian wars of the seventeenth century through our modern wars, were either explicitly racialized wars (most Anglo-Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the wars waged by the Frontier Army against Native Americans) or wars that mobilized ethnic difference and white racism in the war effort (as in World War II and the war with Japan, the Vietnam War, and Iraq and Afghanistan). 

It’s not that reenactors have an uncomplicated view of the past–I’ve gone to several historical reenactments over the past 15 years, in every place I’ve lived, and for the most part I’ve been impressed with their research and knowledge about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ve been to a reenactment of the Boston Massacre at the old Customs House in Boston; a reenactor camp in Eaton (near Greenville) Ohio, with a focus on the frontier wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (including reenactors for both the U.S. troops and Shawnee families); King George’s imperial troops and their Indian allies and enemies at a reenactor camp in Brooklyn, Michigan; black powder gun enthusiast-reenactors of the fur trade days here in Colorado; and I photographed some Seven Years’ War reenactors at Fort Number Four in New Hampshire when I was there to take some pictures for my book.  But while complex, their vision of history remains blinkered and segregated, not because they exclude reenactors of color now (they don’t) or because they themselves have explicitly racist motivations, but because of the stories they choose to tell, and the stories they’re leaving out.

Re-enactments of slavery times and of slave auctions have come in for both criticism and praise from all quarters–praise for their attempts to depict the history of slavery honestly, and criticism for being extremely (and some would say gratuitously) explicit.  But there are plenty of heroic moments in women’s history, African American history, Latin@/Chican@ history, and Native American history that aren’t being reenacted.  Might we see a future in which African Americans re-enact the major struggles and violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era?  Are there women’s groups who regularly dress up in hundred-year old clothing styles and re-enact the violent climax of the suffrage movement?  Personally, I would turn out as a spectator for these events–and I might even be persuaded to get into costume and participate myself–but who will play the thugs with the torches, guns, clubs,  firehoses, chains, and gavage equipment?  Will middle-aged white men be persuaded to cede the heroic roles to other reenactors?

If you have any interest in historical reenactors, go read Kowalczk’s article.  For all of my quibbles, it’s a really thorough overview of historical reenacting, and a rare view of reenactors doing something other than the U.S. Civil War.  He captures in many respects the regional flavors of reenacting that go beyond the Civl War-era.  Furthermore, his interest in masculinity and gender evident in this article aren’t accidental–Kowalczk has written elsewhere on these themes as in this essay, “Manhood, Lorain-style,”  about growing up in the Rust Belt and picking a fistfight to prove he wasn’t “gay.”  This essay might also be of interest to readers of this blog, so print up a copy or zap it onto your e-reader. 

Kowalczk concludes “Embedded with the Reenactors” with an explicit point about the gendered and even childish nature of the fantasies at work in reenacting.  He writes:

Among them was an attractive young mother with two little boys. One of them sat in a stroller and the other ran around pretending to be a soldier. Despite being in uniform, so to speak, I explained to her what I was doing and asked why she brought her family to a battle reenactment given the kind of message it imparts. She answered, “It’s just something to do. And this is what boys do anyway. They’re conquerors — they think they’re born to be conquerors. I used to get tired of them playing war games, but then I got tired of trying to redirect their imagination.” And together we watched her son pretend to kill an imaginary enemy as we walked off the battlefield.

The Aftermath

Later, and mildly depressed, I went to an ice cream shop inside the fort. As luck would have it, I sat beside two other mothers and their four little boys who were arguing. Naturally I eavesdropped.

They were civilians, and I assumed the mothers also had brought their children to foster an all-American, male fascination with fighting and war. But these boys didn’t care at all about the battles, the reenactors or the fort. Like the reenactors, but also unlike them, these children were somewhere outside of real life and real time.

“I’m Mario,” one of the boys yelled.

“No, I’m Mario,” another said.

“OK, can I be Luigi,” the third asked.

The whole thing went on for five minutes, until one of the exasperated mothers put down her fudge sundae and snapped. “Half a day! Just half a day,” she pleaded. “Can you guys please go one day without arguing who’s who in the video game world.”

What struck me about this melee is the nakedly racial ressentiment of Vendler’s critique.  (Vendler is a white Harvard professor of poetry, Dove is a black poet and scholar at the University of Virginia.)  Although Vendler doesn’t say so, she is a Wallace Stevens scholar, and she’s apparently outraged that Dove’s choices meant that Stevens must share space in this volume with unworthy “multicultural” poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and others of the Black Arts movement.  Here’s Vendler:

Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets with hyperbole. It is legitimate to recognize the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest. Language quails when it overreaches.

What is this, a flashback to 1988 and the Western Front of the Culture Wars:  Battle of the Poetry Canon?

And, it’s just comical when a Harvard University professor wonders where the American poetry ”establishment” might be, and mocks the concept of an “establishment” in her comments on Dove’s analysis of the Black Arts movement:

We’re back to that “poetry establishment” again. The members (whoever they are) of this so-called “establishment” “entrench” themselves (as in a war) and, implicitly racist, appear “whitewashed” like the “whited sepulchres” denounced by Jesus. How is it that Dove, a Presidential Scholar in high school, a summa graduate from college, holder of a Fulbright, and herself long rewarded by recognition of all sorts, can write of American society in such rudimentary terms?

We pulled you off the plantation and let you into the “establishment,” Rita Dove!  Apparently, it’s like Fight Club:  The first rule of the “establishment” is you do not talk about the “establishment!”  Rita Dove is a very bad, very unworthy ingrate, isn’t she?  What a disobedient daughter!  What an undeserving recipient of establishment largess!  Dove, in her reply, comments on how racially reductive is Vendler’s analysis:

It is astounding to me how utterly Vendler misreads my critical assessment of the Black Arts Movement, construing my straightforward account of their defiant manifesto as endorsement of their tactics; she ignores a substantial critical paragraph in which I decry the fallout from the movement (“Against such clamor and thunder, introspective black poets had little chance to assert themselves and were swept under the steamroller,” I write in my introduction) and instead focuses on that handy whipping boy, Amiri Baraka, plucking passages from his historically seminal poem “Black Art” in which he denigrated Jews, thereby slyly, even creepily implying that I might have similar anti-Semitic tendencies. Smear by association…sound familiar? I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defense is necessary against these dishonorable tactics except the desire to shield my reputation from the kind of slanderous slime that sticks although it bears no truth. (I could argue equal opportunity offensiveness by having printed Hart Crane’s “A liquid theme that floating niggers swell”—but perhaps that makes me racist as well.)

In the same breath, Vendler—no slouch when it comes to lumping poets together by race—makes quick work of dismembering Gwendolyn Brooks, dismissing my description of Brooks’s “richly innovative” early poems as “hyperbole,” perhaps because I dared to compare those poems to “the best male poets of any race.” Evidently the 1950 Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Ms. Brooks to award her the prize in poetry, at a time when there was little talk of diversity in America and the expression “multiculturalism” had yet to enter the public discourse. Analogous praise today, however, amounts in Dame Vendler’s eyes to nothing but “hype.”

(Full disclosure:  I was alerted to this smackdown by a close relation of Dove’s.)

I’m sure that anthologists of twentieth-century poetry in the middle and at the end of the twenty-first century will make different choices than Dove made.  I’m sure that an anthology of nineteenth-century American literature published in, say, 1911, would have been quite different from one published at the end of the twentieth century.  Dove freely admits that she aimed for breadth over depth in her effort to anthologize the twentieth century, but maybe that’s part of the reason for Vendler’s evident pique.  Vendler responds to Dove’s anthology as though Dove is proclaiming once and for all that she has compiled a definitive statement on Literary Truth and Beauty, whereas Dove herself is much more modest about what she can possibly accomplish barely a decade after the close of the twentieth century:

“From [Dove’s] choices no principle of selection emerges,” Vendler grouses, and at last we arrive at the crux of her predisposition: in her system, an anthologist must have an agenda and is expected to drive that agenda home, sidelining her enemies and promoting her preferences with no attempt at impartial judgment. Actually, I am proud that no principle of selection emerges. My criterion was simple: choose significant poems of literary merit. That these poems happen to illuminate the times in which they were crafted should come as no surprise; that the stories they tell of the twentieth century have many intersections and complementary trajectories is fortuitous, a result of having been forged by and reacting to shared sensibilities.

Dove’s goals seem to me more about providing a collection of useful primary sources for literary historians of the future to sift through and analyze.  That doesn’t strike me as a bad way to go about compiling an anthology so soon after the closing date of the twentieth century, but then, I’m a historian and neither a poet nor a literary scholar.  What do the poets and literary scholars among you have to say?

Senator Ted Kennedy was of course notably silent through these hearings, because he had been a witness called at his nephew’s rape trial the previous summer. (That’s what Snarlin’ Arlen meant to imply when he said towards the end of the clip above, “Mr. Chairman I object to that. I object to that vociferously. . . If Senator Kennedy has anything to say, let him participate in this hearing.”)

Anita Hill looks so young and without defenses or allies in these old clips. She was unimaginably brave to endure this in public. Deborah Gray White suggests the powerful historical currents that Hill swam against 20 years ago in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2008):

Their particular history, the black woman’s history, was especially oppressive. [One author] alluded to its prohibitive nature when she delicately noted the “almost unmentionable history of the burdens of those soul-trying times when, to bring profit to the slave trade and to satisfy the base desires of the stronger hand, the Negro woman was the subject of compulsory immorality.” Sylvia Francoz Williams was even more direct. So painful was the wound of the black woman’s history, she argued, that “her detractors rely upon her not voluntarily reopening it, even to probe it for its cure.” Perceptively, Williams maintained that the black woman’s “sensitiveness on this point has been the greatest shield to the originators of the scandal,” 5.

I recall being in a graduate seminar that week in which the professor asked, “what do you think will be the historical legacy of the Thomas hearings?  Is this a turning point?”  Some students said that yes, the Thomas hearings would change a lot, and one third-year graduate student informed us that “I’m taking notes for future lectures right now.”  Perhaps unimaginatively, I answered “no,” mostly because for me, the Thomas hearings were about men closing ranks to trash a young woman’s testimony.  Secondarily, they revealed a continuing and disturbing white fascination with black bodies and black sexuality. I didn’t think the Thomas hearings would make the problem of sexual harassment go away, or even that there would even be a consensus that it was a problem at all.  Unfortunately, I think I was right.  In the past twenty years or so we have witnessed a fierce backlash against feminist efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to define rape and sexual harassment.  The 1990s and the 2000s have featured high-profile and successful efforts by men to redefine rape as consensual sex.

Perhaps one small thing has changed for the better, at least in the field of American women’s history.  Since the Thomas hearings, African American feminist scholars have developed a small but powerful bibliography on the rape and sexual trauma that was central to the process of enslavement in the Americas.  Before 1991, Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South(1985) was the only monograph on enslaved women.  But the ferment of the 1990s produced a growing number of young scholars who would write about the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in slavery and in the post-emancipation United States in articles and books that put black women’s experiences at their centers. African American and feminist historians are now developing a historiography and a language with which to confront a history that is characterized by rape and other forms of sexual and family trauma. I wonder if there would have been the beginnings of this kind of history without Anita Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee twenty years ago.

Here is a list of selected titles in my field that address sexuality in African American women’s history:

• Mia Bay, “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era,” Reviews in American History, 34:4 (2006), 407-426.
• Daina Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”:  Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007)
• Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (2006)
• Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs : Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996)
• Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom:  Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004)
• Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations:  Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (2002)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:  An American Controversy (1998) 
• Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women:  Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004)
• Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth:  A Life, A Symbol (1996)
• Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (2009)
• Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of her Grief’:  The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93:4 (2007) 1031-1049.

Harris-Perry makes some really good points about the ways in which black scholars and pundits are challenged about their ideas when they dare to talk about racism.  In “The Epistemology of Race Talk,” she notes that (white) interlocutors meet conversations about racism with charges to “Prove it! . . .The implication is if one cannot produce irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias, then racism must be banned as a possibility,” and questions about her authority and expertise (“Who made you an expert? . . . It is as though my very identity as an African-American woman makes me unqualified to speak on issues of race and gender; as though I could only be arguing out of personal interest or opinion rather than from decades of research, publication and university teaching.”)  I’m very sympathetic to both of these issues, as they’re textbook ways to derail a blog conversation, as many of you probably already know!

But, I feel like Harris-Perry was unfair to Joan Walsh when in the same response she accused Walsh of using the “I have black friends” claim.  First of all, here’s what Walsh wrote in the first two paragraphs of her original response to Harris-Perry’s column (and I’m presenting them in full here):

The Nation’s most-read article this week is by my friend Melissa Harris-Perry, “Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama.” Perry doesn’t mention any white liberals by name, nor cite polls showing a decline in support for President Obama among white liberals (as opposed to white voters generally, where his approval rating has dropped sharply). But her piece touched a nerve because of the widespread perception that white liberals are, in fact, abandoning the president.

I’m not sure how to argue with a perception, which is by definition subjective, but I’m going to try, because this is becoming a prevalent and divisive belief. When I say Melissa Harris-Perry is my friend, I don’t say that rhetorically, or ironically; we are professional friends, we have socialized together; she has included me on political round tables; I like and respect her enormously. That’s why I think it’s important to engage her argument, and I’ve invited her to reply.

Harris-Perry writes about the “black friend” claim:

2. I have black friends

Which brings us to a second common strategy of argument about one’s racial innocence: the “I have black friends” claim. I was shocked and angered when Salon’s Joan Walsh used this strategy in her criticism of my piece. Although I disagree with her, I have no problem with Walsh’s decision to take on the claims in my piece. I consider it a sign of respect to publicly engage those with whom you disagree. I was taken aback that Walsh emphasized the extent of our friendship. Walsh and I have been professionally friendly. We’ve eaten a few meals. I invited her to speak at Princeton and I introduced her to my literary agent. We are not friends. Friendship is a deep and lasting relationship based on shared sacrifice and joys. We are not intimates in that way. Watching Walsh deploy our professional familiarity as a shield against claims of her own bias is very troubling. In fact, it is one of the very real barriers to true interracial friendship and intimacy.

(The emphasis above is mine.  There is more under this point that bears reading–I’m just singling out the paragraph that identified Walsh personally and discussed the extent of their acquaintance.)

I may well be a (nother) clueless white lady, but I read Walsh’s opening apologia not as an “I have a black friend, so I’m not a racist” strategy, but rather as “I like this person and usually agree with her, so I’m a little uncomfortable in registering my disagreement on this particular issue now.”  As a blogger, I’ve done this, and by indicating that I like and respect another blogger and yet disagree on a particular issue, I’m just trying to keep everything nice and friendly.  But, I also concede that this may not be the most appropriate or relevant lens through which to view this exchange.  What do you think?  Should Walsh have just written her response without the second paragraph at all?  Is it a girl thing anyway to reassure someone that you really like them before you disagree with them publicly?  Is Harris-Perry being unfair in reacting this way, or is this something that white people need to think about more carefully before they publish stuff?

What’s going on here?  I genuinely want to know.  (Am I just a little too conflict averse, and too invested in everyone being nice and getting along?)  I wonder if my discomfort with this dust-up has something to do with the fact that women are so underrepresented as political commentators and journalists.  If two lefty d00ds mixed it up, would I care so much?

For a generation now, historians have been reluctant to write about capitalism. Cultural history has been the rage, even as developments in the Second Gilded Age (1980–2008)—the unleashing of private economic power, the dismantling of government regulatory controls, and the deepening of income inequality—were making clear the need for a new reckoning with capitalism as a historical force.

Against this background, it is significant that one of the most distinguished historians of our time, Richard White, has written a book about an epic story of the First Gilded Age: the building of the transcontinental railroads between the 1860s and the 1890s. From the moment the first of these railroads was finished at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, these immense undertakings became an American obsession, eliciting both marvel and anger. The marvel was about the technological and organizational feats required to build these roads across vast and often difficult terrain and the profound ways in which these projects transformed America—economically, geographically, and politically. The anger was about the power accruing to the men who built these roads and their consequent ability to hoodwink investors, bribe congressmen, exploit farmers and other small shippers, and engage in speculative activities so dangerous that they periodically brought the entire U.S. economy crashing to the ground. No industry did more to galvanize anticapitalist fury or to generate movements for economic regulation during the First Gilded Age than the railroads.

.         .         .         .        .         .        .         .        

White is brilliant in documenting and reconstructing the precise ways in which the Associates and others feasted on the opening the government gave them.He demonstrates how small groups of private moneymen got access to the government, formed alliances with “friends” in Congress, and conspired in the notorious Willard Hotel in Washington and elsewhere to gain favors, buy votes, and steer legislative debates to desired outcomes. White’s portrait of an American government overwhelmed by corruption is breathtaking to behold and devastating to ponder. It alone is reason to read this book.

White is not as good, however, in explaining why a democratic state, a “government by and for the people,” proved itself to be so vulnerable to the moneyed interests. Some would say, of course, that America’s political system then was democratic in name only, given that more than half the people in the United States lacked the right to vote—women did not possess it, nor did most African Americans, except for the brief ellipsis of Reconstruction (1868–1877). But even as we acknowledge these restrictions on the franchise, we must also grant that in America more people were voting, both in absolute and relative terms, than in any other polity on the face of the earth.

If only the promise of the suffragists had come true, and that extending the vote to white women had made for a more virtuous government!  Alas.  It turns out that most women are just as ignorant of their true economic interests and just as persuadable by the diversionary tactics of two-bit pols (Fluoride!  Communism!  Gardasil!  Socialism!) as most men.  Gerstle shares some ideas of his own as to why the republic has remained resistant to democratic change over the sweep of American history.  Short answer:  it’s the money, honey!

The hastiness of congressional retreat in the face of capitalists’ recalcitrance exposed a chronic shortcoming in America’s democracy: its voracious need for money. The huge number of elected officials and the frequency with which they had to run for office made this democratic electoral system expensive. The Constitution had made no provision for funding this system. Thus the political parties that arose to get their members elected and make public policy also became, by necessity, money-gathering machines. The private organizations and individuals to which the government turned for assistance in accomplishing its railroad-building aims were the same ones in a position to supply funds for congressmen and senators in need of reelection. The promise of delivering such funds—or the threat of withholding such funds or giving them to a rival candidate—deeply affected the process through which Congress awarded contracts (which companies would get them) as well as the content of the contracts themselves (how lavishly these companies would be rewarded for their willingness to do the government’s work). These are the circumstances in which the Central Pacific Associates and other circles of financiers and elected officials got rich and in which the government ceded its authority and privilege to private corporations. The corrupting effects of the transcontinentals, then, arose not exclusively from capitalist practices but from the intersection of those practices with a democratic system structurally vulnerable to moneyed influence.

White came to Baa Ram U. a few years ago to give some lectures about his current project (Railroaded, which is worth a look for its excellent title alone!) and his career as a historian overall.  This review of Railroaded is a model of how to write a review for an audience of intelligent general interest readers.  Gerstle tells readers of Dissent why they should read this book in the first paragraph, and then Gerstle explains White and his career as a historian before giving an able overview of the book and an explanation for its importance.  Nicely done.

Still, electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture. The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.

The relevant comparison here is with the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Today many progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option; but Clinton failed to pass any kind of meaningful healthcare reform whatsoever. Others argue that Obama has been slow to push for equal rights for gay Americans; but it was Clinton who established the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Obama helped repeal. Still others are angry about appalling unemployment rates for black Americans; but while overall unemployment was lower under Clinton, black unemployment was double that of whites during his term, as it is now. And, of course, Clinton supported and signed welfare “reform,” cutting off America’s neediest despite the nation’s economic growth.

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In 1996 President Clinton was re-elected with a coalition more robust and a general election result more favorable than his first win. His vote share among women increased from 46 to 53 percent, among blacks from 83 to 84 percent, among independents from 38 to 42 percent, and among whites from 39 to 43 percent.

President Obama has experienced a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

There’s a lot going on in her column–go read the whole thing.  I agree with her suggestion that a lot of white liberals were completely turned on by the (delusional) fantasy that the election of Barack Obama as President would expiate centuries of violent and persistent racism.  That fantasy was in my view a terrific example of racialist thinking among the flatteringly self-styled “reality based” community.  But it strikes me as circular reasoning to suggest that giving up this racialist thinking and coming to a different conclusion than Harris-Perry about the President’s achievements or failures is itself “a more subtle form of racism.”

Secondly, Harris-Perry’s history of the Clinton administration is damned unfair and misleading on the question of the Big Dog and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  Why does no one seem to remember that DADT was a compromised forced on President Clinton after he tried to integrate the military in 1993, but was rebuffed and humiliated by fellow Democrats like Sam Nunn, not to mention the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell?  (Powell’s history of antigay activism was forgiven awfully fast, wasn’t it?)  Yet here we have Harris-Perry telling the world that DADT was a prejudicial scheme dreamed up by “the Clenis.”  Now, we can certainly argue about whether or not it was a useful expenditure of his political capital to push for military desegregation immediately upon his inauguration in 1993, but that’s what in fact he tried to do.  Is there really any question about the amount of political courage it took to attempt desegregation in 1993 versus 2011, now that the majority of Americans as well as the majority in military service supported the repeal of DADT, and now that it’s been years since some U.S. states began marrying gay couples? 

Is it “a subtle form of racism” for me to ask these questions?

Presidents are responsible for their own successes and failures.  (Put another way, while presidents are of course not all-powerful, no one has as much power as a president himself to shape his electoral destiny and presidential legacy.)  If liberal support for Obama has waned–and by all accounts it has–then it seems more reasonable to ask what Obama might do to win liberals back, if in fact this is something he’d like to do, rather than pre-blaming racism for the possibility that Obama won’t be re-elected in 2012.  Don’t get me wrong–racism is still an enormous problem in this country.  Each new generation of Americans manages to keep racism alive in terribly inventive ways.  I just don’t think that the President of the United States can be convincingly portrayed as racism’s most concerning victim.

If Obama doesn’t win re-election, the reasons will be many, varied, and hotly debated by contemporaries and historians for decades to come.  Racism will likely be part of the reason that individual voters might not support him when they supported Clinton in 1996–but it seems that there are lots of more significant reasons for Obama’s potential troubles next year, such as 1) Bill Clinton is a better politician who knew how to connect to people emotionally and with convincing warmth and sympathy, and he gave great speeches, 2) Clinton had a much more beatable, clownish, Republican nemesis in the form of Newt Gingrich, 3)  Gingrich compromised and otherwise worked with Clinton in ways that the Republicans won’t work with Obama, 4)  Bob Dole was a humorless stiff on the campaign trail, 5) Clinton was always a centrist, so liberals never believed he was one of them anyway, 6) Clinton had been the Governor of Arkansas for 10 years before becoming president, whereas the presidency is the first executive office Obama has held, 7)  Obama’s hold on his own party has been shakier from the start–more Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton than for Obama in the primaries, and Obama has had notably poor relations with Democrats in Congress, even for a Democratic president.

Above all, we have 8) The economy was booming and gas cost less than a dollar per gallon in the mid- to late 1990s.  And so, once again, we can debate his relative skills and political merit, but we must acknowledge that Bill Clinton is just about the damned luckiest man in the history of American politics.  There are a lot more one-term presidents than two-term presidents in American history, after all.

The last time I learned about the Columbian Exchange was in high school. Learning dates and the sequence of events, and getting familiar with maps and geography, was central to my high school history experience. As a history major in college the emphasis on maps, dates, and events diminished, as the work in primary sources came to the forefront.

I can’t imagine 1493will be much required in college history courses, as this type of historical narrative for a popular audience (written by a journalist and not a historian) probably does not conform to how postsecondary history is taught. This is perhaps too bad, as I just did not know most of the history of Columbian Exchange described in 1493.

Learning how to “do history”, to work like historians, is probably not a bad thing. But most history undergraduate students will not go on to graduate school. A book like 1493, a book with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events, might be an example of the kind of works we should make room for in our history courses.

Kim is probably right that a synthetic work aimed at a popular audience probably won’t be on a whole lot of college and university syllabi.  But why should books aimed at a general audience be taught by professional historians, when students might instead read a more challenging book with a professor on hand to guide them through it?  Students are perfectly free at any point of their college or post-collegiate lives to pick up a book like 1493 and read and enjoy it, just as Kim did.

Quite frankly, I don’t think I need to show my students how to read a book like 1493 or celebratory biographies of the so-called “Founding Fathers” by David McCullough.  (I think I personally might die of boredom–and my number-one criteria for selecting books for my syllabi is whether or not *I* think they’re exciting or interesting and can stand to read them again.)  Student can find and read the popular books on their own, and perhaps my former students will get a little more out of them because they’ve had to read other books about the eighteenth century by (for example) James Sidbury, Clare Lyons, Sharon Block, Kirsten Fischer, Jon Sensbach, and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Finally, I disagree with Kim’s construction of popular history versus academic history–a history “with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events” on the one hand, as opposed to the dull, primary-source based history that professional historians write and teach on the other.  (Wait a minute–I thought one of the problems with academic history is that it’s all just facts and dates and geography.  Clearly, history is too important to be left to the historians, but we’ll go with Kim’s complaint that there aren’t enough strong opinions, facts, or dates in academic histories.)  As I suggested above, strong opinions are central to my interest in books and in assigning them to students.  How much stronger an opinion can you find than (for example) Ramon Gutierrez’s forceful argument that berdaches are not early modern heroes of gay liberation but rather were more likely conquered enemies and victims of rape?  How about Annette Gordon-Reed’s awesome smackdown of the Thomas Jefferson biography industry of the past two centuries?  I don’t know what Kim read as a History major in college, but maybe he should have looked for more interesting or more challenging courses.

Kim should perhaps hie himself over to a history classroom at Dartmouth, where he is not a History professor but rather “the director of learning and technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science Program at Dartmouth College” and “has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University.”  I’m pretty sure that the History faculty over there would be surprised to hear Kim describe their work in these terms.  They probably think that showing students how to “do” history with primary sources is important for developing their students’ critical and literary faculties as well as central mastering the discipline even as an undergraduate major.

Why do we never hear calls for science faculty to ditch their lab sections?  Does anyone seriously think that books by Atul Gawande and Robert Krulwich should supplant the lab- and research-based curriculum in science department, in spite of the fact that few science majors will go on to earn Ph.D.s in their fields?  I mean no disrespect to these authors, whose work I enjoy.  But I don’t for a minute think that they are working scientists.  And if I were a student or a parent of a college student, I’d sure as heck want to be trained (or have my child trained) by a professional, not by a collection of popular books on the subject.