The Serpent's Wisdom

I confess I am undecided on how I feel about the bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn. Part of me feels like, if the one thing preventing people from being able to progress in and appreciate the work is the frequent and casual use of a word now considered highly unacceptable, maybe it's not really all that bad to publish an edition that omits it. (I'm not sure "slave" is quite an appropriate substitute, though...) Plus, it's not as if copies of the work in its original form will spontaneously cease to exist.

OTOH, it's not just any word in question. It's a word which is a symbol of the most horrific aspect of American history, and the America of the present.

OTOOH, while editorial decisions to alter works of fiction are made every day, this is an American classic we're talking about; it's not exactly holy scripture, but we shouldn't go changing it without serious reflection.

Says Professor Sam Quinn on his decision to stop teaching the book:

[T]rying to lecture about its literary merits takes a back seat when I see how African American students (I’m talking about teenage sophomores, taking the class for core credit) are reacting to the iterations of THAT WORD. The problem is that Twain doesn’t distinguish between those who are using the word in a "kindly" manner (we could probably assume that this is the only word for black people that Huck has ever heard) and those who are using it an an epithet. Used indiscriminately in these ways, it just makes everyone in a classroom uncomfortable.

For the record, in another comment Professor Quinn says he does not support the bowdlerized version; he'd rather leave the work as-is, he's just going to stop teaching it. And he has a point: leaving the work as-is certainly preserves the evidence it provides of America's hideous legacy of racism.

Americans in general have a reflexive resistance to the idea of something offensive and objectionable being removed. On the whole I think that's entirely healthy and appropriate. Most of us are well aware that it's a bit hypocritical to object to specific words that everyone uses or fleeting images of nudity (we've all seen naked people), while raising no objection to disturbing or even traumatic themes or treatments. We simply on the whole have no respect for timidness in the face of life's smelly details.

But this word is not simply a fleeting expletive. Whenever it comes up in discussion I'm reminded of what novapsyche pointed out once about comedian Richard Pryor's comments about why he stopped liberally using the n-word in his stand-up routine. He said his intent had been to disarm the word, to make it less powerful, to reduce the amount of pain it causes black people, but then he learned that white people were mimicking his usage and citing him as proof that the word was acceptable to use in an offhand way, thereby causing harm to black people.

I guess the lesson here is that unraveling racism is like pulling out an arrow. Do it the wrong way, and you increase the injury.

Every once in a while I see something that just stuns me, and I can barely form a coherent response.

This is an example. To put it simply, virtually all growth in US prosperity in the last 25 years has been enjoyed by white households. A pattern like this cannot happen in a land where opportunity is truly free and open to all.

In examining data from 1984 to 2007, Brandeis's Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that the average white family now has accumulated $95,000 more in total wealth than the average African-American family. One quarter of African-American families, the report notes, currently have no financial assets to protect themselves from financial ruin.

The report's authors argue that, through a mixture of policy mistakes and discrimination, most of the wealth during that period flowed into the hands of white families.

In a study published last year, the University of California, Berkeley's Emmanuel Saez found that income inequality in the U.S. had hit an all-time high in 2007. But the Brandeis study points to a "broken chain of achievement" among African-Americans that, even at relatively moderate levels of income, creates large disparities.

"By 2007, the average middle income white household accumulated $74,000," the report's authors note, "whereas average high income African Americans owned only $18,000."

Earlier this week, Governor McDonnell of Virginia announced that April is now "Confederate History Month."

Yesterday he was forced to concede that leaving out any mention of slavery was a "major omission." I don't think he could have made a more blatant admission that Confederate History Month has more to do with white supremacy than "cultural heritage."

I wonder if there will also be any attention given to the fact that many Virginians were so opposed to joining the Confederacy that they broke off and formed their own state.

So lately my interest has been piqued in the Cthulhu mythos. With its emphasis on bizarre geometry, nameless unspeakable horrors lurking just outside the edges of one's line of sight, and the concept of cosmic secrets known to ancient civilizations and since forgotten, it seems almost tailor-made for a nerd like me.

But as I re-read the seminal story "The Call of Cthulhu" over the past few days, I began to perceive a rather different set of unspeakable horrors lurking just outside of sight.

I've reached a point where everything I listen to, everything I read, everything I watch, gets filtered through a certain perceptual bias. It's impossible for me to not notice references to social power or imbalance. By the time I was done reading the story I was forced to conclude that it was about the "evil danger" of people of color.

"About" is a funny thing. I've written previously that I believe that the meaning of an utterance or artistic work is "primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator". But I think that I have to include in that any agenda of which the author is only subconsciously aware. IOW, whether it was Lovecraft's intention or not to produce a work intended to provoke fear of people of color, this is what he produced, and it is not accidental, it is not something one "reads into the text now 91 years later."

As an aside to illustrate the point of "about", and just because it's on my mind today, and just to prove that I wasn't kidding when I said I am always viewing the world through this lens, consider the 1985 video to "Some Like it Hot" by the Power Station. The model featured prominently in the video is Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula; the video contains so many Terrible Tranny Tropes that it's practically "about" the fact that she is transsexual, though the 'obviousness' of this is only obvious to me in hindsight.

Anyway, back to Lovecraft and his story. It's not enough to say that the story draws a contrast between civilized, rational, yet unsuspecting white people, vs. violent and savage, yet knowing of the hideous horrors lying at the ocean floor, people of color. It's not enough that several times he refers to people of color as "mongrels," or suggests that the cultists are barely human, or avers at one point that to kill them would be an act of mercy. The story hangs its entire bid for effectiveness on the notion that voodoo and other "primitive" religions are evil and dark. Lovecraft presumes the reader is white and expects him or her to be complicit in his view that wherever we find people of color we might find the violent members of an ancient, savage, global cult. The cult and its secrets live "out of sight" in dark jungle type places until the beacon of white anthropology shines on it and reveals the terrible secret.

Furthermore, what of the "unspeakable horrors" this cult may usher in? What of the bizarre, otherworldly geometry in which they dwell? The popular interpretation is that Lovecraft was an anti-modernist concerned about what terrors might be ushered in by Twentieth Century science. In the post-atomic age this does not seem an unreasonable interpretation; indeed it almost seems to cast Lovecraft as a prophet. I'm inclined to suspect, though, that what Lovecraft feared was the thought of a populist uprising in the non-white or even the Eastern European nations. Perhaps the "otherworldly geometry" he feared was the upheaval of the Newtonian clockwork universe and the safe hegemony of the European colonial world order that proclaimed it.

For me the question of cultural appropriation, especially when it comes to, "Where does the inter-cultural exchange of ideas stop and misappropriation begin?", is endlessly fascinating. The thing is, there isn't a monolithic answer to these questions, and we can't come up with an easy answer or template and just tack that on whenever the question arises.

How such an exchange, or misappropriation, occurs has to be seen in the historical context of how it came to be. As a jumping-off point, there's this interesting video of Jennifer 8 Lee talking about Chinese restaurants in America (seen in debunkingwhite):



From the point of view of a merchant, trade between nations and cultures is a good thing -- because it means more potential buyers, more potential profit, more potential opportunities. So it may have seemed to restaurant owners or merchants in Chinatown when white folk started coming in greater and greater numbers to see what food or decorations they could buy that were unlike anything else they or their neighbors had.

And so i think the notion of cultural misappropriation feels to white people like a glass of cold water thrown in the face when a friend accuses them of it because they have a statue of Buddha sitting on their fireplace mantle. Well, hey, they might reply, i bought it in Chinatown from a woman who seemed happy to sell it to me; if *she* doesn't have a problem with it, why should *you*? Or, taking it a step further, doesn't it foster understanding if the people of different cultures who live side-by-side sell things to one another? It makes them less alien, and therefore less scary... doesn't it?

And on their own these are perfectly valid points, IF and only if you exclude the macropatterns of racism in our society. On the micro-level, it's not necessarily a huge deal; where it becomes a problem is when it's enough people in the privileged class who partake of the "exotic" that it starts to drown out the voices and living cultures of the minority.

What i've seen in the last couple of years is that awareness is starting to spread among white people that there's this thing called "cultural misappropriation" and if you're not conscientious you could be doing it too, and ZOMG i don't want to be an oppressor so how can i make sure i am not a cultural misappropriator?

It's gotten to where i've seen people say they're only comfortable with seeing white people exploring the religious traditions of their ancestors. Anything else is too close to cultural misappropriation. So, what, someone has to get a mitochondrial DNA test before they know what religions they are allowed to explore? And isn't this in its own way a restriction on people of color, in that it prevents them from potentially sharing their faith or beliefs with white people?

And yet, i don't mean to deny that cultural appropriation of religious ideas and imagery is very real, and very detrimental. Where it concerns me most is (1) when cultural motifs are reduced to "entertainment value" or "diversion" to the extent that their original meaning is obscured; when this happens, people of color can no longer express their own ideas or criticisms using those motifs without white people hearing "entertainment" when they encounter it; (2) when cultural motifs are stripped of any political implications, especially those which are critical or subversive towards the dominant paradigms; and (3) when people of privilege are turning a profit by stripping the meaning away from cultural motifs. The motif in question becomes an element of the larger culture, and the meaning the larger culture attaches to it drowns out the original meaning attached to it by the smaller culture.

In short, it is a part of the greater pattern of commodification and of misappropriating the language of dissent, the process by which meaningful utterances which pose any threat of causing people to question the authoritarian ideology are rendered harmless.

So, the question becomes, how can people of different cultures share ideas, motifs, food, relics, without them losing their meaning in the context of the original culture? The only way, ultimately, to share ideas in a truly free way is in a world free of hegemonic dominance... which is a tragedy, because humans have so much to share with one another.

If John McCain had publically used the n-word as extensively as he has used the slur "gook" over the last several decades, he would have been disqualified as a presidential candidate immediately (from debunkingwhite):

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Jim Cramer's latest advice to stock market investors: take as much money out of the stock market as you think you would need to live on for five years if you became unemployed today (and i guess put it under your mattress) (from the_recession):

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And, saving the most cheerful for last: an argument by Naomi Wolf that there was a coup in the United States on October 1, the day a military brigade was deployed on US soil for law enforcement (just in time for the election!) This is ostensibly so there will be a unit on-hand in case of some disaster like Katrina, but hurricane season is almost over, why do it now? (from a locked post):

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Our landlord has a few of his relatives over for a barbeque and get-together on the Fourth of July. I saw them on the porch earlier today, speaking to one another in Armenian.

And i thought, Ah, America.

When lady_babalon and i went to the Blue Hills park a few weekends ago, many of the families around us were of different races, and faiths, and listened to music sung in languages other than English -- and i felt profoundly proud of living in the United States.

How many places in the world are there where a person can live, and speak whatever language they wish to speak, practice whatever religion they wish to practice, with the expectation that there will be no interference from state or business or church or neighbor?

cowgrrl and i went to see a movie a little while back called "The Visitor," and among other things it was about this question, of what is an American? It is a white person who speaks English, was born here, and works in a cushy job? Is it a person who has come here from another country without documentation, practices Islam, speaks Arabic, makes music in Central Park, and earns money where he can under the table? The bold answer, the answer that takes courage, is yes and yes. Because every person who lives here brings something special to the people around them, to society as a whole. People have intrinsic worth, and when you say this, you have to carry it forward to the implications therein.

Thankfully the Founders had the foresight to put in the Constitution that the US does not have an official national religion. And so far, we have resisted the call to declare an official national language, though this debate comes up every generation or so and rages even now. Even now there are people claiming that the US is under "silent invasion" from Latinos and Latinas, that they are barbarians who will undermine our culture and our language and our religion. Seriously, "barbarian invasion" is basically what the influx of undocumented immigrants is being called - even though our economy and our politics - and our freedom - pulled them here. And even though they have paid sales tax on every purchase and have worked the fields and unloaded the trucks and staffed the kitchens of our country, they are spoken of as a burden. And even though they bring the wonder of who they are, they are spoken of as a burden.

It is not the place of the government to tell a person what language to speak, or what religion to practice, or whom they can marry or have sex with. It is the purpose of the government to serve us in our own peaceful choices. The Founders didn't actually see it that way, nor have subsequent generations of Americans - witness the practice of slavery, the long history of second-class citizenship for women, or the consignment of Indians to apartheid-like reservations which continues to this day. But it is the America we can visualise here and now.

cowgrrl and i saw Persepolis on Sunday, and found it to be engaging and moving. The flow of storytelling has been tweaked a bit from the graphic novels on which they are based, but the substance of it is still the same.

I'm not really sure how to comment on it. It doesn't really require much comment; the movie (and the autobiographical graphic novels by exiled Iranian Marjane Satrapi on which they were based) speak well and plainly for themselves.

What struck me most was the way the movie illustrates, by giving anecdotes of day to day life in an authoritarian society, how irrelevant ideology really is to the practice of authoritarianism. It is at its heart, at every level of interaction -- from the personal and interpersonal to the institutional -- a system that gives bullies almost free reign.

I think, too, in portraying the simple human desires of the people around her, she exposes the flaws in the common conception that the Iranian people are somehow fundamentally more barbaric than Westerners -- the underlying attitude that by having a more brutish nature they subtly invite authoritarianism or prevent a more egalitarian society from taking hold. She invites the American or British viewer (without beating her over the head with a stick) to examine the ways in which her own governments have intervened in the political shape of Iran to push it towards authoritarianism. The name she chose for the work, "Persepolis," must have been chosen to invite us to contemplate the long history of Iranian civilization.

If you haven't seen the Yahoo!/60 Minutes video segments on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh, i recommend you do.

At one point in the series of segments, a commentator says something like, this is capitalism at its most raw and gritty. A beach drenched with dumped oil, chemicals, asbestos, debris, and who knows what else. A wealthy Bangladeshi buys the ships as-is from Western companies, who would otherwise have to pay expensive disposal costs in their own countries, and sails them right up onto the beach where laborers, many of them children, tear them down rivet by rivet. They have no training or protective gear and about 50 die every year in accidents; and goddess only knows how many more die from inhaling smoke and other chemical exposures.

But you know? It's too easy to blame capitalism. Yes, this particular instance is the result of a capitalist mechanism. But it's not as if we haven't seen environmental disasters and poor working conditions in socialist countries, either. No, the underlying mechanism here is racism, classism, and neo-colonialism, and the way to fix it lies in deeply re-examining our ethics of taking -- and in this case, our ethics of dumping.

Stuff White People Like

Oh, this new blog ruffles the feathers in all kinds of ways. It's brilliant. The comments on each post are proof that it's working. Yes, the criticism that this really mainly applies to yuppies is true, but since they are dominating a lot of the urban cultural dialogue it's still funny and informative to observe the squirming.

Recycling is a part of a larger theme of stuff white people like: saving the earth without having to do that much.

Recycling is fantastic! You can still buy all the stuff you like (bottled water, beer, wine, organic iced tea, and cans of all varieties) and then when you’re done you just put it in a DIFFERENT bin than where you would throw your other garbage. And boom! Environment saved! Everyone feels great, it’s so easy!

... If you are in a situation where a white person produces an empty bottle, watch their actions. They will first say “where’s the recycling?” If you say “we don’t recycle,” prepare for some awkwardness. They will make a move to throw the bottle away, they will hesitate, and then ultimately throw the bottle away. But after they return look in their eyes. All they can see is the bottle lasting forever in a landfill, trapping small animals. It will eat at them for days.