when the Railsplitter went foreign

I don't usually read non-fiction history books cover to cover, but when I do...

Here's the thing. I picked this book from the Blogging for Books website because, frankly, the selection at that time sucked, and this was the only one that struck me as having potential. I really wasn't in the mood for a presidential biography (I've never been in that mood; I'm not sure I'd even recognize it, if I did stumble across it). But the other options were downright dismal. So I selected this one, about Abe Lincoln.

The book is Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power, by Kevin Peraino. And yes, I received a review copy in order to do this review.

I've had good luck with the books I've chosen from Blogging for Books. Here's to hoping that continues. Lincoln in the World certainly didn't disappoint.

Maybe I should reword that. I was expecting to struggle through a dry accounting of treaties and dignitaries lists I'd never remember quit reading after a few paragraphs. Instead, I got sucked in by Peraino's humor and insight.  Who wouldn't smile knowing that the esteemed president was completely aware of and honest about his lack of preparation for his post as our leader in foreign affairs? "I will be very apt to make blunders," he said to an unnamed foreign dignitary.

I'm totally stealing that line, by the way.

But anyway.

I grew up thinking Lincoln was something of a romanticist; perhaps that is only because our history books remember him romantically. The truth is that Lincoln was a literalist. Peraino quotes Lincoln's friend as saying that Lincoln's mind "crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham,... Everything came to him in its precise shape and color."

Here's something I don't think many people understand: why do we study history? Peraino says that "in the age of Lincoln, we see shadows of our modern global arena." And that is why we study history: to recognize ourselves and discern what is real in our present. Peraino's treatment of Lincoln provides the lens for any reader to do exactly that. He makes Lincoln real, reminding us - or perhaps telling us for the first time - that Lincoln was just as human as the rest of us.

We tend to think of History as a list of dates, names, and wars, but history is nothing more, or less, than our story. It is the story of humans. Rather than listing the minutia of all Lincoln's foreign politics, Peraino examines Lincoln's character via the hard choices he navigated, thus giving a complete picture of how personality and interpersonal conflicts affected our young country's foreign involvement.

To illustrate this picture, Peraino focused on five conflicts Lincoln faced:
1. with his friend and law partner, Billy Herndon, over the Mexican War
2. with his Secretary of State over which of them would control foreign policy
3. with the British Prime Minister, over a diplomatic crisis in the midst of the American Civil War
4. with Karl Marx, in a race for public opinion
5. with the emperor of France, over their short-lived occupation of Mexico.

In the last chapter, Peraino addresses another conflict brought about by Lincoln's foreign policy: the efforts of biographer John Hays to efforts to define Lincoln's foreign policy legacy. Peraino titled this chapter "Lincoln vs. Lincoln," a nod to the conflicting presentations of Lincoln's legacy by the several biographers, all contemporaries of Lincoln, and all seeing him differently. From this, we learn why Lincoln's foreign policy has traditionally been such a minefield for historians (and for some of us, we learn that is was a minefield, and why is was, all at the same time).

As any good biography, this book tells enough about the era that non-historians will get a clear picture of the setting and cultural climate, allowing the reader to grasp Lincoln's personal development. Peraino's analysis flows smoothly in the context, and will be easy for anyone to read. So, if you have even a passing interest in American history, check this one out. It won't disappoint.

~~~

Incidentally, Lincoln was really funny, though maybe not always the way he intended. From the text:

As for French, the nineteenth-century language of diplomacy, he did not understand enough to read a menu. ("Hold on there," the Railsplitter once told a waiter in a New York French restaurant. "Beans. I know beans.")
... In the White House, Lincoln's attempts at diplomatic finesse could seem comically inept. His efforts to bow elegantly to visiting diplomats were so "prodigiously violent" that they had "almost the effect of a smack" in their "rapidity and abruptness."
... "His conversation consists of vulgar anecdotes at which he himself laughs uproariously," the Dutch minister complained. 

Confession: I pictured something akin to the Beverly Hillbillies' shenanigans when I read that. 

"techniques of interrogation"

I'm reading about Brazil this week in my history class. We're focused on the human rights violations during the military regime from 1964-1985. One of the books we've read from for this section is A Mother's Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship, by Lini Penna Sattamini, the mother of a man who was tortured by that dictatorship. And then I read this:

"U.S. policy to Brazil shifted significantly only when President Jimmy Carter (1977-1980) took office and prioritized human rights standards in foreign policy considerations. By then, human rights had become a household term in the United States, and Amnesty International had been recognized as a world leader in the campaign against the use of torture. Lina Penna Sattamini's call that we must never forget is not merely a convocation to remember the past. It is also an appeal to denounce the ongoing uses of those techniques of interrogation that almost took her son's life."

Ok, admittedly, there's a lot wrong with all that. Like, of course the US didn't want to distance themselves from Brazil because of human rights violations - we were sponsoring them! Duh. We could start there and talk for hours about how f*ed up that all is. But that's not what this post is about; I'll leave that discussion for the essay I have to write for class.

This post is about my personal beef with the above quote.
- Yeah, I'm that important (to myself).

I've mentioned this once or thrice in this blog before, but I don't talk about it a lot. There's not much to talk about, really, but if you aren't in on the secret, you might disagree. See, I used to be an interrogator for the US Army. It wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't for that long. I was in five years (and one month, twenty days, but who's counting?), and only did one deployment. I was a Sergeant when I got out, but I was just a Specialist when I was deployed. In civilian-ese, that means I was pretty low-ranking. That worked out in my favor, as I saw it. The way the Army works, the higher you get in rank, the more time you spend behind a desk instead of doing the fun stuff. During my one year in Iraq, I conducted over 300 interrogations. (Whoa! Sounds like a lot of yelling, eh? Not really.) 

So anyway... Whenever I hear interrogation being conflated with torture, I get a little testy.

I'm not going to address specific historical instances of the US' involvement in or use of torture, because I can only speak for my own experience. I know full well that, historically, we're not necessarily the good guys. I mean, see above for goodness' sake - we were teaching the Brazilians how to do it!

What I am going to address is this (repeat after me):
Torture is not a technique of interrogation. 
Torture is torture. 

And if we could just get that through our thick national skulls, it would settle a lot of these pesky "enhanced interrogation techniques" questions that we just can't seem to figure out.

Interrogation is a methodical questioning of a subject, to get information.
Even the dictionary agrees with me!

There is NOTHING about 'causing harm for the sake of getting them to say something' - because, you know, torture doesn't even work as a form of interrogation (occasionally and in very specific short-term situations, sure, but, just - no, for any number of reasons, it doesn't work). It works great as a scare tactic, because it's f*ing scary.

Wanna know what I've found works best in an interrogation? Talking to people as though they were actually people. Being honest with them. Being kind. If they come in there thinking you're an enemy, show them you're human, too. That works really well. In my book, the "enhanced interrogation techniques" involved me being kind and bringing the subject a fatty cake.*



*Fatty cakes, in civilian-ese, are any of the American delicacies which fall into the "Twinkies & crap" category.

Dos Erres, Guatemala: an essay on the connection between language and violence

So, this isn't my best academic work. Not even close. As you can see from all the notes at the end, my brain wanted to take this farther. It's been a battle to complete it without turning it into a massive research project. But it's overdue, so I'm turning it in and moving on to the next piece. 

~

When we read about any of the atrocities humans have committed against other humans, one question dominates our thoughts: How could human beings do these things to other human beings? The answer, in small part, lies in the words we use. In the case of Dos Erres, Guatemala, the words killed, and words allowed killing to continue.

The descriptions given by the Guatemalan soldiers', of their training and culture in the Guatemalan Kaibiles (whose job and training is similar to that of the US Army Special Forces), gives the first hints to how words have shaped events. In the broadcast, “465: What Happened at Dos Erres,” from This American Life, two soldiers from the unit which perpetrated the Dos Erres Massacre are interviewed. During this interview, one of them describes the training of the unit. In this description, any military person might recognize the themes from their own training: each level or branch of military training has a sense of pride in itself which is encouraged from the top down, and inculcated from the bottom up. This pride is not based on being the most ‘humane’ unit; it is based on being the most effective unit in their missions. Effectiveness, in a military mission and within the military culture, is related to completion of the task, but it is also related to brutality in the sense that the ‘best’ soldiers are thought of as those who are able to divorce themselves from emotion – a weakness when it shows – and do the task, no matter the obstacles. Brutality is also encouraged in that the one emotion which is not considered weakness is anger, and violence as an expression of anger is acceptable, even a sign that the person is fully engaged with the military culture. At its best, this culture provides governments with a cohesive unit that is willing and able to act decisively to complete a mission. At its worst, a culture like this does not allow for the humane aspects of humanity; within its worst actions, an act of humanity is revolutionary, and takes revolutionary courage. Any counteraction makes the actor stand out as ‘against’ the unit – a very difficult and dangerous place for an individual to stand.

Euphemisms are integral to how we – how humans – talk about these events. In this case, the euphemisms are covering the horrific nature of what the Guatemalan government – the government which the US put in place and encouraged – has done to its own people. But the importance of euphemisms in this event goes beyond how we talk about it now; in no small way, euphemisms allowed the genocide to happen. The use of euphemisms begins with the training of nearly every military in the world, which encourages one unit to stand taller than others, and develops a troop mentality which places anyone not in the unit, below the unit – a less productive, less worthwhile human being.¹ (This is a hypothesis is supported by research conducted in the studies of the psychology of warfare.²) Incrementally, the stain of ‘otherness’ becomes more pronounced as the social distance from the soldier’s unit becomes greater. As the ‘otherness’ becomes more pronounced, euphemisms for groups of people become more pronounced as well. As language influences thought (and vice versa), speaking of other people as lesser, provides a psychological basis for treating other people as lesser. This is how hate crimes happen; this is how genocides happen; this is how the atrocities committed by our own troops, happened. ³

In Guatemala, the ‘otherness’ which became euphemized was drawn most prominently along racial lines. Indians by any name were seen and treated as lesser humans, or as Rigoberta Menchu described, as less than a dog (Menchu, 2010, p109). Menchu’s testimony in fact is so laden with the effects of racism that it is, I think, impossible to select any one chapter from her book which does not show some reflection of the racism which Indians in Guatemala faced; her comparison of her treatment with that of a landino family dog is just one of the more direct and obvious examples. For the military commanders, then, it would have been a simple thing to use the racism already present in Guatemalan society to instigate the soldiers’ willingness to treat Indians inhumanely – even for those soldiers who were Indians themselves.⁴ In all likelihood, the commanders would not have even made that choice consciously – it was ingrained in them, too, though they certainly saw things differently than Menchu and other Indians did. Ricoardo Falla, in The San FranciscoMassacre, July 1982 (p. 374), elucidates it this way: “Though variations occur, the basic truth remains. Some testimonies pass through second and third hand sources, but they should not be dismissed because some data is mistaken or numbers changed.” There are conflicts in the testimonies of the Guatemalan people; the truth remains, that their culture was so violently divided by race, that the massacres were in some ways, only the next step.

The Guatemalan culture was full of euphemisms which softened the reality of their government’s war on its people. People weren’t “murdered” by their government, they were “disappeared” – a description which clouds the murders with mystery, as though the people were just gone, not murdered. From the perspective of the persecuted, softening the reality probably was beneficial. They didn’t need their words to remind them of the horrors they were facing, and the mind can only take so much. However, when these events were communicated to the rest of the world, euphemisms worked to soften the perception of violence happening in Guatemala. American people (for example) were hearing that it was bad, but not that it was violent, horrifying, or atrocious. It was easier, then, for foreign people to look away, to not demand some sort of intervention. Of course, the American people didn’t know how involved their government already was, or how their government was involved. The layers upon layer of subterfuge concerning American involvement in the Guatemalan genocide acted euphemistically; words, intentionally softened and twisted, masked the reality in Guatemala. We talked about “rural pacification” (Intent to Destroy, Guatemalan Reader, p 362), and the chances that “repression” might be successful (We Cannot Confirm nor Deny, Guatemalan Reader, p379). The Guatemalan embassy’s letter to the US Secretary of State (October 22, 1982; Guatemalan Reader, p 383), even as it decries rumors of atrocities committed by their government, highlights their “civil defense patrols” – a tidy euphemistic name for the groups of Indians forced to commit acts of violence and vandalism against their neighbors.

Looking specifically at the Dos Erres Massacre, we can delineate the ways in which euphemisms worked throughout this event. In the instructions given to the Kaibiles, the village of Dos Erres was described as a communist enclave that was aiding the rebels; the village was positioned against the Guatemalan government and was helping the same rebels who had killed some soldiers. That wasn’t true, but the Kaibiles didn’t know that. Though this wasn’t specifically a use of euphemisms, it provides the basis of anger in the minds of the Kaibiles through the use of intentionally inaccurate descriptions. The Kaibiles shared the embarrassment and retributive passion sparked by hearing of the deaths of their fellow soldiers – a lesser group of soldiers, but still higher in rank than non-soldiers. This same ranking might have discouraged the Kaibiles from hearing the denials of the villagers; when a lesser person declaims what a higher person has said, the higher person is believed. It’s easy to imagine that the Kaibiles’ perception of the villagers as lying about the supposed aid to rebels might have increased the Kaibiles’ anger and desire for retribution. The next step – the escalation of anger into violence – was already part of the culture and training of the Kaibiles.

Fifteen years later, it was the Kaibiles’ cook, Favio Jerez, who proved to be the “weak link” in the unit’s code of silence; he was the first to confess. (Habiba Nosheen, What Happened at Dos Erres) His ‘weakness’ that allowed him to break that code and confess was that he had never been a full member of the Kaibiles’ culture, having not completed more than two weeks of the training. Favio, spared the indoctrination of Kaibiles culture, was able to see through the euphemisms to the humans on the other side.

Notes

¹ As a former soldier, I want to make it clear that what I’m describing is the worst case scenario; it is the most extreme form of the mindset which lies at the base of military cohesion development. In most cases, the mindset I’m describing is not elevated above that of light-hearted teasing of other military units as being ‘less hardcore.’ Certainly, any unit I’ve ever served with has retained its culture of humanity, tempering the degree of dehumanization to the level of semantics – a far cry from a mindset which would allow for the destruction of another human being.

² Lt. Col. Grossman, author of On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), does a compelling disposition on how this works, going into far more detail than I have the space for here. See Section IV – An Anatomy of Killing: All Factors Considered, in particular, for relevant discussion. Lt. Col. Grossman includes a selected bibliography of his references, which is no less of a comprehensive resource for being ‘selected.’

³ The examples which come to mind immediately are Matthew Shepard (hate crime), the genocides in Rwanda and, of course, Guatemala, the human rights violations at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (crimes of American troops), and stories of war crimes by American troops in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Each and every one of the perpetrators in any of these crimes, was likely able to act as they did because they didn’t see the victims as being of equal humanity.

⁴ People who have been bullied, are more likely to bully others. There are numerous resources for this; Olweus (2013) is one.

Bibliography

Embassy Guatemala. "We Cannot Confirm nor Deny." In The Guatemala reader history, culture, politics, edited by Greg Grandin, 378-385. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.

Falla, Ricardo. "The San Francisco Massacre, July 1982." In The Guatemala reader history, culture, politics, edited by Greg Grandin, 373-377. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.

Grandin, Greg. "Intent to Destroy." In The Guatemala reader history, culture, politics, edited by Greg Grandin, 361-365. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.

Grossman, Dave. On killing: the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. Boston: Little, Brown, 2009.

Nosheen, Habiba, and Ira Glass. "What Happened At Dos Erres." This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/465/what-happened-at-dos-erres (accessed July 19, 2013).

Olweus, Dan. "School Bullying: Development and Some Important Challenges." Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 9 (2013): 751-780. http://www.annualreviews.org/ (accessed July 22, 2013).

the Dos Erres Massacre

I'm researching the Dos Erres Massacre in Guatemala right now, for a history class. It happened in the early 80s.

It's fucking horrific. And it's just one part of a larger horrific series of events, that we (the USA) pretty much put into action, encouraged/funded, all while publicly denouncing it. Cuz that's how we roll. (It's fucking disgusting.)

Did you know about this? I didn't. My history education up til now really, really sucked.

Here's an NPR radio broadcast (good old Ira Glass) about it, published just last year:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/465/what-happened-at-dos-erres

I'll post my expanded thoughts on this later, when I'm done with them. 

"Even the Rain"

Have you seen this movie? 

It's about the Water War in Bolivia, which happened exploded in Bolivia in early 2000.

Yeah, I hadn't heard of it. With any luck, you're better educated than I am.

I just wrote a brief essay about this, for a class. Now I'm going to proselytize and tell everyone that they should watch it, because it was a) well done, in my opinion, and b) a serious eye-opener for me. I think it might open some other people's eyes, too.

The movie's available on Netflix (streaming), or you can buy it on amazon. There's a crappy version (which happens to not have English subtitles, if - like me - you need those) on youtube, too. Seriously, check it out.

Here's what I wrote about it, since I know you're curious:

There is a recurring theme in the history of Bolivia since their colonization by Europeans; it is a theme of racial superiority representative of the hegemonic ideologies of the colonizers. This theme is artfully highlighted in the film Even the Rain (2011), which follows the efforts of a fictional film crew attempting to create a dramatic documentary of Christopher Colombus’ invasion and subjugation of the Taino people. To save on the cost of production, the film crew is working in Bolivia, where a casting decision leads them right into the middle of the Water War, a very real internal political crisis that occurred in Bolivia in early 2000. Using this backdrop, the viewers are led to see the connections between Columbus’ actions, and the actions of the foreign film crew, and the Bolivian government.

The director of this film crew has striven to use Columbus’ exact language (from his journals and letters), so that they might remain as close to the reality of the Spaniards’ actions as possible. Early in the movie, a scene begins (at 0:25:47) in which we see the film crew acting out a speech given by Father Montesinos, who was, as the director says, “the first voice of conscience against an empire (0:29:19).” Father Montesinos railed – against the Spaniards’ treatment of the Native peoples, demanding that the violent and dehumanizing practices (including not just slavery, but the particularly brutal methods of enslavement and debasement for which Columbus’ occupation of the Bahamasis now known. Sandwiching the scene with Father Montesinos’ speech, we see what’s going on in Boliviaat the time: the beginnings of the Water War, when communal wells were being locked against the people who’d dug them, and the first of the public protests.  

In that first protest scene, we find the actor cast as the lead Native role, “Daniel,” leading the protests. Cinegraphically, Daniel is set up as the ‘first voice of conscience’ in the Bolivian Water War.

While Daniel is clearly aligned on the ‘side’ of the Natives, and the Bolivian government – which sought out and supported the privatization of their country’s water – is clearly aligned with Columbus’ ideology, the film crew itself is torn. In their conversations with each other, it’s clear they are sympathetic to Columbus’ victims, and to the impoverished Bolivians (despite the crew’s disagreement over what their involvement should be, their sympathies are nonetheless made clear over the course of the movie). However, the conflict over what their role should actually be comes out early, and in such a way that they are forced to consider how they might be involved on a grander scale, intentionally or not. At 0:32:40, we see the executive producer, “Costa,” helping the actor cast as Columbus to rehearse his lines. The actor’s lines roughly quote a letter from Columbus, written in 1493 from the Bahamas(the difference in the lines and the letter is so slight, that it is likely to be only a difference of translation). He is speaking of the Taino people. “They are so naive and generous with what they have,” say the lines, “that they never refuse anything. Whatever they have, if you ask them for it, they will give it to you, inviting the person to share it with them... With just fifty men, you could subdue them, and make them do whatever you want.”  Then, in the very next scene (beginning at 0:35:05), Costa condescendingly tries to convince Daniel to stay out of the protests, then discusses the low cost of production while on a phone call, saying, “two fucking dollars a day and they feel like kings.” Moments later, the audience it reminded of what Costa has just said when Daniel reiterates Costa’s words back to him: “two fucking dollars, no? And they’re content.” Daniel forces Costa to see his own condescension, by repeating Costa’s words back in English – which Costa had clearly assumed Daniel would not understand. These scenes, and these words, all illuminate the disregard the ruling classes may have for the ruled classes, whether it be Spaniards versus Natives, rich versus poor, or employer versus employee.

The disregard humans hold for ‘others’ is probably more universal than what ‘haves’ hold for the ‘have nots,’ but it is in relations of power that these prejudices are most evident. In Even the Rain, it is the conversation between the film crew and a governing official, who appears to be the Mayor of the city, that the extent and nature of the government’s disregard for its citizens is fully elucidated. The scene begins at 0:51:58 and opens with the chants of protestors echoing in the background. “A little domestic row,” the presumed Mayor says, “Nothing for you to worry about.” One of the actors responds by comparing the scenario to the infamous “let them eat cake” of Marie Antoinette; of course this is an escalation, prompting the Mayor to defend his administration’s actions. His defense, though spoken in various terms, ultimately rests on the supposed racial inferiorities of the “Indians” he blames for causing the unrest – even as he references the “long history of exploitation” of Bolivian Native peoples – and his listeners are intended to share his implied racial superiority. He characterizes them as primitive, stone-throwers in the global economy. “It’s the cult of victim versus modernity,” he says. That statement calls to mind the goals of Columbus and other explorers, who sought to ‘bring civilization to the barbarians’ they encountered. It was thought though, that any Native peoples found were too barbarous, too cognitively ill-equipped, to truly reach ‘civilization’ at the level of the Europeans. The Mayor says as much, saying that if they were allowed, “these Indians [would] drag us back to the Stone Age.”

Even the Rain shows how the behavioral patterns created by the actions of the dominant governing bodies in Bolivia are representative of the same hegemonic ideologies under which European colonizers operated in their ‘discovery’ of the Americas. The overlapping stories keenly illustrated the racial themes which have survived hundreds of years in the histories of Bolivia and much of the Americas. The viewer is forced to ask – what happens next? The dust settled and the government of Boliviawas forced to reconsider privatizing their water, but is this progress? It seems that, given the country’s history (then and since), no real lesson has been learned. The heart of the problems, illustrated so well in Even the Rain, have not yet been acknowledged, and thus will continue to plague Bolivia.

References

Christopher Columbus: The Untold Story. (n.d.). UnderstandingPrejudice.org. Retrieved July 16, 2013, from http://www.understandingprejudice.org/nativeiq/columbus.htm

Bollain, I. (Director). (2011). También la lluvia[Motion picture]. Bolivia: Image Entertainment.

 

the Bisbee Deportation

Sheriff Henry C. Wheeler is the key to understanding the Bisbee Deportation of 1917. In looking back, the Deportation appears inconceivable; how could that happen, and in the U.S.A, no less?

After reading the testimony of Sheriff Wheeler, the figurehead of the Bisbee Deportation, one has to wonder whether racism might have been the ultimate motivation behind the event. He rants about the "foreigners" who came to town just to cause trouble by standing in the picket lines; he claims the majority of those deported were Mexicans. Not Mexican-Americans, but Mexicans. He says it like it's a bad word. Those men, he said, weren't even employed at the mine they were striking against. Yet, in late June 1917, Sheriff Wheeler had refused when the mining officials asked him to step in and deputize "special officers" to take care of the strike. His reason? He didn't want to encourage vigilantism. Why, then, did he do exactly that, even leading the deportation himself less than a month later? 

academic interference

This whole semester I've been bitching about not having enough time to blog, because of all the academic work I have to get done. Well, duh, I should have been combining the two the entire time. After all, I did plan on sharing more of my academic work on this blog - I had just forgotten that I was going to do that. So today, as I sat at the computer wanting to write a post and knowing I had to get work done on my research projects, I decided to finally follow up on my forgotten intentions. And damn, it feels good.

Right now I have three projects in progress. One for psychology, two for history. My history capstone project is an analysis of the motivations behind the Bisbee Deportation of 1917. My independent study for history is an evaluation of how the mine has shaped the culture of Bisbee, starting with the era after  the mine closed, in 1973. If that doesn't give me 30 pages, then I'll also examine the same topic, pre-1973.

The psychology project... is in disarray. I'd planned on doing a survey of mental health professionals who work with survivors of sexual trauma to get professional opinions on what therapeutic theories are effective, or not, and why. Then I was going to compare those to current research to do a comparative analysis of the various theories' effectiveness. Fun, right? Well, for that to work, people would have to actually participate in my survey. I got responses from a few people, but 5 responses does not a study make. So I have to change my project. My professor very kindly is sending me data to use (since I went through the work of gathering data and just didn't have enough responses, she's allowing me to use data she gathered for one of her projects without affecting my grade). The new project is about personality traits (think: the Big 5 - Openness to experiences, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) and satisfaction with life. And to be perfectly honest, I plan to look at the data and then build the project around what I see. Because I now have about two weeks to get this done.

While I wait for my psychology professor to email me the data, I'm focusing on my history projects.

Today: the Bisbee Deportation of 1917.
This was a critical blow to the power of unions. To crush a strike, the mining company backed a deportation by law enforcement of the striking miners, who were 'shipped' by train (cattle cars) from Bisbee, Arizona, to an Army camp in New Mexico. The town was locked down by the sheriff who issued 'passports' to residents who had not been deported. To go in or out, you had to show your passport. This was intended to keep the deportees from returning, and it went on for months afterward. Very few of the deportees did ever return. The case went to trial, but although the illegality of the deportation was agreed upon, nobody was ever convicted.

More to follow. Promise.

some thoughts Hurston

I read most of Dust Tracks on a Road, an autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston, pretty quickly, but I had to force myself to finish it. The book is informative, about Hurston certainly, and less obviously about the times she grew up in, but the reader never feels engaged. I never felt as though the 'main character' were truly a sympathetic one. The book could just as easily been written in the third person, and might even have felt more real if it had been.

There's much discussion in the literary and civil rights circles about Hurston's apparent apathy toward the massive problems facing blacks in the US at that time (the turn-of and early years of the twentieth century). Maya Angelo talks about this controversy in her forward to Hurston's Dust Tracks, and she offers some perceptive analysis of Hurston's personal distance throughout the book.

Hurston does keep her readers at arm's length, and through her narration we can see that she participates in the world in a detached sort of way. Reading her story, I came to believe that Hurston doesn't intentionally keep people at a distance. She's smart and a capable anthropologist, but as we so often are unaware of ourselves, she is unaware of her detachment from the world of social constructs.

It should be no surprise that Hurston views the racial conflicts of the times through a distant lens which only affects her sparsely, and seems of little consequence to her. Nothing affects her strongly that isn't related to her father, mother, or step-mother. In fact, even her siblings are mentioned only in how they affected her directly, never for their own sake  She's not an overtly or intentionally selfish person; rather, she's barely aware of the outer world, blinded by an almost benevolent hubris. She can't see what the big deal is.

By her recollection, Hurston's childhood seems almost idyllic, in terms of racial relations. Perhaps it's the setting - an incorporated black town in Florida - or perhaps it's that Hurston doesn't process events the way other people might; there could be a psychological component to her lack of awareness. Later, Hurston comments on how it was more important to make one's own way in the world than it was to try to make the world better for others. A black man came into the barber shop where she worked, which catered to white men only, and the employees - all black - threw him out, refusing to serve him. She described her perspective of the experience this way:

     "An incident happened that made me realize how theories go by the board when a person's livelihood is threatened... that night in bed I analyzed the whole thing and realized that I was giving sanction to Jim Crow, which theoretically, I was supposed to resist. But here [we were] all stirred up at the threat of our living through loss of patronage... Perhaps it would have been a beautiful thing if Banks [the manager] had turned to the shop crowd with customers and announced that this man was going to be served... Then we could all have gone home to our unpaid rents and bills and things like that... There is always something fiendish and loathsome about a person who threatens to deprive you of your way of making a living. That is just human-like, I reckon." (Dust Tracks, 134-136) 

When I first read that, it felt significant, but honestly I was just trying to get through the book. I noted it for later consideration, understanding that Hurston preferred her life of relative ease (compared to the lives of other blacks, especially at that time). I struggled, as I've said, to finish the book. It was enlightening, but not engaging. When I finished it, I put it down in relief, grateful to be done with it and more than somewhat resentful of the essay I still had to write about it for my class (which I still haven't written - I skipped it, taking the hit on my grade rather than brutalizing my sensibilities trying to answer the asinine questions being asked).

That passage of Hurston's was illuminated in perfect clarity when I read the next book on the class list: Assata Shakur: an autobiography. Where Hurston noted troubles and ascribed them to immutable human nature, Assata notes troubles and determines to change them, by her own force if necessary. Maybe it's only that Assata lives more fully in the world of people than Hurston does; I think it's that Assata is involved in life and is driven by compassion, or empathy, or a wiser sense of the human experience. Perhaps those characteristics can't really be separated. Regardless, Hurston is one to work around problems rather than trying to solve them, and she doesn't pay much attention to those which aren't obstinately in her way.

And regardless of my own issues with reading through this book, I do recommend it to readers interested in this section of US history. Viewed through an awareness of the lens of Hurston's detachment, her story is useful in that it provides the view of those blacks who chose not to support civil rights. Perhaps some understanding is to be had here for that cause, though understanding of course should not be confused with endorsement.

~

Version cited:

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust tracks on a road: an autobiography. Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. Print.

Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

"I'm not going to start this right now, because I have to take notes for my assignment so I'll need to get my notebook and pen first, but maybe I'll just glance at the introduction..."

33 Pages into the story, I looked up and realized that I would have to re-read that whole beginning, this time taking notes. This book seriously sucked me in.

It was captivating to read; it was depressing in analysis, in the way that only truth can be.

~

If we were to identify a singular dominant theme in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, it would be of the sexual exploitation of African American women in the institution of slavery. The length and breadth of the text are streaked through with references, both direct and indirect, to the specific difficulties faced by the women who were slaves. Although the institution of slavery itself creates the framework, the events of her narrative have the sexual exploitation of Harriet Jacobs by her owner, the slaveholder known in the book as Dr. Flint, at their root.

The only period of Harriet’s life that is spared some form of sexual exploitation is her earliest childhood, before she even knows she is to be a slave. It’s a short period, though, and as Harriet learns, the budding of maidenhood is a frightful thing for a slave girl. Harriet speaks eloquently of “the trials of girlhood” (Incidents 26) as she experienced them. She is just fifteen when she becomes aware she is a target of Dr. Flint’s depredations, but by then she already knows what sort of behavior she can expect from a man who is a slaveholder. “Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves... She will become prematurely knowing in evil things.” (Incidents 27) Though Harriet speaks in general terms, it’s clear that she includes herself in this assessment. The reader is made to understand that her experience – the misery she suffered as the result of Dr. Flint’s sexual harassment of her – is common amongst female slaves as they grow into adulthood. The behavior of Dr. Flint and the other slaveholding men in her narrative put the flagrant sexism of the antebellum South on display; they have no concept of the slaves as having human dignity, but nor do they view their own wives as deserving of the dignity expounded as a virtue of monogamy. In reaction, the wives join in the harassment, harboring resentment and jealousy rather than lust, and vent these frustrations on the female slaves who have been subjected to their husbands’ predations. In this way, the slaveholder’s wives are the unwilling accomplices of their husbands, furthering the misery swirling around the slave women’s sexuality.

As Harriet grows to womanhood in this environment, she is still beset by the same hopes and concerns other young women of her age encounter. She briefly entertains the hope that she will be allowed to marry a man of her choice – a choice typically denied and always hazardous for slaves. Nevertheless, Harriet falls in love. She predicts the unhappy ending to this affair; in any outcome, there would be only pain. Even had she married the man – a freeborn colored man – he would have been harmed by his inability to protect her under the law. Instead, she encouraged him to leave because that was the only way she believed he might find happiness. Such was the hold of slavery on the sexuality of African American women in its grip. (Incidents 33-38)

That hold only tightened when the enslaved women became mothers. As chattel, their offspring were no more sacred to slaveholders than the offspring of horses or cows, and motherhood itself brought a new set of fears to supplement the existing ones. First, slave women had little or no choice in who they conceived a child with, or when they did so. Then, their children were the property of their owners, and could be taken at whim. Worse still, if the child were a girl; the mother knew how much more difficult her child’s life would be, just for being female. Harriet describes this with keen articulacy. Though her innate boldness empowers her to choose the father of her children, the choice is made in the context of a scheme to escape Dr. Flint, in favor of necessary expediency, and at the cost of her pride. Harriet is corned by her circumstances, and forced to sacrifice her moral obligation to marry before having sexual intercourse; in this manner, her sexuality is a weapon in her own hands, intended to allow her release from Dr. Flint, but effectively harming her standing instead. (Incidents 47-51)

There is no release from sexual exploitation for Harriet during the life of Dr. Flint. Even in her torturous and extended escape, she is hounded with the knowledge that he obsesses over having her fully in his control, to have her “subject to his will in all things” (Incidents 26). Her existence as a woman is an unpalatable threat to her safety, as long as he holds her as his legal slave.

In Harriet’s case – and likely in so many more cases – her sexuality is threatened, and threatening, from her maidenhood until her release from slavery. For many other African American women in slavery, their release from slavery came only with death. It is a blessing in Harriet’s eyes that she is able to live beyond that time, beyond the soul-rending bonds of slavery which turn her sex and her sexuality against her. For Harriet, sexual exploitation by Dr. Flint is the driving force behind her fears and actions for much of her life. It’s only in the very beginning of her life, and the very end, that she is relatively free from those influences. 

~ 

Edition Cited: Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the life of a slave girl (Unabridged). 1861. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 2001. Print.

~

I've decided that, in general, my 'reviews' of non-fiction books will be more "critical analysis" than "review." It's more my thing.