Tony Platt GoodToGo

WE'RE DOING OKAY

March 22, 2020

In the search for being useful during these precariously cloudy times, I’m joining with our neighbors to investigate how the coronavirus crisis is affecting folks on our block of 1600 Josephine Street, Berkeley, and what we can do to build solidary in this moment of mandated social distancing. We plan to ask some personal questions. The least I can do, then, is ask myself how I’m doing.

I’m 77, actually 78 in a few weeks, and without any notice I suddenly find myself represented in three very public categories: “elderly,” “having a compromised immune system,” and “non-essential worker.” My partner Cecilia, though a few years younger, is similarly defined. These categories are not new to me, but I’ve never let them frame who I am or how I live my life. This is not the way I usually think of myself.

As I get closer to the big 80, I’m not in denial about what’s ahead. I’m not one of those people who thinks that 70 is the new 60. Yet, I follow my godmother Juanita’s advice by always trying to “get on with it.” Whenever I would grumble to her about writer’s block or some other impediment, she would tell me to “get cracking.”

And looking back over the last year, I seem to have followed her mantra. I published a book and traveled to several countries to talk about it. I had hundreds of conversations that made me feel very much alive.  Cecilia and I visited Oaxaca in January and December, we lived in Paris for a few weeks, and had a vacation in Provence.  I actively participated in conferences in Barcelona and San Francisco. A few weeks ago, with three activist co-researchers at Berkeley, I helped to organize a new year-long research project that will try to account for how our university accumulated the human remains of 10,000 California Native Peoples in the first half of the 20^th century, and why it is so reluctant to do justice to the tragic past.

In the last week of February 2020 – only four weeks ago – I packed a short week very full in New York. Being there for Dennis, my oldest American friend, who had just put his wife of more than fifty years into a residence for people with “memory problems.” Having dinner with a friend in a hip restaurant. Going to the Whitney. Seeing a play with Steve Earle about a mining disaster in West Virginia, and the extraordinary Irish production of Hamlet at St Anne’s (“The time is out of joint.”)  And giving a talk at a seminar at John Jay on the “military-industrial complex.” Our focus was mainly on the militarization of everyday life in Latin America, oblivious to the possibility that three weeks later there would be a popular call for the military to become the vanguard of a public health mobilization in the United States.

I returned home from New York tired and with a miserable cold that lasted a few days, but it was all worth it and – I thought then –   I would do it again and again.

I’m quite sociable. On my daily round of chores, I often make time to chat with the Iranian woman who sells flowers next to Bank of America, with Marcia and Paul at Masse’s bakery, with Peter at the deli, and with the folks who sit at the outside tables at Peet’s. Though no longer teaching, I meet regularly with students. My dog Buster prompts endless conversations with strangers. And with Cecilia, who is also go-go-go, we enjoy a wide range of cultural pleasures: museums, galleries, dance, music, theatre, talks, great meals, movies, and seriously good times with friends and family. A few weeks back we sat through a marathon all-day production of “Gatz” at the Berkeley Rep, and we said that we’d do it again.

Our neighbors Tiana and Dave at 1609 regularly tell us, “You’re our model, we want to be like you when we get older.”

Unlike my daughter Rebecca, who smells trouble a county away and chided me at least twice every day for not being prepared, I was slow to accommodate to the new regime. I had lunch with university administrators at the Women’s Faculty Club on March 2^nd  (80,000 cases reported in China); I met with my research team on March 3^rd  (80 dead in Italy); I had breakfast with a visiting researcher at Saul’s Deli on March 7^th    (800 cases in Germany); I watched my football team (Manchester City) lose on March 8^th; I had lunch with grandchildren on March 9^th; I took Buster to have his teeth cleaned on March 12^th; I met my colleague Jonathan for what-the-hell gin martinis at Cesar’s on March 13^th; I played my tri-weekly game of racquetball at the university gym on March 15^th.   (1,809 dead in Italy). In other words, a pretty typical week.

Meanwhile, I was beginning to get the message. On March 12^th, we gave away our tickets (before we found out the show was cancelled) to what would have been Cecile McLorin Salvent’s brilliant jazz opera at the Paramount in Oakland. On March 14^th, the Sacramento Public Library Association abandoned their annual fancy fund-raiser to which I and other local authors had been invited. The next day, after talks with Cecilia and my friend Dr. Bob, who dismantled every one of my rationalizations for being Mr. Social, my calendar filled up with cancellations: going for a walk with a friend, a beard trim at the barber’s, my daily gym routine, a book tour in northern Italy in early June, our summer vacation in France.

Now “sheltering in place” since Governor Newsom’s order on March 20, we took up a friend’s kind offer to shop for us. We reluctantly told our long-time neighbors and friends, Dave and Tiana, that they could no longer share our virus incubator aka hot tub, and that we would no longer be popping into their house on a whim.  I don’t think this is the model they had in mind for their golden years.

It feels like months, but it’s only been a week since our lives changed. “How are you doing,” I’m asked in conversations on the phone, zoom, facetime, and skype. After bouts of depression, feeling immobilized and lethargic, and obsessed with the latest news reports, we’re slowly finding a rhythm to the new normal abnormal. After years of procrastination, we’ve organized and culled our library, ready for the students who can’t visit us. Next is cleaning out closets and then taxes. I’ve even started doing a little on-line research on the Berkeley project. It feels like being in a recovery program, except nobody is optimistic about our chances of getting clean. Cecilia and I even tentatively discussed that this temporary routine might become permanent.

Still, we’re the relatively lucky ones. As retired professors we have a comfortable pension. We can afford not to work. We’re not one of the half a million people in the Bay Area who have lost their jobs or had their hours drastically cut back in restaurants, stores, hotels, and other “non-essential” workplaces. Unlike the eighty percent of California agricultural workers who are undocumented, we are eligible for public services and don’t live in constant fear of ICE. We own our house in Berkeley and co-own a cabin up the coast when we want a break from the metropolis, while thousands in California  sleep rough. And we’re not one of the 370,000 people under the age of 65 in the Bay Area who don’t have health insurance. So, for now, we’re doing okay, but the majority isn’t.

GET CRACKING

“With the last gasp of life, you get a new lease on life.”

(Samuel Beckett)

 

My godmother Juanita Rothman refused to be defined by a lifetime of chronic illnesses that ultimately made daily tasks into an obstacle course. “So boring,” she’d say about her health problems, not as a matter of denial or stiff-upper-lipishness, but because life is short and there’s so much to discuss, debate, and create. “Achievement, that’s why I think we’re put on this earth,” she once told me. “To get things done, that’s what life is about.”  She stuck to this mantra right to the bitter end of her ninety-four years.

Whenever I visit the old country, I make a point of spending time with Juanita. It’s a pleasure, not a duty. We are not biologically related, but I feel connected to her as though by blood. And it’s a bonus that she links me with Nat, the love of her life and my godfather, and the circle of friends around my parents in their youth.

Yes, I know I’m writing in the present tense as though she’s still alive. I miss her deeply.

“How’s the new writing going,” she’d ask me, even after I’d just completed a big project and felt I deserved a breather. Didn’t she understand what it was like to teach at a state college, loaded up with three demanding classes and close to one hundred needy students, with not a teaching assistant in sight?  “Have you started a new book,” she’d ask, and I’d mumble my reply as if I was a procrastinating student about to miss a deadline. “No, not really, but I’m thinking about it,” I’d lie. “The problem with writers,” she’d reply, not missing a beat, “is that they think too much and don’t write enough. When one is a writer, Towhnee, one writes. Don’t make up excuses. Just pick up the pen.”

She died in her elegant home in Cheltenham, England, on December 11^th, surrounded by collectible memories ­­ ­– “A poet gave me this hookah … I collected these ivory elephants in Africa… This is my father’s humidor the way it looked the day he died” … – and a vast, eclectic library, including an impressive collection of first edition poetry that she bequeathed to me in recognition, I suppose, of my efforts to transgress the boundaries of academic prose.

        As Juanita Masur she grew up economically and racially privileged in South Africa – the daughter of Gertrude and Max, a Hungarian woman born in the United States and a South African businessman, both Jews. Apartheid and the Second World War shaped her antifascist politics. At Witwatersrand University, where she received a degree in political philosophy and economics, Juanita was, in her words, “a bit of a Bolshy.”  She took over as editor of the campus newspaper from her comrade Ruth First, who later as Ruth Slovo was the first white woman imprisoned for political activism under the apartheid regime’s detention laws. Juanita ran a clandestine school teaching literacy to Black South Africans. In the 1940s, the Nazis murdered one of her uncles in Germany, while her brother joined the Canadian air force and died during the war in the Netherlands. Back home, she helped her mother administer a camp for 90,000 prisoners of war. After graduation, Juanita worked as an assistant editor at the Johannesburg Sunday Express

            By the 1950s, as South Africa’s racial lines hardened against the post-war winds of change blowing through the continent, the regime viciously cracked down on dissent. Many activists left the country, including Ruth Slovo, who was assassinated in Mozambique in 1982 by a letter bomb delivered by the South African security forces. Juanita also exiled herself into the world, no small feat for a single woman in a pre-feminist era. She lived for a while in Greece before moving permanently to England.

        Juanita’s personal life similarly defied convention. With little patience for dutiful wives, she married three times and divorced twice, the kind of behavior typically reserved for men of her generation. She scandalized South Africa’s middle-class Jewish community by marrying a working-class Greek immigrant whom she was tutoring in English. “He wasn’t Jewish,” she said. “The marriage didn’t last. It was all about sex.” Divorced and now a parent, she focused on making a career as a writer and journalist. She lived for a while in Greece where she wrote for United Nations publications and received a transfusion of blue blood through her marriage to Count Nicholas Kalerghi Mavrogeni, an official in the Ministry of Justice. 

In 1961, after her second divorce and move to England, she crashed the boys’ scientific club to publish and edit a new magazine, Hovering Craft and Hydrofoil, and become a founder of the International Hydrofoil Society. She was courted by the patrician Edward Boyle, a Tory rebel who broke ranks with his party over capital punishment, education, immigration, and foreign policy. Boyle joined Harold Macmillan’s government, working his way up to Minister of Education and, later, the House of Lords as Baron Boyle of Handsworth. But he didn’t join Juanita. She turned down his persistent marriage proposals and an opportunity to become a Lady as well as a Countess, instead choosing Nat Rothman, the Jewish ex-commie, on condition that she wouldn’t have to sacrifice her career to deferential domesticity.

After Nat’s death in 1998, she wasn’t interested in another relationship. When she showed me her photo albums – organized in seemingly random, non-chronological order – I could see that from her earliest years she had a spark and zest for life, not traditionally beautiful, but a looker with pizzazz and smarts, who attracted men and looked them right in the eye. From her attentive father to the two men who, she told me sheepishly, proposed marriage when she was in her 80s, she always had suitors.

In her last decade, she was too busy for romance. She worked for free as a literary editor and agent for aspiring and established authors, helping them to publish in a wide variety of genres, from fiction and memoir to scientific and historical treatises. She worked harder than most people twenty years younger. Aspiring and published authors somehow found their way to her to receive rigorous editing services, handwritten in ink. During a visit a few years ago, she showed me some of her projects: a World War II memoir that’s been published, a novel she was submitting to Routledge, and another 500-page novel that she was inclined to reject. She had to inform a retired, well-known chef that his memoir of cooking for the stars in swank restaurants was not up to par. “He started sobbing, I thought it was about the book,” she told me. “It was embarrassing, he wanted to marry me.”

Juanita relished political discussion, no subject off-limits, no orthodoxy unchallenged. She was easily irritated by the local retirees’ fondness for gossip and organ recitals – “all they want to talk about is their health” – and had no time for the Jewish book club other than to give its members advice about what to read. She didn’t care what people thought about her decision to support a program that brought Palestinian kids to Cheltenham. “Time waits for no man, Towhnee.”

She was more up to date on literature and the arts than I was. It was her boundless reading that introduced me in 1997 to the work of W. G. Sebald, whose book The Emigrants left a lasting impression: “They are ever returning to us, the dead.” During a visit in 2010, we discussed and argued about presidential politics in the United States, the Middle East, the state of London theatre, and what we were reading. Her gifts to me included Bernard Schlink’s latest novel (Homecoming) and a new book of unpublished stories by Primo Levi (A Tranquil Star). She knew my tastes well, but she was usually ahead of them. When I asked about her bedside reading, she showed me a new book on Walter Benjamin (Archive) and a coffee table book of Tracy Emin’s controversial work. She flipped open the pages and showed me the artist nude, the artist semi-nude, and the artist with legs spread-eagled in a very unladylike pose. Emin’s texts refer to fuck and fucking in many inventive permutations. “Well, some of this is silly,” said Juanita in her ever-so-polite and measured English, “but I think she’s saying something interesting, don’t you?”

I will miss her voracious curiosity, fierce intelligence, and tough love. She had absolutely no sympathy when I complained about writer’s block. I can hear her now: “Get cracking, Towhnee. You have an obituary to write.”

AN EMBARRASSMENT TO HISTORY: SIMON SCHAMA'S 17th CENTURY NETHERLANDS

I’ve started to do some general reading about the history of the Netherlands. I’m particularly interested in learning about the emerging nation in the late 16th and early 17th century during a period when modernity, slavery, academia, and the prison co-existed. 

I’m doing this because I’m in the early stages of a possible project on the late 16th century origins of Leiden’s prison. The Netherlands was a pioneer in creating a “house of correction” designed to terrify vagrants and other subverters of mercantile capitalism into industrious labor. Leiden was among the first Dutch cities to create a workhouse-prison, a model that was emulated throughout Europe, an early precursor of the 19th century penitentiary-as-factory. Dignitaries and writers from England, France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia came to take notes.

An internet search tells me that a good place to start is Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. First published in 1987, it was reprinted in 1997. No changes or preface to the 2nd edition, so I assume that a decade later the author is happy with his first effort. Schama is a biggie in the UK: a public, university-based intellectual who is popular via his BBC pop-history programs. His name trumps the title on the book’s cover.

From what I know of his work, I don’t like his culture-centric approach to “national character.” But I’m a learner reading this book for basic information, so I’ll try to put a hold on critique. At first, I succeed.

I’m encouraged that Schama thinks crime and punishment is a sufficiently important topic to bookend his 700-page tome. The first chapter describes in some detail Amsterdam’s Tughuis, also known as the Raspuis (Saw-House), where, from 1595, a regime of forced labor backed up by punishments of exquisite cruelty were carried out “in dead earnest.” (p. 19) Women were held in the Spinhuis where, from 1597, “vagrants, whores and thieves,” in Schama’s words, “were sent for stiff doses of improvement at loom and wheel.” The Spinhuis’ motto, etched in the entrance, expresses its catch-22 creed: “I exact no vengeance for wrong but force you to be good.” (p. 16)

Schama’s last chapter returns to the same theme with which he begins the book: describing how houses of correction were intended to “dissolve the stain of vagrancy” and turn the idle poor into productive workers. (p. 582) There’s also a coda on early 18th century campaigns against “unnatural practices” and “homosexual witchhunts.” (p. 605)

The rest of the book catalogues in exhausting and often amusing detail how the Netherland emerges as a nation, and the particularities of Dutchness: from the rise of a consuming bourgeoisie to marriage and family life, the arts, and everyday cultural habits. The opening and closing chapters on the harshness of prison regimes and moral panics about sexuality no doubt signal that the country’s 17th century embarrassment of riches came at a price, but Schama offers no insights about the significance or insignificance of the houses of correction to the country’s textile industry or to shaping a capitalist labor force or to constructing the boundaries of citizenship. Without analysis, the vivid descriptions of punishment, prostitution, and penal regimes have a titillating quality, the stuff of entertainment.

As for the material riches that Schama describes in prurient excess, one might expect a book written in 1987 and reprinted in 1997 to at least make a connection between Dutch involvement in the slave trade of some half a million black bodies from Africa to the Americas – an investment that began in the same decade as the Spinhuis – and, say, the “Dutch hankering for confections and delicacies,” with more than fifty sugar refineries operating in Amsterdam alone by the 1640s. (p. 165) But there’s nothing, not even rhetorical speculation.

Prostitution gets thirteen pages in The Embarrassment of Riches, but slavery, Africa, Brazil, and Suriname don’t even make it into the index. “Wonderfully inclusive” and “history on the grand scale” read blurbs on the back cover. “Extraordinarily exclusive” and “history with blinders” is more accurate.

A CHORUS OF VOICES: A CONVERSATION WITH TOMMY ORANGE

 

Arlene Goldbard conducted and edited this interview with Tommy Orange and myself in 2013 as a project for Storycenter (www.storycenter.org). It was published in The Republic of Stories issue #3 (Summer 2013).

Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He worked with the Native American community in the Bay Area for several years, three of them spent developing a media center for the Native American Health Center. He received a B.S. in the Sound Arts in 2004 and was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2014. Tommy grew up in Oakland, California. His recent critically acclaimed novel There There focuses on the urban Indian experience.

Arlene Goldbard is a writer, public speaker, cultural activist, and consultant to StoryCenter and other organizations. She has published The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave. Read about them, subscribe free to her blog, and watch videos of her talks at arlenegoldbard.com.

Arlene Goldbard: Let’s begin with you telling readers how story figures into who you are in the world and the work that you do.

Tommy Orange: The way it’s influenced my life is that I feel like I can only receive or engage with information when it comes in the form of story and the meaning that comes with that. I didn’t do well in school: I could hear the noise of the information being given to me, but I didn’t know what that means, what’s the context. I’ve been trying to collect stories from my parents my whole life in order to understand how I’m situated and where I come from.
This is something I’ve only realized since I’ve been so enmeshed in digital storytelling. I started doing it about two and a half years ago. First getting trained at the StoryCenter and then working in the Native community doing storytelling workshops led to me realizing the power and the role that story has played in my life.
Also, in 2005, my dad got cancer, level-4 lymphoma. He had four Native American church ceremonies and was healed. That was one of my first ceremonial experiences; we didn’t grow up that way. That changed everything for me. I started realizing that there was a narrative going on inside the ceremony. It was story through song and prayer. I grew up in Oakland with a lot of other people of mixed backgrounds. I was not culturally steeped in any regard. It was the beginning of my journey toward an understanding of myself as an Indian person, as a mixed person. This is the heart of how I started connecting to story, to my own story, and to my family’s story.
In regards to my work, I’m working as a digital storytelling facilitator—work I very much believe in—and also my personal work writing a novel that includes many voices. The idea is that a chorus of voices tells a story to the people. The majority of Native people live in cities now. There hasn’t really been much about that story of Native people now: their interaction or collision with the city and what that looks like, the Oakland urban Indian experience in general.
Working in digital storytelling has made me realize that a collective of these personal stories tells a meta-story that says more than a single voice could ever say.

Arlene: How about you, Tony? Situate this topic for us in your world.

Tony Platt: I was trained as a sociologist and a historian and have always written politically-informed, activist writings. But I didn’t start writing personal stories until the ‘70s when my son, Daniel, became ill and nearly died for the first time. I started writing stories about that experience with him and then the experiences with the medical system—sort of dark, satiric, humorous stories as a way of dealing with the horror of what I was experiencing and what he was experiencing. That I found very helpful and cathartic. I began to really enjoy the particular form of the non-fiction, first-person story, the craft of trying to do that in a way that would be interesting and would reach people and communicate.
For several years those two tracks of my writing were very separate, a creative writing voice and an academic, political activist voice. When my formal academic career began to end (or it didn’t really make a difference to my career what I did), I decided I wanted to try to bring those two voices together. So about ten years ago I started trying to write histories that were seriously researched, dealing with hard topics, controversial topics, but that would also be informed by a personal sensitivity, a first-person voice, a storytelling voice.
First was a book called Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial about the history of eugenics and racism in California, and more recently in my last book, Grave Matters, which starts off again with my son, with a scattering of his ashes up at Big Lagoon where we have a vacation cabin in Humboldt. That led me to discover what I’d really not faced before: the history of the desecration of the Native graves in that very same site and everywhere else in California.
So the experience of Daniel and his death and mourning him and trying to figure out how to commemorate him then very organically led me to working with Native groups in Humboldt and to exploring the history of the death and desecration of Native graves in that area. So I’ve begun to write about those two experiences together. My story writing now is still activist. I’ve tried to make the activism less polemical and more tried to relate my activism to where people are at, to try to find some common ground through personal stories and then take them into the political activism that they may or may not want to explore.
I also try to deal in my stories with hard issues of the past, issues dealing with race – this history of California that is such a tragic history and mostly gets forgotten and discarded and turned into upbeat mythological stories that are taught to our kids. There’s now a very rich historical record about California. If anybody asks us now what is the tragic side of California history, we could give a good answer from the historical record and oral histories and so on. But when we look at public histories—what shows up in textbooks, in schools, in public places, in memorials, rituals, commemorations—here we seem to practice a scrupulous amnesia and not deal with it. So that’s what’s preoccupying me now: how to take a lot of the things that we know and make them a part of everyday common sense, a part of not just a historical record, but a public conversation about political issues.

Arlene: One through-line I hear in both your descriptions is that you reached the point in your lives where data couldn’t encompass reality for you, couldn’t describe your experience in a way that was sufficient to portray all its dimensions. Story becomes multi-layered, without separation between the personal and the political, a container that can really hold all that one is experiencing. These days, that reality is impressing itself more and more on people.

Tommy O.: I think David Foster Wallace said that with the total noise of the information age, we need something that cuts through. The super-personal story moves into the supra-personal story, because when you start getting at why the things you’re talking about in your story affect you, you’re getting at universal truths. The more personal you can go, the more likely you’re going to connect with more people, as odd as it sounds.

Tony P.: At the same time, a part of that worries me. It used to be that the personal story and the oral history were very rare. Now it’s also become commercialized, particularly with the confessional talk shows, the Oprah Winfrey syndrome. My worry is that sometimes people can stick with a personal story and not look at the larger issues or that the personal story can become fetishized and made into a commodity or made sentimental. I know when I talk about my book and the issues I’m concerned about, I start with the place up in Humboldt, with my son’s death, and then I move on to these larger issues. I want to take people on that journey. But I also know that people have curiosity about my personal relationship with my son’s death and all the feelings associated with that, and sometimes that can become a distraction, not just for the audience but also for myself in terms of trying to tell a larger story. There are many different kinds of personal story and storytelling. Some of them can actually become quite conservative and produce an inward experience only.

Arlene: What do you think about that, Tommy?

Tommy O.: I much more have in mind the story where the personal histories and the larger history can merge and be told through personal story. It’s much more likely that those are going to engage people. I totally agree about the fetishizing of the personal, that junk TV sort of sentimentality. There’s a risk to indulging in that. Personally, I’m able to engage more with history when I can hear people that connect to it because of their own personal story.

Arlene: I was wondering about another dimension of this when I looked at the young people’s stories from the New Haven All Together Now workshop. I noticed that the stories done by older people in Berkeley were mostly about an individual in relation to a larger movement, a journey in life that connected to the spirit of the times and the places where injustice was coming forward and needed to be addressed. More of the young people’s stories were about how they had internalized a view of themselves as less than they are, and now realize they are worthwhile. That’s a different journey in a different part of life, but there wasn’t as much connecting in most of those stories to larger issues. Now a new iteration of All Together Now is coming up, two generations relating to the 50th anniversary of many Southern civil rights movement milestones. So I’m wondering: how do you create what you’re both talking about, the opportunity and ability to connect the little story and the big story with young people who haven’t had a whole lifetime of doing that already?

Tony P.: I think the problem with the two sets of interviews is that we were drawn from different contexts and we were asked different questions. The group that was pulled together in Berkeley through Osher Lifelong Learning Institute had been socially and in some cases politically active for a long time. When we sat down and talked together, that’s really what we had in common. The young people were coming of age and trying to find their voice and the social meaning of their life. But it really wasn’t a conversation because we were dealing with different issues and weren’t asked common questions. I think that conversation can take place. The socio-cultural context young people are involved in today is different than the struggles and cultural issues that I was involved in. Through music and the arts there’s a way into a political and social life that is different than coming into activism like I did through formal political social movements. We have different starting places. The conversation can take place, but I don’t think it’s begun yet.

Arlene: What could be the prompt to open up that conversation? If you were sitting in a room full of teenagers and a group of people in your generation, what question would you want to throw out?

Tony P.: First of all, if you’re talking about two groups of people that have very different class and racial histories like the two groups that were brought together, then it’s very hard to find a common question. We’re talking about primarily working-class urban kids. The older group in Berkeley was—not necessarily from birth—middle-class activists, an educated group of people. It’s not so much the prompt question as to try to find what the common ground would be. Do you see yourself trying to change the world in some way? How would that be? Something as open-ended as that. It doesn’t have to be politics in a formal sense, it can be through music or cultural activity or whatever. So I think there’s two issues: one is the differences in our class and education and speaking different historical languages, and the other is trying to find a prompt that isn’t bound by class and race that opens up different possibilities.

Tommy O.: I agree with Tony about the differences of race, class, and history. But what I’ve been able to see growing up as a young person in this generation is that there hasn’t been any movement that has felt passionate enough—like the way it was in the golden days of activism for my mom, who was a hippie in the ‘60s who wanted to cross the country with dreams of being a dancer in New York and ended up at a peyote commune in New Mexico where she met my dad. That spirit is something I’ve always wished my generation had, but I’ve never seen it. There’s passion, but it feels like it’s displaced or fragmented. I think that’s the result of how much information is out there and the freedom to explore any area of your own personal interest—and how much there is to explore with the noise of the internet, which makes for a very fragmentary situation. The amount of information makes it hard for there to be one movement or one solid thing to get behind.
At the same time, the amount of information we do have makes for a much more cynical generation. When I was watching some of the older generation’s stories, they kind of ended on a note of, “We need to do something more.” The spirit of activism does not feel alive in my generation or even the younger ones. It feels like people know the information, but they’re not rising up. So I don’t really know what’s connecting the two generations, where their common ground is.

Arlene: I’m a veteran of that period, too. We felt that what we thought, what we felt, and what we did made a huge difference in the world. They have a phrase for that: the revolution of rising expectations. As the energy of possibility aggregates, you do more because you feel it really matters. It’s very different from the internalized powerlessness and discouragement that sometimes seems rampant. People internalize the voice that says you don’t have power, you don’t have capacity. Paulo Freire had a phrase for that: “Internalization of the oppressor.” That’s a hard gap to bridge.

Tony P.: I think Marx said that we make history, but not under conditions that we choose. It’s purely a biological accident that I was born into the post-WWII period, a period of profound transformations taking place all over the world. We did feel like we were in the majority, even though we weren’t, and that gave a tremendous boost in optimism to the movement. This is a very different time in world history. We’ve had the defeat of communism, of socialist regimes, of the hopefulness of all the nationalist movements that came out of Africa, Latin America, that were going to not just provide independence from colonialism but also new systems of justice. So we’re in this in-between period of world history where people are somewhat dissatisfied with the past and present systems but trying to figure out new models for the future. That’s very different than leaving the classroom when I was a student and walking outside and having all those movements pull me in. I think this is a much more difficult period.
On July the 4th, I always like to read Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “What does July the 4th mean to the Negro?” It’s an incredible speech. He basically says, This is your celebration, not ours. This is your country, your patriotism, not ours. There’s this one sentence that I wrote down yesterday when I was reading it again: “This is 1852. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” This is 1852. He clearly feels a great despair. Then ten years later we have the ‘60s—not the 1960s, but the 1860s and the Civil War, the end of slavery, and all the problems that came after the hope of Reconstruction.
Nevertheless, that totally changed the relationship of Africans and black people to this country and gave Douglass a much more optimistic view of the future. Ten or fifteen years later, he was then talking about the need to celebrate July the 4th as a black holiday as well as a white holiday. Things can change very quickly. We shouldn’t underestimate this, though I do think we’re in a very hard, difficult, strange time in world history and I think there’s going to be a lot of times in the future that will get much worse before there’s a possibility of things getting better. Still, things change fast.

Arlene: It’s important to remember that. I think back to the late ‘80s: no one predicted the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the fall of Apartheid at precisely that time. A lot of people wanted to claim it after the fact, but pretty much everyone was surprised. I like the fact that I’ve lived to see some big surprises in world history. It suggests there might be others. Is there something else you’d like to say, something my questions didn’t touch on that is important to you?

Tony P.: One is the particular kind of storytelling we’re doing that addresses a racist history against Native peoples, particularly in California for me. We’re up against the romance of the Indian and how that figures into how we tell stories. That’s one issue that’s very curious. You get that romantic, back-to-nature Indians–are-one-with-nature story which is not true of any other racial narrative in the United States. You don’t hear it about Chicanos, Americans, or Asians. It’s a peculiar thing, this hatred and romance, the two sides of that and how you negotiate with that.
The other thing is that with historians, there’s been a lot of critique in the past about left progressive historians tending to create meta-narratives that didn’t take into account all the incredible regional differences in the United States. I do think it’s important to collect the regional and local stories, but to also then go back to the larger story, whether it’s the story of genocide and displacement, the profound cruelty of what happened to Native peoples in California. Not to get lost just in the local and the regional, but also to try to attach all of these regional and local variations. It’s very important to enrich that larger story or meta-narrative, to try to keep that relationship going between the larger story and the local story.

Tommy O.: On the other side of the romanticization is the meta-narrative of the America that needs to keep the story of America intact, needs to keep it tried and true, needs to keep the story of America as wholesome as possible. And that comes with an incredible amount—especially now, with how much we know—of ignoring and also of redefining what Indian people are doing, which is based on this Christian idea that if we’re supposed to be holding dominion over the earth, that comes along with civilization and advancement and progress. So what you have is the story of people that were advanced and holding dominion over the earth like they should and escaping from religious persecution—this is the meta- narrative—coming here and finding basically wild beasts doing nothing with the earth. In that meta-narrative, if you’re not doing anything that’s advancing civilization, if you’re in harmony with the earth, you’re like a beast or a thing to be dominated and you’re useless.
That’s not to say that Indians weren’t acting like humans all over the world have always acted; there was violence and depravity, I’m sure. But the idea that harmony with the earth—the basic idea that there was sustainability as a people and respect for the thing that they come from which is the earth—the idea that we weren’t doing anything with the land and so it’s justified that because of progress things had to go the way that they went. That basic restructuring of what happened and what’s behind that, people needing to be able to feel okay with America still being if not a good place or a good thing to have happened, at least a necessary and essential thing to have happened because of progress and the way that we think of it. Manifest Destiny, that meta-narrative is deeply disturbing to me in how much I encounter it from friends and people in my communities, that that’s still running underneath and informing their idea of who they are. It’s really disturbing when I come across it.

Arlene: How do you dislodge that?

Tommy O.: Stories. I believe that story is the way to rewrite it. A collection of stories is the way to rewrite a singular history that has been in textbooks, this single authority that is basically the U.S. government, which itself has huge investment in writing history in a particular way that makes it a single and not a collective narrative. I think it takes a lot of people telling a lot of stories about what their experience has been, what the experience of their ancestors has been.

Arlene: Thank you, Tommy. Tony?

Tony P.: I think this is incredibly critical. You get what I call the California Story that does a couple of important things. One, it creates an institutionalized amnesia about California’s bloody past, just cuts it out totally and doesn’t deal with it in a profound way. You can’t imagine, for example, going to Germany today and not tripping over the Holocaust and Nazis. Everywhere you go there are memorials, there’s commemorations, there’s rituals, there’s school discussions, there’s textbooks. Whatever people’s critiques of contemporary Germany, you have a country totally preoccupied with its past, constantly discussing it.
Then you come to California and it’s pretty much ignored. It’s ignored right from the beginning of kids getting that story in the fourth or fifth grade about the missions as agents of civilization and religiosity and bringing culture to the mindless savages of the West. They still get that. I just met with a group of teachers in Crescent City where the school system is under order to deal with the way in which it teaches about the history of race in California because of the discriminatory suspensions and reaction against Native kids in that county. The teachers and School Board are bringing in people to have conversations and so on. I went and talked to them about the new textbook that they use. On the surface, it seems very multicultural, but it says things like, “Indians have lived in California for hundreds of years.” That’s on page 102 of the textbook. I mean, it’s not just creating a mythical interpretation. It’s factually incorrect right from the beginning. Then there’s a wonderful line in it about how the padres came over and set up the missions to teach Indians how to work hard, again reinforcing this notion of laziness and unproductivity.
Without romanticizing the Native past of California, the people historically in this region did live very comfortably and productively, living long lives in symbiotic relationships—particularly in the Northwest—with the land and the water and so on. Misinformation comes at a very early age. It’s institutionalized in schools. It’s good that kids get to read around the seventh grade The Diary of Anne Frank and learn about the tragedy of personal experience of genocide in Europe. That’s the perfect opportunity for teachers to then come back and say what’s the comparable history in California, and we don’t do that.
When I go talk to college students about this, they’re open and receptive to these issues, but they feel like they’ve not learned anything until they’re in college, or they’ve mis-learned these histories. This is now so embedded in the cultural common sense about how people see the past. I do agree that stories are one way to get at this, but I think the school system has to get really shaken up to get a conversation going about this at a pretty young age. There are very few teachers and less parents trying to teach their kids the counter-narrative, refusing to let them go visit the mission and walk over the bodies of Native peoples buried there. There’s very little opposition going on in the schools.

Tommy O.: I think another indication of this unforgivable institutionalization of false history is that there are a lot of tribes in California that are not given federal recognition. The very fact that they aren’t has to do with how many of them have been killed: they don’t meet the requirements of largeness based on the very fact that they were killed by the U.S. government that will now not recognize them as tribes because they’re so small because they were killed. It’s just ridiculous.

Tony P.: Let me add one other thing, because I think, Tommy, that you referred to this before. I think the notion of American exceptionalism—that we’re a leader in the world, that we’re a leader of democracy and freedom and we take freedom other places—I think that’s so embedded that it’s difficult for educational and other institutions to think about the United States as a country like other countries, with its benefits and its weaknesses and its flaws, that we’re more like other places than superior to other places. Those kinds of chauvinist assumptions about American exceptionalism then make it very difficult for the educational system in particular to deal critically with this past and to open it up.

Tommy O.: I think this is at the heart of what’s hard about a dialogue on how to inspire change. This kind of information is really hard to integrate into the meta-narrative that everyone is taught. Like you’re saying, it takes institutional changes and story changes and social media efforts. It takes a lot because it’s an uprooting of a large story that has been told for many, many years. If you don’t see the institutions changing the story, and you basically trust the institutions, it’s really hard to know what can inspire. It’s not just the Indian problem, it’s the basic assumption that America is exceptional and is not like everyone else and we’re heroes. That’s a very difficult one to uproot.
Arlene: It goes to this concept that seems really powerful to me: potential consciousness. If you already believe something or are convinced of something, then there’s a limit on what you’re able to let in that might contradict that pre-formed consciousness.

Tony P.: If you’re a tourist or a visitor traveling to Humboldt or Del Norte, some of the sites of the bloodiest atrocities in California history, you can travel through that place and be open to learning and seeing it in new ways, but there are no rituals that are public, there are no memorials, no commemoration. You look at the tourist books and they’re about how Humboldt is unspoiled nature and what a wonderful place to visit and, yes, there are Indians there and they live with nature, too. It’s just shocking that you can be so oblivious in your public information and in your tourist information that when you come up against that it is a rupture and it does contest what everybody thinks is the common sense. History is powerful when people think that that is the way it is. With this mythic history of California and the failure to recognize it in the present, people think that’s the way it is. It’s been imbibed from such a young age and become so institutionalized.

Tommy O.: It’s also prevalent here in the Bay Area where there’s a lot of history and Native activism. Even here, you can go over to Emeryville to the Shellmound site—an Indian burial site—and you have this gigantic mall situation with these stores. It’s not even a mall that has a wider spectrum of classes that go there. It’s a high-end mall right on top of these burial sites and there wasn’t much consideration of not doing it because of how much money was behind it. Something as basic as going to this mall, you would never even know that it’s an Indian burial ground. Even the idea of an Indian burial ground sounds kind of ridiculous and Hollywoodish in and of itself because of the way it’s been portrayed in movies.

Arlene: The fact is, no matter where we stand around here, we’re standing on land that holds the memory and the bones of the people who came before those who live now. And that’s almost never acknowledged; those stories need telling.Thank you very much.

 

TRINIDAD, DO THE RIGHT THING

This Trinidad is in northern California, a site of a genocide against Native peoples in the wake of the Gold Rush. Here is the text of a speech I gave on New Year’s Eve in support of a vigil led by descendants of people who lived in Tsurai (Trinidad), protesting the town’s decision to relocate a lighthouse on Native land.

First I want to acknowledge that we are standing on land that was home from time immemorial to the people of Tsurai, and will always be their homeland; and to acknowledge the many people who lost their lives at sea and are memorialized here.

I also want to thank the organizers of this righteous cause for inviting me to participate in this protest. I am here not only to support your immediate demands but also to recognize the right of the lineal descendants of Tsurai to preserve and protect this site. It is the right thing to do. It benefits all of us privileged to live or visit here, this place of wondrous beauty and extraordinary tragedy.

Trinidad and Humboldt County have had many opportunities to do the right thing.

In the aftermath of the Gold Rush, from 1846 to 1873, a genocide took place in this region of California. Let’s not mystify what took place as “manifest destiny” or as an unfortunate by-product of Progress. The killing fields were everywhere, some 55 massacres taking place in Humboldt. The slaughter was deliberate and intentional. The town of Trinidad benefited commercially and economically from this genocide, grabbing land and resources, driving Indian people out.

Trinidad has had many opportunities to do the right thing, as Germany has done in taking responsibility for its genocide, the Holocaust: economic compensation, a public apology, and rituals and memorials to commemorate its bloody past. Yet Trinidad has done nothing, not even tackle this bloody origins story in its history museum.

The genocide did not end with cessation of warfare in the 1870s. In the aftermath, children were forcibly taken from survivors and sent to prison-like boarding schools where they were punished for “speaking Indian” or trying to preserve their cultural traditions. Young women were rounded up and sold into sexual slavery and as maids.

Trinidad and Humboldt and California have had many opportunities to do the right thing, to acknowledge and make amends for this widely known practice, as Canada and Australia have done with respect to indigenous peoples. Yet they have done nothing.

Then came the artifact hunters, the amateur archaeologists, the museums and anthropologists, to dig up and pilfer gravesites that had been forcibly abandoned during the genocide. Ten thousand human remains were taken to Berkeley, while sacred artifacts from here were sold to museums around the world, from Russia to New York. This whole region, including Trinidad, was a major site of this organized robbery, endorsed by California’s leading citizens and civic clubs, including the federation of women’s clubs

I’m reminded of Aaron’s curse in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “Even when [your] sorrows almost were forgot,” I will dig up your graves and “let not your sorrow die.”

Trinidad and Humboldt and California have had many opportunities to do the right thing and let sorrow die, such as repatriate human remains and return artifacts, offer sites for reburials and offer financial compensation, as Germany has done for survivors of the Holocaust. Yet they have done almost nothing. Berkeley still holds 10,000 human remains, making the campus into an unsanctified cemetery.

The genocide was followed by the production of cultural images that degraded and humiliated Native peoples, imagining them as a sub-human race, “predestined to extinction,” making the massive violence done by human beings appear to be natural and inevitable, rather than man-made. One particularly vicious myth was that Native peoples had not resisted, that somehow they had been complicit in their own near demise.

From guerilla warfare in the 19th century to political and legal strategies in the 20th century, to this gathering here today, there has always been resistance. Robert Spott spoke out against theft of lands in the 1920s. Hupa and Yurok organizations in 1931, according to a government official, made “vigorous complaints against excavation of Indian burying grounds along the coast.” When Alice Spott, Minnie Shaffer, and Olive Frank — tough young Native activists, the predecessors of the young women leading us today — in the late 1940s discovered Berkeley anthropologists here, on this very spot, digging up graves, pretending to be only interested in middens (garbage trenches), the women gave them hell. They voiced their complaints throughout the county, forced a suspension of the dig and generated a public meeting at Trinidad Town Hall some 68 years ago.

For a while, the looters and scientists backed off, but they soon were back to work, digging in Sumeg (now Patrick’s Point) and O-puyweg and other sites at Big Lagoon where there were less folks to keep an eye on them. Trinidad and other towns did nothing to stop looting in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. It took Milton Marks, Margaret Marks Lara, Walt Lara Sr., Joy Sundberg and other leaders of the Northwest Indian Cemetery Protection Association, founded in Humboldt in 1970, to raise hell once again, and literally run archaeologists off Native sites, while Trinidad and other towns looked away, evading their responsibility.

Doing justice to the past is hard and messy work, requiring the stamina of a long-distance runner. It means speaking the unspeakable, making human-made tragedies a matter of public recognition, creating histories that speak to all the diverse populations of the region, and recognizing that the United States is not exceptional but one among many nations, that we too — just like a Germany, a Rwanda, a Cambodia — need to come to terms with our sorrowful past.

Now here we are again, another struggle on a long journey, organizing and creating pressure from the grassroots to make Trinidad do the right thing: Listen to and respect the wishes of the descendants of the people who lived in Tsurai long before there was a Trinidad, and acknowledge the atrocities of the past that bleed into the present.

For starters and as a sign of good faith, Trinidad should halt movingthe lighthouse until a solution is found that satisfies all Native voices.

It’s time for another town hall meeting.

It’s time for Trinidad to, finally, do the right thing.

(Published in North Coast Journal, January 4, 2018.)

 

INEQUALITY OF DISCLOSURE*

    In 2010, Rebecca Skloot was a little known science journalist on the faculty at the University of Memphis when her first book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, an investigation into the ethics of medical research, was published. It became an instant crossover hit: translated into twenty-five languages, persistently near the top of the New York Times bestseller nonfiction list, receiving the pop-culture imprimatur of the Colbert Report, and now an HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. Skloot’s timely reporting on an important topic is entertaining, cleverly organized, and well written. So why does it leave me with a nagging sense of unease?
    Henrietta Lacks was thirty-one years old, the African American mother of five children, when she died in 1951 from cervical cancer in the “colored ward” of Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. Before her death, a doctor took samples of her tumors and tried, as scientists had unsuccessfully tried for decades, to keep them alive. Lacks made history when her cells not only survived, but also reproduced by the trillions. “They became,” writes Skloot, “the first immortal cells ever grown in a laboratory.” While Lacks’ cells became known all over the world to doctors and scientists as “HeLa,” and indispensable to significant innovations in the treatment of polio and cancer, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization, the woman herself was largely forgotten by history. And for a long time after her death, her family was not even aware that Henrietta Lacks lived on in the many lives of HeLa.
    As an undergraduate Rebecca Skloot became “fixated” on the idea of writing a book that would be “a biography of both the cells and the woman they came from.” She read other accounts of how Henrietta Lacks became HeLa – in stories published in Jet, Ebony, and Rolling Stone in 1976 – but none, in her opinion, did justice to either the humanity of the donor or the uses and misuses of her cells. Skloot wanted to correct the record.
    Of the two narratives threaded throughout this book, the story of a scientific breakthrough and its consequences is compelling and informative. Skloot makes complex information accessible to a broad audience without sacrificing sophistication or condescending to non-experts. She has a knack for bringing us into the everyday world of labs and illuminating the give and take of debates among scientists. Drawing upon a case study of HeLa, she also demonstrates how hospitals, the medical profession, scientists, and the pharmaceutical industry colluded in withholding vital information from patients and profiting off their bodies and diseases throughout most of the twentieth century. (It wasn’t until 1974 that a federal law was passed requiring informed consent from the subjects of federally funded research.) And in the case of African American patients, such as Henrietta Lacks and her family, Skoot shows how racism added another deep layer of exploitation and humiliation.

    Much has been written (see, for example, Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid) about the long history of racist medical practices against African Americans: discriminatory access to healthcare, too little treatment too late, higher mortality rates than whites, disproportionate sterilizations in the name of eugenics, and notorious experiments – such as Tuskegee syphilis study of the 1930s when the U. S. Public Health Service allowed hundreds of black sharecroppers in Alabama to risk death without treatment. Rebecca Skloot adds another chapter to this infamous history, demonstrating how doctors treated Henrietta Lacks with “benevolent deception”; how the patient and her family were not consulted or informed about the reproduction of her cells; how her medical records were made public without permission; and how HeLa fuelled a “multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials,” while the family didn’t make a dime. Skloot’s book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ethical issues that typically undergird important scientific developments.
    The author was not satisfied with sticking to a popular history of an important scientific topic. She chose also to delve into the everyday lives of the Lacks’ family and to document her own efforts to win the family’s trust. She did not want to promote herself in the book, she recently told the New York Times, but her editor and publisher insisted. The conceit of a white journalist discovering black people’s tragedies is reproduced in the movie with Rose Byrne channeling Skloot.
    The liberal author’s foray into the lives of inner city families trying to survive perpetually hard times has a gee-whiz quality. While Skloot stands on solid ground when writing about and offering her opinions on science, her discussion of black urban life is tentative and often awkward, as when she warns us in the book’s introduction that some of the book’s dialogue “appears in native dialects.”
    The author promises candor and self-revelation in the book’s first pages when she tells us that during the course of researching the book, she formed “a deep personal bond” with Deborah, her key informant and Henrietta Lacks’ daughter: “without realizing it, I’d become a character in her story, and she in mine.” But Rebecca’s character is undeveloped, while we are flooded with detailed, and often irrelevant information about Deborah and her family. As a result, the book suffers from an inequality of disclosure.
    It would have been interesting to read about the impact the project had on Skloot’s personal views about race, and her professional views about the social responsibilities of journalists. But she keeps a tight lid on her own stuff. During the course of the book, we learn some unexplored facts: that she is white, middle-class, and divorced, and has a penchant for dressing in black. She’s also agnostic, a rationalist, “half New York Jew and half Midwestern Protestant,” and tends “to leave the room when religion comes up in conversation.” This sets up the inevitable culture conflict – and dramatic arc of the book – with Deborah, who is poor and poorly educated, and not only “deeply religious,” but inclined to faith healing and voodoo. The bond between the two women is sealed when Skloot, irritated by Deborah’s mood swings (the result, she found out later, of high blood pressure), gets down and yells at her to “get the fuck off me and chill the fuck out.”
    Some of the personal revelations about the Lacks are relevant to the book’s purpose. Skloot provides vivid descriptions of the family’s initial suspicion of her motives and locates their resistance to her investigation in the long history of academic and scientific abuse of African Americans. Similarly, she effectively makes her case for the endemic hypocrisy of the United States by contrasting the widespread and profitable use of HeLa with the enduring health problems of the Lacks’ family and their chronic medical indebtedness. Henrietta’s husband gets paid off a humiliating $12,000 by Bethlehem Steel for a lifetime of asbestos-related illnesses acquired on the job; three of her children suffer from tuberculosis; and Deborah is endlessly sick. “If our mother is so important to science,” says one of Henrietta’s sons, “why can’t we get health insurance?”
    But why do we need to know about Henrietta’s unhappy sex life, vaginal bleeding, gonorrhea, and the tumors that invaded her bladder and lungs? Or that her father was a “squat man,” who beat people with his cane. Or that she started having sex with (and later married) her cousin when she was barely a teen. Or that one of her children died in a state institution after weeks of “self-induced vomiting.” Or that after her death, her children were virtually imprisoned by an abusive relative who starved them and “beat them all bloody.” Or that one of her children “grew into the meanest, angriest child,” did time for stabbing a man to death, and later in life “smashed a forty-ounce beer bottle over a woman’s back and pushed her through a plate-glass window.”
    Or that Deborah’s cousins tried to “have their way” with her; that Deborah was molested and beaten by her guardian’s husband, then abused by the first husband, and mistreated by her second; that a son was jailed for robbing liquor stores; and that she took fourteen pills a day as her illnesses mounted, and died impoverished. How do these selective facts – reported as examples of individual pathology rather than social injustice – contribute to the book’s argument?
    Skloot tries to present this pandering to voyeurism and schadenfreude as an argument for plucky resistance. She resorts to an Oprah-like truism about black women as indestructible, making over Deborah into “one of the strongest and most resilient women I’d ever known.” But we are told very little about this process of survival and redemption, and the knee-jerk assertion of agency is wishfully sentimental rather than persuasive. There is nothing uplifting about watching a woman take a literal and metaphorical beating.
    If Skloot is interested in addressing the structural roots of racism, inequality, sexism, imprisonment, and ill health that devastate black communities, she should look for social rather than individual solutions, and work with the Lacks family’s community to organize themselves into an effective campaign for justice for Henrietta. It’s a start that the author helped Deborah to find out what happened to her institutionalized and abandoned sister; that she shared some of her research with the family; and that she has established a scholarship fund out of the profits of her book for Henrietta’s descendants. She couldn’t do more, she claims too easily, because “there’s a code of ethics in journalism that says you can’t pay people for their stories.”
    These well-meaning but safe gestures are echoed in the book’s last chapter, in which Skloot skillfully lays out “complicated” policy issues but ducks taking positions on them. Should patients receive economic benefits from parts of their body that are used for profit? Should Johns Hopkins University take responsibility for how it exploited its patients’ ignorance and practiced Jim Crow health care in the liberal North? “Like it or not,” concludes Skloot, “we live in a market-driven society, and science is part of that market.”
    Unfortunately, Deborah, who died before the book was published, is not around to say, in her own dialect of course, what she thinks about her friend Rebecca sitting on the fence and airing her family’s dirt in public. I don’t think she’d like it.

_______

*This blog is an expanded version of a piece originally published in Truthdig.com (April 9, 2010).

 

TRUMP: OUR BLOOD, HIS GUTS*

“Old Blood and Guts. Our blood, his guts.”
(World War II saying)

"Bring back Patton"

(Donald Trump, October 4, 2015)

There’s been quite a bit of speculation about Donald Trump’s historical precursors, from Emperor Nero to Führer Hitler and Governor George Wallace. Though he shares some of Nero’s populism and quirky personality traits, Hitler’s knack for branding, and Wallace’s pugnacious racism, Trump is a man of this media-driven moment. He has much in common with Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, who like Trump, made a fortune before entering politics, knows how to work the media, and represents the rise of the anti-politics politician.

As for parallels from the past, Trump reminds me in several ways of one of his own heroes – George Patton (1885-1945), the American general known by military men as Old Blood and Guts, whose larger-than-life persona has been aggrandized in an Oscar-winning movie, museums, children’s books, motivational manuals, and cyberspace. He was “one of America’s greatest soldiers, a genuine hero,” according to a HBO documentary. A Time-Life book compared him to Babe Ruth coming up to the plate: “Here’s a big guy who’s going to kick hell out of something.”

Like Trump, the general was born with a gold spoon in his mouth. George inherited wealth from his father who made money in Southern California’s land deals, vineyards, and oil investments. When Patton married Beatrice Banning Ayer in 1910, his considerably wealthier father-in-law put him on the family payroll and subsidized a coddled military career, complete with traveling servants, a stable of horses, and all the trappings of minor aristocracy. He grew up with Mexican servants at home, Black maids at the Virginia Military Institute, and a personal Chinese cook in the army.

Like Trump, Patton’s rightwing politics was based on a US-centric nationalism and an unabashed, racial worldview. He had a taste for authoritarian regimes that promoted anti-democratic policies. “To Hell with the people,” he confided in his father. He dismissed “sexless” pacifists as having the “back bone of a jelly fish.” In his personal copy of Mein Kampf, he underlined Hitler’s assertion that “a Majority can never be a substitute for the Man.”

Patton was an equal opportunity hater. As a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, one of his favorite films was “Birth of a Nation.” During the war he remained convinced that “a colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor.” To Patton, Arabs were “a mixture of all the bad races on earth.” At the end of the war, he regarded Jews as a “sub-human species” and Germans as “the only decent people left in Europe.”

Like Trump, Patton had a particular animus for Mexico. In the 1910s, he advocated imperialist annexation. “If we take the country,” he wrote his father, “we could settle it and these people would be happier and better off.” When he was assigned to the Eighth Cavalry Regiment on the Texas border, he celebrated killing two Mexican soldiers by cutting notches in the grip of his revolver and strapping the dead men to the hoods of car like deer. “I feel about it just as I did when I got my first fish,” he wrote his wife.

Like Trump, Patton was known for his public bravura and crude bluster. “Patton didn’t give a damn about keeping anything secret,” the Third Army’s historian, Hugh Cole, told me. His flamboyance made him, as Life magazine noted, “the pet of all the newspapermen.” Patton’s boss, Dwight Eisenhower, considered him a brilliant military strategist, but an impulsive narcissist who could not resist making off-the-cuff comments to the press corps. When he expressed his anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic views in public in 1945, Eisenhower berated his indiscretions and transferred him to a desk job. Patton blamed the “non-Aryan press” for plotting his demise.

Unlike Trump, Patton didn’t enter politics. But it was on his mind in 1945 when he died in a car accident. If he had lived, it’s likely that he would have followed the lead of many former high-ranking officers who joined corporate boards, became cabinet members and ambassadors, and repositioned themselves as Cold War warriors. His rightwing supporters, including the racist Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, floated his name as Secretary of War and pitched the idea of a run for Congress.

Patton believed in reincarnation and thought that he might have been Hannibal and an English knight in previous lives. Who knows, maybe he’s returned, ready to spill our blood with his guts.

* Originally published as “The Strange and Shocking Similarities Between Donald Trump and ‘Old Blood and Guts’ Patton,” History News Network, 3 March 2016, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162220.

 

A CAUTIONARY TALE*

    I must confess that my first thought on being asked to review yet another book about “mass incarceration” was jaded disinterest: There can’t possible be anything more to say about this topic. I was wrong. It turns out there’s a lot more to be said, and Elizabeth Hinton's From The War on Poverty to The War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016)  says it thoughtfully, passionately, and clearly. The conventional wisdom about the “punitive turn” in the United States locates its origins in the rise of free market economic policies and the political shift to the right, emerging first under Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan, and then fully embraced by the Clinton administration. There is a tendency in this viewpoint to characterize the post-World War II period in binary terms: liberals versus conservatives, social democracy versus neo-liberalism. Hinton, an Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard, takes issue with this interpretation, arguing that the modern carceral state has deep and wide political roots, and owes as much to the liberal social-democratic tradition as it does to the rise of the New Right and Neo-Cons. She adds an important chapter to the revisionist tradition in American historiography: from Gabriel Kolko’s analysis of the repressive underside of social democracy in the Progressive Era (The Triumph of Conservatism, 1967) to Naomi Murakawa’s insight about the role of “liberal law and order” in the Truman administration (The First Civil Right, 2014).
    Delving into government documents, policy statements, and legislative debates, Hinton’s focus is on the politics of urban governance from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty through Reagan’s War on Drugs. This approach can easily get mired in empirical details, but her smart analytical narrative and choice use of source material make for a lively read.
    Hinton demonstrates that from the beginning the Kennedy-Johnson War on Poverty was a battleground of ideas and policies between mostly grassroots struggles to extend the benefits of the New Deal to communities of color, and top-down efforts to construct the foundations of the urban carceral state. For a very brief moment, the civil rights, black liberation, and feminist movements, in alliance with liberals in government, created the possibility that the United States would follow the social democratic path forged by most countries in the West, with guarantees of income, health, education, and equal access to public services.
    The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act planted the seeds of equal opportunity and community empowerment. But, says Hinton, the Johnson administration also planted the seeds of repression. The book’s title notwithstanding, the War on Crime was a central component of the War on Poverty, with “statistical discourses of black criminality and pathological understandings of poverty serving as its intellectual foundation.”
    Hinton leaves no doubt that racism was at the core of the new urban carceralism, a fierce pushback against rebellions in Watts and other cities that resulted in the arrest of tens of thousands of African Americans and new strategies of social control, from velvet glove techniques of cooptation and management, to an iron fist of counter-insurgency operations tested in Viet Nam. She digs up some telling examples: Nixon’s aside to his chief of staff in 1969 that “the whole problem is really the blacks…. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to”; Reagan’s statement to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1981 that “only our deep moral values and strong institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”
    Yet, Hinton does not regard contemporary racism as simply the leftover debris of the segregated past or as an echo of slavery. She makes the important point that “the long mobilization of the War on Crime was not a return to an old racial caste system in a new guise – a ‘New Jim Crow’. Rather, the effort to control and contain troublesome groups with patrol, surveillance, and penal strategies produced a new and historically distinct phenomenon in the post civil-rights era: the criminalization of urban social programs.”
    We follow the book’s main argument about the interweaving of repressive and progressive policies in urban social programs as they were articulated and implemented by successive administrations, with an emphasis on the expansion and refinement of carceral strategies: Johnson’s investment in urban policing, backed up by corporate and military assumptions about the War on Crime; Nixon’s use of discretionary funds and executive powers to grow the penal system, and enlist academics in devising new methods of punitive control; Ford’s emphasis on special programs for “violent repeat offenders” and “career criminals”; Carter’s efforts to extend the carceral state to public housing projects in the guise of “urban revitalization initiatives”; and Reagan’s acceleration of mass imprisonment, and contracting out of penal operations to the private sector.
    By the time that Clinton became president in 1993, says Hinton, both parties shared a “deep commitment to crime control as a viable response to socioeconomic inequality and institutional racism.” Whether it was Los Angeles’ rightwing police chief in 1965 comparing the black residents of Watts to the Viet Cong, or Democratic Senator Joe Biden in 1982 describing crime as “a national defense problem” that put us “in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” the militarization of urban criminal justice operations enjoyed “a broad bipartisan political consensus.”
    After a compelling analysis of the repressive strain that runs through post-World War II, American liberalism, Hinton tries to provide a glimmer of hope in her conclusion by discussing what it will take to move toward “a more equitable and just nation.” She wants us to imagine “what the United States might look like today” had policymakers “steered the War on Poverty’s community action programs with the same level and length of commitment as they gave to the War on Crime.”
    Unfortunately, the mostly top-down, retrospective account of the 1960s does not make this alternative path seem like a credible choice, either then or now. Hinton wants to resurrect “the principles of community representation and grassroots empowerment” embedded in the progressive ideas of the “Great Society,” but does not address how this might be achieved in the current political climate, whether Trump’s defense of the thin blue line or Clinton’s centrist reforms. So, unlike the rest of this relentlessly unsentimental, compellingly argued book, the last few pages have a whiff of nostalgia.
    Elizabeth Hinton, however, is not alone in struggling to articulate a progressive vision that speaks to the current interregnum, when the old regime is crumbling and the new one has not yet emerged, when, as Antonio Gramsci put it, a “great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Recent protests on the streets and in prisons suggest that social activism and organized opposition can have a far-ranging impact on carceral institutions that always bend to the arc of power, but are vulnerable to struggles from below. How to build protests into a serious movement while staying alert to the carceral underside of liberal reformism is the challenge we face. In this context, Hinton’s cautionary tale is a must read for activists.

* To be published in Punishment and Society (2017).

 

WHEN OUR WORLDS CRIED: CALIFORNIA'S GENOCIDE*

Too many academic historians are reluctant to accept that the catastrophic experiences of California Indians during the 19th century meet United Nations legal standards of genocide: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

Benjamin Madley, an Assistant Professor of History at UCLA, responds to this challenge as a prosecutor might, building his case on a mountain of evidence until the verdict is undeniable: what happened in California from 1846 to 1873 was a genocide “more lethal and sustained than anywhere else in the United States or its colonial antecedents.” By 1880, the Native population had declined by more than ninety percent since the first Europeans arrived in the region.

You need a strong stomach to get through Madley’s An American Genocide, as it relentlessly excavates atrocities and cruelties from the historical record, piling high the corpses until we are compelled to witness how the past bleeds into the present. For doubters, more than one-third of the book consists of appendices that document every known massacre and military expedition against California Indians. Madley’s extraordinarily comprehensive research leaves no source unexplored: state and federal archives, legislative reports, memoirs and manuscripts, and library collections. This is the definitive account of California’s genocide on which all future studies will be based. It’s an impressive first book by a young scholar.

Keeping an open and optimistic heart about human nature while reading this book requires considerable effort. A genocide is not carried out secretly in the night by rogue elements, nor is it a reversion to or carryover from an earlier age. Rather it’s a modern, highly bureaucratic operation that requires time, planning, organization, popular mobilizations, and a rationale that enables perpetrators to feel that they are engaged in a righteous defense of civilization.

Madley persuasively illustrates how California’s best and brightest government officials, legislators, political leaders, judges, and businessmen were active and enthusiastic architects of genocide. Governors authorized twenty-four state militias to operate as a “killing machine”; and when militias ended their involvement in the slaughter, the U. S Army became a “major killing force.” Lawmakers transformed California Indians into easy targets by reducing them to rightless subjects; made the prosecution of anti-Indian crimes almost impossible; and refused to ratify federal treaties. And the legislature colluded with landowners and ranchers to sell thousands of surviving California Indians into “state-sponsored servitude.”

An American Genocide sets the record straight on the perpetrators who engaged in “direct killing.” But there’s a great deal more work to be done. “That California Indians survived is remarkable,” briefly notes Madley in his conclusion, but the full story of guerilla warfare, strategies of resistance and endurance, and political-legal struggles by California Indians remains to be written.

Moreover, I wonder if Madley’s chronology is too constricted. He starts his narrative in 1846 when U. S. warships enter Monterey Bay and took the region from Mexico; and ends in 1873 when official “killing campaigns that targeted California Indians… had finally come to a close.” While Madley recognizes what happened prior to American colonization under Spanish, Russian, and Mexican rule as “harrowing and catastrophic,” he sees this period as a prelude to genocide. Here, at least implicitly, he endorses the widely held view that attributes the decline of California Indians under Spanish and Mexican rule to diseases that shredded Native immune systems throughout the Americas; and the decline under American rule to human agency and policies of extermination.

I prefer to understand the epidemic of premature death resulting from disease and malice as interrelated, just as Holocaust scholars regard the estimated twenty percent of Jews who died in the camps from malnutrition and exhaustion as victims of genocide. No doubt Spanish and American colonialisms had their own particular regimes of domination, but I take the long view that the period from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries is interconnected, and part of what historian Tom Bender calls the “violent process of nation-making.”

Also, I would extend California’s genocide beyond 1873 through the twentieth century. The officially sanctioned killing expeditions may have ended, but social death persisted: land grabs, economic and sexual exploitation, efforts at cultural annihilation through boarding schools, desecration of tens of thousands of grave sites, plundering of artifacts, and perpetuation of myths about “disappearing Indians” and racial inferiority. Unlike the leaders of the Nazi regime who were defeated at the end of World War II and convicted in Nuremberg, the leaders of California’s genocide were rewarded for their crimes, enshrined as founding fathers, and applauded for bringing Progress to the Golden State.

The book’s conclusion is well known: “Genocidal acts perpetrated against California Indians indicate a broad-base, state-supported project aimed at their physical annihilation.” This knowledge has been passed on orally for many generations. And others have dared to write truth to power. Theodora Kroeber and Robert Heizer’s popular Sierra Club book, Almost Ancestors, published in 1968, asserted that efforts to “wipe out a whole culture” happened here as well as over there. In 1978, Byron Nelson Jr.’s Our Home Forever documented how the Hupa experienced “a kind of violence the area had never known.” And a year later, Jack Norton’s pointedly titled book – Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried – included the full text of the United Nations Genocide Convention.

Yet, we very much need this book. Not only is it the first thoroughly documented and vetted account of California’s genocide, it also will make it much harder for deniers and amnesiacs to dominate the state’s public history. Until very recently, popular histories of California continued to erase the state’s legacy of crimes against humanity. In 2012, when I attended the 3rd Global Conference on Genocide in San Francisco, during three days of panels and presentations my talk was the only one that included California as a site of genocide.

Well into the 20th century, architects of the California Story built a cultural firewall that insulated generations of young people from the horrors of the bloody past. Instead, students were drilled in a catechism that portrayed Native peoples as biologically inferior, racially different, predestined to extinction, complicit in their own demise, and in need of the firm hand of civilizing institutions. A widely used, state-authorized textbook for elementary schools (William White’s Our California, 2006) sidesteps the challenge of teaching the history of genocide by pretending it never happened. In the 7th grade, when The Diary of Anne Frank is typically taught, it is the rare teacher who makes a connection between Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and California’s catastrophe. Out of curriculum, out of mind.

Not surprisingly, public history echoes public education’s amnesia. There are no plaques or markers along the state’s Redwood Highway inviting tourists and locals to consider the thousands of Native people who lost their lives and their homelands, then had their artifacts pillaged by museums and ancestors dug up by universities in the name of pseudo-science. We are not expected to grapple with reconciling places of extraordinary beauty with the unspeakable horrors of genocide; nothing to disturb the public relations image of northwest California as an outdoor paradise and eco-tourist’s heaven. There are no official, civic memorials to the victims of mass injustice, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Memory Park in Buenos Aires, or the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York; or educational centers devoted to learning about the motivation, psychology, and organization of perpetrators, such as Germany’s Topography of Terror.

California continues to be shaped, culturally and socially, by bitter legacies and divisions. Doing justice to the past means speaking the unspeakable, rehearsing the bad, making human-made tragedies a matter of public recognition, creating histories that speak to all the diverse populations of the region, and recognizing that the United States is not exceptional but one among many nations, that we too – just like a Germany, a Rwanda, a Cambodia – need to come to terms with our sorrowful past.

* This review of Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press 2016) was originally published in News From Native California 29, 4 (Summer 2016).

 

ON THE RUN FROM HER CRITICS: ALICE GOFFMAN'S ETHNOGRAPHY*

I first read sociologist Alice Goffman’s book On The Run in 2014, before vitriolic gossip accused her of crossing the line from fieldworker to criminal collaborator; before some critics pegged her as another white do-gooder going native; before reviewers picked over the fine print looking for scraps of incriminating dirt.**

I had been out of criminology for several years and was trying to catch up on the rush of books on “mass incarceration” and related topics. On the Run stayed on my mind long after I finished reading it. I thought then, as I still do, that this is a remarkable first book, written with an honesty and self-examination that is rare in the social sciences. It deepens our knowledge about the mundane, tragic ways in which the criminal justice system creates havoc in the lives of impoverished African American communities.

During her freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, a very young Goffman got a job at the University cafeteria. It was her first foray into sociological participant observation, riskily following in the footsteps of her famous father Erving, who died when she was an infant. She challenged herself—a white, privileged, middle-class woman—to learn about the everyday lives of hard-pressed African American workers serving students who mostly ignored them. As she tentatively crossed the color line, she began to feel an affinity with her downwardly mobile co-workers and alienation from her classmates, who were climbing the ladder to professional success.

Goffman’s job at the cafeteria led to tutoring and living for four years in an impoverished African American community in Philadelphia she calls 6th Street, where her study of young men “dipping and dodging the police” became her dissertation at Princeton and then this book.

Goffman’s ethnography is sharply observed, capturing the rhythms and tensions of a “hyper-policed Black neighborhood”: how constant surveillance and intrusion create lives of “secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability”; how young men must “cultivate a secret and unpredictable routine” if they want to stay out of custody; and how the police physically and psychologically force mothers, sisters, and lovers to snitch in order to survive or keep their homes and children.

She brings fresh insights into how young men and their networks of support try to make something out of nothing: using jail as an occasional safe haven from street violence; turning bail offices into an informal banking service; and creating an underground market that trades in fake documents, drug-free urine, jail cell phones, and off-the-grid medical services. Yet, even as she documents these creative and innovative forms of agency, she doesn’t romanticize her subjects or imply that repression and resistance are equally balanced. “To be on the run,” she concludes, “is also to be at a standstill.”

On the Run is clearly and well written, with a preference for local slang over arcane jargon. No index and skimpy footnotes mark the book as clearly aimed at a crossover market (no doubt hoping to emulate the success of The New Jim Crow). As a result, analytical complexity is sometimes sacrificed for a good story.

There’s some occasional, unexamined hyperbole, such as declaring that “the US ghetto [is] one of the last repressive regimes of the age,” or suggesting “the current treatment of poor Black people” is comparable to what happened to “the Jews of Europe” and other victims of totalitarian regimes. And, as with most of the recent literature on mass imprisonment, the deep historical roots of police violence and the racist foundations of American criminal justice are minimized. We learn nothing, for example, about the specific history of policing in Philadelphia or comparable cities.

Goffman claims that hyper-policing in African American communities is a relatively new phenomenon, that “for most of the twentieth century, the police ignored poor and segregated Black neighborhoods such as 6th Street.” Here she ignores the weight of historical evidence, from W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Richard Wright, to Gunnar Myrdal and the Kerner Commission. In 1960, James Baldwin hardly knew anybody in Harlem, “from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.”

When Goffman sticks to the present, her account is original, insightful, and morally compelling. To understand the integrity of her project and how she pushed herself “further than was safe or expected,” make sure you read the last and longest chapter in the book, the blandly titled “A Methodological Note.” Here, she reveals how at first she endured suspicions in the community that she was a lesbian on the prowl for teenage girls or “one of those white girls who liked Black guys.” She’s refreshingly candid about how she often “felt like an idiot, an outsider, and at times a powerless young woman.”

As Goffman walked the fine line between participation and observation, 6th Street became her home, its sorrows her sorrows. Over seven years she attended nineteen funerals for young men; she allowed men on the run to hide out in her apartment; she witnessed routine police violence and was herself stomped by a SWAT team; and she sat in hospital holding the hand of one her friends as he died, wishing the worst for the man who shot him: “I learned what it feels like to want a man to die.”

After her funding ended, Goffman left 6th Street, finished her dissertation, and moved on to her first job at the University of Wisconsin. But she remained “tied to the memory of the men who are no longer with us.”

There is no doubt that this project broke Goffman’s heart, changed her life, and shaped how she thinks about the world. “The likelihood that I’d soon go to prison seemed about equal to the chance I would make it to graduate school,” Goffman recalled. Fortunately for readers — along with her colleagues and students—she ended up doing time in academia.

* This review of Alice Goffman’s On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (New York: Picador, 2014) was originally published in a slightly different form in The Journal of American History, 102, 4 (March 2016): 1149-1150.

** On the various controversies, see, for example, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The Changeling," New York Times Magazine (January 17, 2016); Paul Campos, "Alice Goffman's Implausible Ethnography," Chronicle of Higher Education (August 21, 2015); and Jennifer Schuessler, "Alice Goffman's Heralded Book on Crime is Disputed," New York Times (June 5, 2015).