Defining Race: Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro

author James Baldwin

"Trumpcare was never about the well-being of Americans," actor Jeffrey Wright recently remarked as President Donald Trump continued to dismantle the former president's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. "It was about trying in vain to erase Barack Obama from the history books." Given the erratic nature of Trump's actual policies, where everything is put in direct opposition to Obama's legacy, Wright's claim isn't rhetorical. What he does is open a door into what the early days of the Trump era are all about: inducing social amnesia. The one consistency that both elected Trump and has sustained him so far has been the continuous fermenting rage over having had eight years of America's first black president. Even the term – Obamacare – when it springs forth from the lips of many Republicans, sounds like they're describing some kind of plague or pestilence that has swept the land and needs to be gotten rid of, denying both the intent of the Act (despite its deficiencies) and the political integrity of the man who put it forth. Obamacare never was allowed to be a piece of legislation, which is why the Republican alternative isn't even a sufficient improvement, or close to being a reasoned response to it. During the tenure of his presidency, I think Barack Obama knew that he was a lightning rod for both the unrealistic expectations of his followers and the irrational hatred of his adversaries. He also understood that any daring move on his part to fulfill those two terms in office would have likely led to a cataclysmic outcome given the nation's unresolved racial history and its string of assassinations. So he worked carefully (and with precision) to be both a visible and an invisible presence. Out of office, Obama is still a projection of America's torn psyche, an ineradicable reflection, one part of the nation wishing to bury the whip of slavery while the other refuses to confront and transcend this unsavory legacy.

Racism in Alive in America: Part Two

Part One of this piece appeared on Critics at Large on Sunday, August 16.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
                                                   ― William Faulkner

Jim Grimsley's contention that “We reserve our special ideological fury for blackness” suffuses Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. If the tone in most of Grimsley’s How I Shed My Skin is a gentle wistfulness, the mood that percolates throughout Between the World is one of anger, desperation and fear, punctuated by flashes of love for his teenage son, Samori. Coates, the author of the memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, has written in the form of a letter to his son about what it means to be a black man in America today. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The violence to which Coates refers encompasses slavery, the terror of Jim Crow, and police brutality right up to the present moment, much of it covered by Grimsley. But Coates’ prose has a much more personal edginess to it as he has internalized and lived that history. The power of his writing in part derives from his capacity to dissolve the distinctions between the past and the present where one seamlessly flows into the other. Read the lyrical passages in Between the World and Me where he urges his son to not only respect all other living human beings but also to extend it to individuals once enslaved.

Coates insists that no amount of false morality about “personal responsibility” on the part of African Americans can shield them from lethal violence. Right from the outset when he attempts to help Samori grapple with his feelings after the police officer in Ferguson who killed Michael Brown was not indicted, Coates refuses to comfort his son or the white reader for whom this book is really intended, with “praise anthems [or] old Negro spirituals.” “There is no uplifting way” to tell the hard realities about brutality in America. Instead of bromides about racial progress, he can only offer the need for struggle, as he sets out to explore the question of how to “live free in this black body” when “black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed.” As a result of his own life experiences, he believed he was in a war “for the possession of his body, and this would be the war of his whole life.” This is not a book for those whose only touchstone for improving race relations is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or for anyone who wants to see America through the prism of what Coates calls the “Dream” of “perfect houses with nice lawns.”

Reconstruction and Deconstruction: Ta-Nehisi Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates. (Photo: Stephen Voss)

“We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”

– Thomas Miller, South Carolina Congressman, 1895

“The beauty in his [Baldwin’s] writing wasn’t just style or ornament but an unparalleled ability to see what was before him clearly and then lay that vision, with that same clarity, before the world.”

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

The Congressman quoted in the first epigraph was an African-American who, in a futile effort, was attempting to make the case that blacks in the legislature had provided competent government, so why should whites attempt to disenfranchise blacks with poll taxes and literacy tests? It was not necessary for him to add the terrorist attacks from the Klan against blacks who attempted to vote. A few years later the civil rights icon, W.E.B. Du Bois, offered an insightful response: “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.’’ These two quotations provide the title and the thesis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest offering, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (One World, 2017). The good government that Obama provided generated a racist backlash in which Donald Trump was the major beneficiary. Coates’s book is structured around eight essays, one for each year of the Obama presidency, written originally for The Atlantic, for which he is a national correspondent, and concludes with a blistering epilogue on the white supremacist ideology of Trump in all its “truculent and sanctimonious power.”

Green Book – Racism: Solved?

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book.

Green Book (2018) – directed by Peter Farrelly; written by Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie, and Nick Vallelonga (son of the main character) based on his father’s letters and tape recordings and an interview with the other main character; shot by Sean Porter; edited by Patrick J. Don Vito; and with music by Kris Bowers – is a tonal, cinematographic, acting, and musical achievement, and a thematic disaster. It's based on the true story of Italian Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) driving Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) to performances of his musical trio through the Deep South in 1962 by relying on Victor Hugo Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book, which is a guide to the spaces and hours that are safe for a black person to be at. The film features an entirely conventional and by-the-numbers mismatched-buddies road-movie plot that’s revitalized by the two leads’ performances. Mortensen plays Vallelonga as the trashiest kind-hearted Italian man in the Bronx, while Ali’s Shirley is the epitome of tortured dignity and class. But the writing navigates deliberately into a racial minefield, careful to step on every single mine it can find.

A Lesser Lear, and a Greater

Kenneth Branagh in King Lear. (Photo: Johan Persson)

You can see the problem with the imported two-hour-without-intermission King Lear, co-directed by Kenneth Branagh, Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, in the opening scene. Lear (played by Branagh) sweeps onto the stage of The Shed and dives into the love contest among his three daughters. Goneril (Deborah Alli) recites her stock speech declaring her bottomless love for her father, but when the invisible baton is passed to Regan (Saffron Coomber), her outpouring of affection has been cut so drastically that all she seems to be saying is “Ditto.” So when Cordelia (Jessica Revell) refuses to “heave [her] heart into [her] mouth” and Lear’s response is to divide her intended portion of his land between her elder sisters, you wonder why he’s more put out than he was by Regan’s spare offering. In fact, the king seems angrier at Kent (played, bafflingly, as a woman, by Eleanor de Rohan) than anyone else. The scene has no weight; it feels like a plot set-up.

William Bradford Huie: The Accursed American

Dedicated to Martha Hunt Robertson Huie (1931-2014).

In American English, to call someone a “cuss” was always to say they were stubborn, cranky, intransigent; that they wouldn’t go along. It was also an idiomatic alteration of “accursed,” a dated expression applied to one deemed ungodly and unsociable. Let the word be justly applied to William Bradford Huie, an American writer who risked ostracism and danger from the very communities that, had he gone along, would have most embraced him. A white Southerner, he reported the evils committed by white Southerners; a Cold War militarist, he hounded the military on questions the military didn’t want asked; an advocate of personal and public accountability, he placed blame and named names.

Absorbing, tenacious, eye-opening, Huie’s nonfictions are adventures in investigation, angry commentaries on democracy, rueful essays on post-war American culture, and affirmations of a beleaguered humanism. You feel not that he has caught every conceivable truth, but that he has put as many conflicting truths in play as any single searcher could; that he has shown each perspective straight, but from different angles; and that the force of his summation is earned by insight, work, and an interrogation of prejudice, his own as well as others’.

All but forgotten today, he was, in his time, something like a superstar. He emerged from the Deep South to distinguish himself as a war correspondent, television personality, pioneer of post-war intellectual conservatism, and chronicler of American injustice whose books and by-lines sold as fast as they could be printed. Hollywood bigwigs hot on “adult themes” scrambled to film his racy, tough-talking novels, while the more socially-conscious stars snapped up his nonfiction. He searched, dug, discovered, and submitted facts to a candid world. And inevitably, he was marked for death: his sallies in the race wars were damaging enough to necessitate his sleeping “with one eye open and one hand on my automatic shotgun.”