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Episode 53: Nobody Else Has My Eyes · Political Junkie Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_01: On July 21,
0:00
SPEAKER_01: 2023,
0:03
SPEAKER_01: amid a culture war manufactured by Republican Party activists,
0:07
SPEAKER_01: Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in Jacksonville,
0:11
SPEAKER_01: Florida.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: The occasion?
0:13
SPEAKER_01: A set of standards for teaching African American history just issued by the Florida
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Board of Education that evaded or denied much of what we know about the history of
0:23
SPEAKER_01: Black people in the Americas.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: These dishonest guidelines brought the state's social studies curriculum in
0:30
SPEAKER_01: compliance with HB 7,
0:32
SPEAKER_01: passed in April 2022,
0:34
SPEAKER_01: a law that characterized current scholarship in Black history as socially divisive
0:39
SPEAKER_01: propaganda and harmful to the young.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: Like similar laws passed in 17 other states,
0:46
SPEAKER_01: HB 7 misclassifies most knowledge about Black history,
0:50
SPEAKER_01: literature,
0:51
SPEAKER_01: and culture as critical race theory.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: It makes false claims that true history shames white students by forcing them to
0:59
SPEAKER_01: bear responsibility for racism.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: White activists under the mantle of parents' rights have pushed this narrative since the 2020 election.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: One white mother from Fairfax County,
1:11
SPEAKER_01: Virginia worked to have Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel,
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Beloved,
1:17
SPEAKER_01: removed from the curriculum.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: She claimed that the book gave her teenage son nightmares.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: It was disgusting and gross, the young man, now a college student, affirmed.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Most of us would characterize Beloved as a tough read,
1:32
SPEAKER_01: but also one that accurately reflects the scholarship about violence directed
1:36
SPEAKER_01: against enslaved people.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: So this creates a problem for educators under laws like HB 7.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Removing the violent realities of white supremacy from the curriculum creates a
1:48
SPEAKER_01: void that is difficult to fill.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: And yet Florida educators,
1:52
SPEAKER_01: handpicked by Governor and Presidential Primary Candidate Ron DeSantis,
1:56
SPEAKER_01: tried,
1:58
SPEAKER_01: looking for stories of uplift and progress.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: The standards offered younger students stories about African American inventors and explorers.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: They encouraged high school teachers to introduce the contributions of Africans to society,
2:12
SPEAKER_01: science,
2:13
SPEAKER_01: poetry,
2:14
SPEAKER_01: politics,
2:15
SPEAKER_01: oratory,
2:15
SPEAKER_01: literature,
2:16
SPEAKER_01: literature, music, dance, Christianity, and exploration in the United States from 1776 to 1865.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the realities of African American history had to be massaged into a positive story.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: One lesson plan included instruction in the opportunities Black Americans had to
2:36
SPEAKER_01: learn skills as enslaved people,
2:38
SPEAKER_01: as if plantations were vocational schools.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: Let's listen to Vice President Harris's response to HB 7.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we should model what we say.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: These extremist so-called leaders should model what we know to be the correct and
2:59
SPEAKER_00: right approach if we really are invested in the well-being of our children.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: Instead, they dare to push propaganda to our children.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: This is the United States of America.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: We're not supposed to do that.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: And here's the other piece about this.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Now, when adults know what slavery really involved.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: Adults know what slavery really involved.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: It involved rape.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: It involved torture.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: It involved taking a baby from their mother.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: It involves subjecting to people the requirement that they would think of
4:16
SPEAKER_00: themselves and be thought of as less than human.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: So in the context of that,
4:24
SPEAKER_00: How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities,
4:34
SPEAKER_00: that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?
4:46
SPEAKER_00: In the midst of these atrocities, that there was some benefit
4:52
SPEAKER_01: The history being dismantled and books being banned in states like Florida took
4:57
SPEAKER_01: decades to research,
4:58
SPEAKER_01: write,
4:59
SPEAKER_01: and weave into lesson plans.
5:01
SPEAKER_01: Historians don't just fight for this knowledge because it helps us understand the past,
5:05
SPEAKER_01: but because our violent present is descended from the world that slavery made.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: In 2007,
5:12
SPEAKER_01: celebrated African American historian John Hope Franklin,
5:15
SPEAKER_01: the grandchild of enslaved people,
5:17
SPEAKER_01: discussed this legacy.
5:20
SPEAKER_03: The very important point is that slavery had implications not only for then but also for the present.
5:30
SPEAKER_03: And the ideology of slavery was highly developed in the United States.
5:37
SPEAKER_03: And you can't end slavery and end the impact of it forthwith or immediately.
5:47
SPEAKER_03: Even when you end slavery, the
5:49
SPEAKER_03: aftermath out of it is so deep, the implication out of it is so far-reaching, and the ideology persists.
5:58
SPEAKER_03: Therefore,
5:58
SPEAKER_03: the impact of slavery can be felt in the 21st century,
6:04
SPEAKER_03: as indeed it was in the 19th century at the time of its so-called end.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: Franklin urges us to not just understand Black history as a field with its own lessons,
6:16
SPEAKER_01: but as a living thing,
6:18
SPEAKER_01: an intervention in United States,
6:20
SPEAKER_01: North American,
6:21
SPEAKER_01: and world history,
6:22
SPEAKER_01: and a mirror for the present.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Few contemporary scholars have invested more in that project than Nell Irvin Painter,
6:28
SPEAKER_01: who returns to the show with a new collection of her work,
6:31
SPEAKER_01: I Just Keep Talking,
6:33
SPEAKER_01: A Life in Essays,
6:34
SPEAKER_01: out this week from Doubleday.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: The author of eight previous books,
6:38
SPEAKER_01: Painter also pursues her historical vocation as a visual artist,
6:43
SPEAKER_01: professional training she completed after retiring from the Princeton University
6:47
SPEAKER_01: History Department.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: This curated collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the questions,
6:53
SPEAKER_01: visual observations,
6:54
SPEAKER_01: and imaginative renderings that scholarship alone cannot properly address.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: The book is autobiographical, it is scholarly, and it is beautiful.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: Painter has truly taken the practice of history to a new level.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Join Nell and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: And I'm your host,
7:15
SPEAKER_01: Claire Potter,
7:16
SPEAKER_01: professor of history emeritus at the New School for Social Research,
7:20
SPEAKER_01: a contributing editor at Public Seminar,
7:22
SPEAKER_01: and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: This is episode 53, Nobody Else Has My Eyes.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: Nellervan Painter, welcome back to the show.
7:56
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Claire.
7:57
SPEAKER_02: You know, I always enjoy talking to you, even before you had a podcast.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Now, I want to start with the beauty of this book.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: It's obviously companion volume to Olden Art School in its design.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: Also, the paper is so lovely.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: And I want you to start by talking to us about how this book brings together your
8:20
SPEAKER_01: work as a historian and your work as an artist.
8:23
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
8:23
SPEAKER_02: I want to say two things.
8:25
SPEAKER_02: The first thing,
8:26
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
8:26
SPEAKER_02: you asked about the paper,
8:27
SPEAKER_02: and I do want to talk about the paper and about the publishing processes that you
8:34
SPEAKER_02: need to do this book,
8:35
SPEAKER_02: which everybody says,
8:36
SPEAKER_02: oh,
8:37
SPEAKER_02: this book is so heavy.
8:38
SPEAKER_02: And it is literally heavy.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: So we will talk about the paper.
8:42
SPEAKER_02: But you mentioned Olden Art School, which was my memoir from 2018, before the pandemic.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: And it has art throughout.
8:54
SPEAKER_02: And that's where I learned that it is possible to put art throughout a book,
9:00
SPEAKER_02: not just in an insert,
9:02
SPEAKER_02: a cheapo insert,
9:04
SPEAKER_02: which is what people still do,
9:07
SPEAKER_02: but they don't have to do it.
9:08
SPEAKER_02: Now, about the paper.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: I started thinking about paper back for creating Black Americans,
9:15
SPEAKER_02: which is my narrative history of Black Americans.
9:19
SPEAKER_02: So it's a history, history.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: But the illustrations are all Black fine art.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it cost a trillion dollars in permissions, but it's a gorgeous book.
9:32
SPEAKER_02: And at that point, I was talking to my editor about how we make the fine art look good.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: And it's in the paper, not just in the ink.
9:45
SPEAKER_02: And so the paper has to be a special paper that shows color illustrations crisply and beautifully.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: So I learned,
9:56
SPEAKER_02: that was like 2005,
9:56
SPEAKER_02: 2006,
9:57
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
9:57
SPEAKER_02: it was a trillion years ago,
10:00
SPEAKER_02: that it is possible to put art throughout a book if you have the right paper.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: So Old in Art School was published by a small independent publisher,
10:11
SPEAKER_02: Counterpoint,
10:12
SPEAKER_02: in Berkeley,
10:13
SPEAKER_02: and they managed to put the art throughout,
10:15
SPEAKER_02: and the book came in under $30.
10:18
SPEAKER_02: So when it turned out that it was going to be Doubleday who was going to be
10:23
SPEAKER_02: publishing I Just Keep Talking,
10:26
SPEAKER_02: my first thought was I want to have my art throughout.
10:29
SPEAKER_02: And, of course, the editor said, oh, no, we can't do that.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: It'll be too expensive.
10:34
SPEAKER_02: The book will cost $40.
10:37
SPEAKER_02: So I said, well, talk to your graphics people.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
10:42
SPEAKER_02: So they went and talked to the graphics people and the graphics people said,
10:45
SPEAKER_02: yeah,
10:45
SPEAKER_02: we can do that because the technology has changed from the 20th century.
10:50
SPEAKER_02: And 21st century technology,
10:52
SPEAKER_02: if you have the right paper,
10:55
SPEAKER_02: you can put full color images throughout the book.
10:59
SPEAKER_02: So that's how I got full color images throughout.
11:03
SPEAKER_02: I just keep talking.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: Now,
11:05
SPEAKER_02: I do have another book contract after this for Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker,
11:12
SPEAKER_02: and she didn't say that with Penguin.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: So when I talked to them, I said, I want to put my art throughout the book.
11:18
SPEAKER_02: And they said, oh, no, we can't do that.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: The book will cost $40.
11:22
SPEAKER_02: It's prohibitive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: And I said, go talk to your graphics people.
11:28
SPEAKER_02: And the graphics people said, yeah.
11:31
SPEAKER_02: So it's about up-to-date technology.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: Well,
11:36
SPEAKER_01: and this also goes in the category of another thing I learned from Nell Painter
11:42
SPEAKER_01: that you can take power over in your life.
11:46
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we women always need to hear that.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: We do indeed.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: But there have been a number of times in my life in which you have done something
11:56
SPEAKER_01: that you think,
11:57
SPEAKER_01: well,
11:57
SPEAKER_01: nobody's allowed to do that.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: And you do it.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, actually, yes, we are.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: I want to talk about some of the themes of this beautiful book,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: which the paper actually makes it just a pleasure to read.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a tactile pleasure to turn the pages.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: But it's a collection of your essays.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: I presume you didn't include everything that you have written that is uncollected.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: How did you make the choices now?
12:22
SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, everything still had to speak to you.
12:27
SPEAKER_02: So there were some things that were clearly dated and they were too dated to go in.
12:34
SPEAKER_02: There were some things that were clearly dated that also still speak to us.
12:38
SPEAKER_02: So, for instance, the 1981 essay on affirmative action is still sadly pertinent.
12:48
SPEAKER_02: There was a short response I gave.
12:52
SPEAKER_02: I've forgotten to which journal they wanted me to talk about what it's like to be a
12:56
SPEAKER_02: Black woman historian scholar at the time.
13:00
SPEAKER_02: The piece is called Regrets.
13:03
SPEAKER_02: And I said, I just can't show up for this.
13:05
SPEAKER_02: I'm too tired.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: And then in 2022, I made a little drawing called The Same Frustrations Over 25 Years.
13:14
SPEAKER_02: Those same frustrations were about not only regrets about the same stuff happening,
13:22
SPEAKER_02: the same shit happening to Black and other faculty members,
13:29
SPEAKER_02: but also people continuing to sum up and dismiss Sojourner Truth in Frances Dana
13:37
SPEAKER_02: Gage's words,
13:38
SPEAKER_02: which I will not repeat.
13:41
SPEAKER_02: So I published Sojourner Truth, A Life as Symbol in 1996.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: I mean, more than a trillion years ago.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't the only one writing a scholarly book, a careful book about Sojourner Truth.
13:56
SPEAKER_02: Carlton Mabee and Margaret Washington also published in that same era.
14:02
SPEAKER_02: And we just could not make a dent.
14:05
SPEAKER_02: in Francis Dana Gage's slogan of Sojourner Truth.
14:10
SPEAKER_02: So that was also why I made that drawing, The Same Frustrations.
14:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: So it's still pertinent too.
14:19
SPEAKER_02: The drawing actually is from 2022 when I was in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania
14:25
SPEAKER_02: Academy of Fine Arts,
14:27
SPEAKER_02: but it spoke over the eras.
14:29
SPEAKER_02: So the pieces had to still speak to us.
14:34
SPEAKER_02: And they couldn't be way too long.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: So already the book is long, and I didn't want it to be any longer.
14:42
SPEAKER_02: Also, the pieces couldn't repeat each other too much.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: There are some themes that reappear,
14:49
SPEAKER_02: but they're kind of hard themes that you probably need to read more than once.
14:54
SPEAKER_02: So the question was readability.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: whether the pieces were still pertinent.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: That was about it, really.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: My editor was very helpful in helping me make those decisions.
15:09
SPEAKER_02: But mainly, it was a pleasure to go over my thinking.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: The oldest piece, I think, is the Martin Delaney piece, which is actually, I think, from the 80s.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: Martin Delaney still needs to be known.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: And the hook was that carte de visite of Martin Delaney,
15:30
SPEAKER_02: that is a very small photograph,
15:33
SPEAKER_02: had come up for auction a few years ago.
15:37
SPEAKER_02: And the auctioneers expected it to sell for about $6,000,
15:43
SPEAKER_02: which is already a lot of money for a carte de visite,
15:46
SPEAKER_02: because these things were made in multiples.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: And they're small.
15:50
SPEAKER_02: But it sold for something like $60,000 and everybody was flabbergasted.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: And that says that Martin Delaney,
16:00
SPEAKER_02: that African-American history,
16:03
SPEAKER_02: that art with African-American figures are still very valuable,
16:12
SPEAKER_02: literally valuable.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: The book is also in parts, both the art and the text, autobiographical.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: And the only strictly autobiographical essay is the introduction,
16:30
SPEAKER_01: but at other times you come back to your experience as an artist and a historian.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things you talk about is your
16:41
SPEAKER_01: parents' vibrant intellectual life and your gratitude toward them for loving you as
16:49
SPEAKER_01: they did and the resilience that that gave you.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you could talk to our listeners about that a little bit because people
16:58
SPEAKER_01: need to think about resilience and how to cultivate it.
17:03
SPEAKER_02: I think there's some resilience you can cultivate, but there's a lot of resilience you inherit.
17:10
SPEAKER_02: And I inherited it from my parents, who were well-educated people.
17:14
SPEAKER_02: They never questioned what I was doing or its value.
17:20
SPEAKER_02: I grew up in a household with books.
17:23
SPEAKER_02: I grew up with The Nation magazine.
17:26
SPEAKER_02: It was a progressive household.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: I just answered a question from an honorary grandson about the Vietnam War.
17:35
SPEAKER_02: And I said that I knew about it and I was always against it.
17:39
SPEAKER_02: I knew about it when it was the French trying to keep their hooks in.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: I knew about Algeria.
17:47
SPEAKER_02: I knew about these things, thanks to my parents.
17:51
SPEAKER_02: And I also talk about in that autobiographical introduction,
17:57
SPEAKER_02: the death of my brother,
17:59
SPEAKER_02: which was a family trauma,
18:02
SPEAKER_02: tragedy story.
18:04
SPEAKER_02: that i still after all these years do not understand how my parents overcame it
18:11
SPEAKER_02: they kept telling me we had you and i believe that is it's not the whole key to my
18:21
SPEAKER_02: feeling free intellectually
18:25
SPEAKER_02: But I have always felt free intellectually.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: I should say I've always felt relatively free intellectually.
18:35
SPEAKER_02: I haven't felt totally free intellectually.
18:39
SPEAKER_02: So, for instance, I do not feel free now to talk about Israel-Palestine.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: I do not feel free to do that.
18:49
SPEAKER_02: But mostly talking about American history and American politics, I do feel free.
18:58
SPEAKER_02: And I am just about to write a short piece for Lit Hub,
19:03
SPEAKER_02: probably about being a Black writer and not writing about Blackness alone.
19:11
SPEAKER_02: And that's an area where I feel free to write about it,
19:16
SPEAKER_02: obviously,
19:16
SPEAKER_02: because I wrote a big book called The History of White People.
19:19
SPEAKER_02: But I can also see looking around me that my readers can be confused, like, who the hell are you?
19:29
SPEAKER_02: It was much worse when I first started writing some 20 years ago now.
19:36
SPEAKER_02: But there's still the question,
19:38
SPEAKER_02: and I think it may even come more from Black readers than non-Black readers.
19:46
SPEAKER_02: Why are you doing this?
19:49
SPEAKER_02: Why are you writing this?
19:51
SPEAKER_02: And the subtext may well be, are you a self-hating Black person?
19:57
SPEAKER_02: Well, no, I'm not.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: But I'm a Black person who hasn't felt curbed
20:05
SPEAKER_02: by racial boundaries in writing and thinking.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your essays is how expansive your intellect is.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: And when we talked about the history of white people,
20:18
SPEAKER_01: I think I said,
20:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:19
SPEAKER_01: I'd never thought of Nell as an intellectual historian.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: And now I know she's an intellectual historian.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: And then I was looking at all these essays and I'm like, how did I not know that?
20:29
SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking about how few Black women I know who are political historians.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: I know two.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: And that there is something about the Academy that not only funnels
20:45
SPEAKER_01: African-American intellectuals into Black studies of various kinds,
20:51
SPEAKER_01: but also says that there is a very narrow path.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's actually not okay to be a political historian.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: That's something other people do.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: White people do.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: Why is that, do you think?
21:04
SPEAKER_02: One part of it is we've had such a need for thinking about Blackness and about race in America.
21:12
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people had been doing that in the 20th century,
21:16
SPEAKER_02: but because of the imperatives of this scholarly market,
21:21
SPEAKER_02: there were few places they could publish,
21:23
SPEAKER_02: like the Journal of Negro History,
21:25
SPEAKER_02: for instance.
21:26
SPEAKER_02: You know, I am working on Sojourner Truth.
21:29
SPEAKER_02: I have found myself going back to really old articles in the Journal of Negro History,
21:34
SPEAKER_02: which could not have been published in the Journal of Southern History or other
21:42
SPEAKER_02: mainstream historical journals.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: So there's a real hunger for what we have to say about Black history and about race.
21:52
SPEAKER_02: And we still haven't filled it up.
21:56
SPEAKER_02: There's just a lot to be done, said, and written.
21:59
SPEAKER_02: So part of it is the need.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: and the hunger.
22:03
SPEAKER_02: But another part is on the part of Black people and non-Black people of feeling
22:11
SPEAKER_02: insecure about Black people writing other stuff.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: And that's what I was just talking about.
22:18
SPEAKER_02: So I feel it not just from white people who can be very afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing,
22:28
SPEAKER_02: And of Black people who have a sense of what the right thing really ought to be.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: That's very interesting.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
22:36
SPEAKER_01: your biography of Sojourner Truth,
22:39
SPEAKER_01: I remember when you came to Wesleyan University and you gave a talk from that research.
22:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:45
SPEAKER_01: And somewhere in that talk, you dropped a thought and then you moved on.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: But the thought was this, that if
22:53
SPEAKER_01: We understand slavery as the violent institution that it was,
22:58
SPEAKER_01: and we understand women as having been sexually vulnerable to rape all the time,
23:04
SPEAKER_01: that undoubtedly men were too.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: And you said that, I don't know if you remember that, but you said that.
23:11
SPEAKER_02: I don't remember,
23:12
SPEAKER_02: but I also mentioned that somewhere else,
23:15
SPEAKER_02: you know,
23:16
SPEAKER_02: but it's pretty much embarrassing because I don't and didn't have the research.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: You didn't have the research and there hasn't been much research done since,
23:27
SPEAKER_01: but that has always struck me as one of those lacunae,
23:32
SPEAKER_01: not just in African-American history,
23:34
SPEAKER_01: but in history more generally.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: We have really fleshed out our notion of,
23:40
SPEAKER_01: you know,
23:41
SPEAKER_01: how we have gotten to this place where it is okay to be violent against women and
23:46
SPEAKER_01: sexually violent against women.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: We're not okay, but that it continues to happen no matter what we do.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: We can talk about it.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:55
SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you where the discourse is.
23:57
SPEAKER_02: It's in the Catholic church.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: I think that's probably right.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: That's see, there you go again.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: That's a dissertation, listeners, right now.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: But you also, in your essay on Clarence Thomas, which I think was collected in the Toni Morrison book.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: Toni Morrison collection.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: That's where I remember it from.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: That essay felt so fresh to me in terms of what you had to say about the ways both Thomas and Hill were
24:33
SPEAKER_01: could not escape certain racial narratives, even as politically we were outraged.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you would talk about that a little bit.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: Why with the amount of work that has been done in this field and in feminist studies,
24:50
SPEAKER_01: the racial narrative has not actually become less constraining?
24:56
SPEAKER_02: No, I don't think that's true.
24:58
SPEAKER_02: I think the racial narratives are racial narratives, plural.
25:01
SPEAKER_02: So now if I talk about Black conservatives, you won't think, oh my God, I never heard of that.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: No, we have a discourse on Black conservatives.
25:10
SPEAKER_02: We know they're there and they get quoted and we know they're there.
25:15
SPEAKER_02: So it has moved.
25:17
SPEAKER_02: But I would also add that Bell Hooks' book,
25:22
SPEAKER_02: Ain't I a Woman,
25:23
SPEAKER_02: is still being read and cherished as being pertinent.
25:29
SPEAKER_02: So in that sense-
25:31
SPEAKER_02: Bell hooks his point that Black women were invisible and we're making ourselves
25:39
SPEAKER_02: invisible because we didn't want to be seen as tearing down Black men.
25:45
SPEAKER_02: So that theme is still pertinent from decades ago.
25:50
SPEAKER_02: And the problem
25:53
SPEAKER_02: that Anita Hill had was people couldn't wrap their heads around who is this very
25:59
SPEAKER_02: well educated Black woman who is standing up and saying,
26:05
SPEAKER_02: here's a Black man who harassed me.
26:07
SPEAKER_02: So there was then no way of slotting her into our racial discourse.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: And because bell hooks is still pertinent, I think there's still a problem there.
26:21
SPEAKER_02: Now,
26:21
SPEAKER_02: Clarence Thomas inserted himself into racial discourse by making himself into the
26:31
SPEAKER_02: victim of lynching,
26:33
SPEAKER_02: which at the time struck me as criminal.
26:37
SPEAKER_02: I mean, on his part.
26:40
SPEAKER_02: and still strikes me as criminal.
26:43
SPEAKER_02: And we have no reason in the succeeding 30 years,
26:48
SPEAKER_02: practically,
26:49
SPEAKER_02: to see Clarence Thomas as any more of an upstanding citizen of the country or of
26:57
SPEAKER_02: his race.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, less so.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: The more that we now know about his connections to wealthy people,
27:04
SPEAKER_01: not to mention his wife's connections to January 6th.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: So I want to talk about violence because there's another essay in this book,
27:12
SPEAKER_01: which I just loved,
27:15
SPEAKER_01: which was about the legacy of slavery in the South for both Black people and white people.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: Soul murder and slavery.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: And you make the argument that the essence of slavery was violence.
27:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: And that that cannot help but be traumatic through generations.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: Now,
27:40
SPEAKER_01: can you talk to our listeners a little bit about this essay and about the ways in
27:47
SPEAKER_01: which our current political discourse that is trying to push the forgetting of
27:54
SPEAKER_01: slavery into our schools,
27:57
SPEAKER_01: why is that an urgent issue for us?
27:59
SPEAKER_02: It's an urgent issue in terms of parts of our society that...
28:06
SPEAKER_02: still suffer very high levels of personal violence.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: That is to say, the old Confederacy.
28:15
SPEAKER_02: And then since January 6th,
28:18
SPEAKER_02: and the prominence of Confederate flags in the MAGA movement still say that slavery
28:27
SPEAKER_02: plays its part in
28:30
SPEAKER_02: the ability of Americans to turn to violence for political ends.
28:36
SPEAKER_02: So the essay, Soul Murder and Slavery, is about family dynamics, basically.
28:42
SPEAKER_02: And it's about the ground zero, the foundation of human enslavement being personal violence.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: And as you mentioned, it's transgenerational cyclical.
28:59
SPEAKER_02: So personal violence exists,
29:03
SPEAKER_02: continues to exist,
29:06
SPEAKER_02: and continues to exist in family dynamics and society in places in which
29:13
SPEAKER_02: enslavement was the foundation of the political economy.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: You know,
29:19
SPEAKER_01: I was thinking when I was reading your essay,
29:21
SPEAKER_01: which is the beauty of this book,
29:22
SPEAKER_01: that every essay made me think of something else I had read that I then put in
29:27
SPEAKER_01: dialogue with it.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about Jan Lewis's essay about Thomas Jefferson's family and how
29:36
SPEAKER_01: Jefferson needed his children to love him and would barrage them with letters
29:42
SPEAKER_01: begging for their love and
29:44
SPEAKER_01: Claiming that they didn't love him anymore.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: And part of the price of that love was them never acknowledging that they had
29:52
SPEAKER_01: siblings who were waiting on them at table.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: And one of the points Lewis makes in that essay is that all families lie about something.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: Right.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: And that looking at dishonesty in families is in fact a method.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: I felt like your essay was saying,
30:13
SPEAKER_01: looking at the violence in families,
30:15
SPEAKER_01: that violence has a history and that history is slavery.
30:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: It's slavery, but it's also piety and femininity all wrapped up together.
30:27
SPEAKER_02: It's religion and it's family.
30:30
SPEAKER_02: There's so much there.
30:32
SPEAKER_02: You mentioned Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
30:36
SPEAKER_02: I have not seen the new play, but I've read about it and I would like very much to see it.
30:42
SPEAKER_02: And it sounds to me that it does, in art terms...
30:48
SPEAKER_02: what I was doing in this essay, that is, of linking the present with the past.
30:56
SPEAKER_02: One of the things that I always thought about with the whole question of Hemings
31:01
SPEAKER_02: and Jefferson was how young she was.
31:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she was.
31:09
SPEAKER_02: And we know from Harriet Jacobs that this was as ordinary that a 14-year-old would be sexual prey.
31:18
SPEAKER_02: And so I wrote about that in my essay that's about young women and sex.
31:26
SPEAKER_02: It puts together Freud's Dora,
31:31
SPEAKER_02: and Harriet Jacobs,
31:33
SPEAKER_02: and the idea that this young woman,
31:36
SPEAKER_02: a young woman,
31:38
SPEAKER_02: is prey of the older men around her.
31:42
SPEAKER_02: And we all know from having been 14 that we're so vulnerable at that age.
31:49
Right.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: You know, just listening to you talk about that essay, which is wonderful, listeners, and
31:56
SPEAKER_01: It's the first thing you should go to.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: You can read around in this book.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: You don't have to read it straight through.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: Is our current debate about abortion and the outlawing of abortion,
32:08
SPEAKER_01: which in many states means that children...
32:12
SPEAKER_01: can be forced to bear the child of someone who has raped them.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: And it makes me think,
32:19
SPEAKER_01: much as you say that Southern violence is a legacy of slavery,
32:24
SPEAKER_01: that the idea that poor children who are unprotected can just have children and
32:33
SPEAKER_01: it's not a big deal,
32:35
SPEAKER_01: that's part of how life is,
32:36
SPEAKER_01: is that part of the legacy of slavery as well?
32:39
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
32:41
SPEAKER_02: I don't know, because it's much broader than slave societies.
32:46
SPEAKER_02: But it is noteworthy that the age of consent was in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
32:55
SPEAKER_02: notably young in the former Confederacy.
33:00
SPEAKER_02: I think that's part of what you're pointing to.
33:03
SPEAKER_02: The sense that very young women can be, we'd say, mishandled sexually.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: Right.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things we know is that girls being forced to have sex and to
33:22
SPEAKER_01: reproduce that young produced a lifetime of damage.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: And that for the rest of their lives, many of them were harmed, but also traumatized.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: In that essay, Soul Murder and Slavery, I focus more on psychological trauma.
33:40
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
33:41
SPEAKER_02: The sense that a person who has been abused sexually in youth is vulnerable to
33:51
SPEAKER_02: disregarding herself,
33:53
SPEAKER_02: to feeling her only value is as a sex object,
33:58
SPEAKER_02: and to lashing out at other people and herself physically.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: And you also talk about the harm to white women.
34:07
SPEAKER_01: One of the things you say in that essay is that men who were violent toward the
34:12
SPEAKER_01: people they enslaved were also violent toward their wives and their children.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: Were likely to be.
34:18
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's not a one-to-one, but again, the vulnerability.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: So now I want to talk a little bit about you as a teacher in this book,
34:31
SPEAKER_01: because as a teacher,
34:33
SPEAKER_01: you are extremely famous.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: I mean, among everyone in my generation.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: How does this book teach an audience things about history,
34:46
SPEAKER_01: both through the essays you've written,
34:49
SPEAKER_01: many for a general audience and through the art?
34:53
SPEAKER_02: Well, through the essays, I think the lesson is you can write about whatever you want.
35:03
SPEAKER_02: That's kind of the basic.
35:05
SPEAKER_02: And the art says you can look at this and maybe think of something that isn't in
35:13
SPEAKER_02: the text,
35:14
SPEAKER_02: and that's okay.
35:16
SPEAKER_02: So what visual art did for me as a historian,
35:21
SPEAKER_02: since visual art doesn't have the same kind of rules that we have as scholarly historians,
35:29
SPEAKER_02: you know,
35:29
SPEAKER_02: you can't just pretend the archive exists.
35:32
SPEAKER_02: isn't there or you can make up the archive.
35:36
SPEAKER_02: As a visual artist, you can do whatever you want in the archive.
35:40
SPEAKER_02: And one of the pieces is my MFA thesis,
35:43
SPEAKER_02: in which I do talk about the archive for a historian and the archive for an artist.
35:49
SPEAKER_02: And another piece is a selection from old art school in which I talk about the
35:57
SPEAKER_02: difference between history,
35:59
SPEAKER_02: history and history as in visual art.
36:04
SPEAKER_02: Many people asked me as I was writing Olden Art School about the contrast between
36:12
SPEAKER_02: creating as a scholarly historian and creating as a visual artist,
36:16
SPEAKER_02: and they're very different.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: As a visual artist,
36:20
SPEAKER_02: I could make up whatever I wanted and I could ask questions.
36:25
SPEAKER_02: I could make juxtapositions that had no place in life or in history.
36:31
SPEAKER_02: And that sometimes could lead me to questions that I initially thought,
36:37
SPEAKER_02: well,
36:37
SPEAKER_02: there's no answer to this,
36:39
SPEAKER_02: or I drew without seeking an answer and then discovered,
36:46
SPEAKER_02: oh,
36:47
SPEAKER_02: I could ask and answer that.
36:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
36:53
Yeah.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, fiction is another way that people do it.
36:57
SPEAKER_01: Taya Miles has written a wonderful novel in which she's able to do some of the
37:03
SPEAKER_01: stuff that you do visually by introducing a ghost and having people speak words
37:10
SPEAKER_01: that are nowhere in the archive.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: She actually creates a primary source.
37:15
SPEAKER_01: It's brilliant.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: But would you advise a young historian today to have a creative practice that
37:24
SPEAKER_01: that they pursue alongside their scholarly work?
37:28
SPEAKER_01: No.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: Okay, why?
37:30
SPEAKER_02: Both are 100% time-consuming.
37:37
SPEAKER_02: So, for instance, people ask me now, oh, are you painting?
37:42
SPEAKER_02: Are you drawing?
37:43
SPEAKER_02: I said, no.
37:45
SPEAKER_02: First,
37:45
SPEAKER_02: I was putting together this collection of essays and thinking about it and writing
37:50
SPEAKER_02: the introduction and the coda.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: And now I'm talking about it.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: I'm promoting it.
37:57
SPEAKER_02: This is 100% of the time job.
38:01
SPEAKER_02: And I can't switch from one side to another.
38:05
SPEAKER_02: It takes me...
38:06
SPEAKER_02: a week or so at least to go from one side of my brain to the other.
38:11
SPEAKER_02: Maybe other people can do it, but I certainly can't.
38:14
SPEAKER_02: And when I was in art school, it was all consuming.
38:20
SPEAKER_02: So I have nothing against somebody having a garden or making drawings or making
38:26
SPEAKER_02: paintings or knitting or whatever they want to do creatively.
38:32
SPEAKER_02: But if you want to do your creative stuff,
38:36
SPEAKER_02: with the same intensity as you should be doing your scholarly stuff, that's two lives, not one.
38:46
SPEAKER_02: One of the things I always said as professors was that you should get away in the summer.
38:54
SPEAKER_02: So maybe summer is the time,
38:56
SPEAKER_02: but then again,
38:57
SPEAKER_02: a French friend was astonished when American colleagues said,
39:01
SPEAKER_02: oh,
39:02
SPEAKER_02: the summer,
39:03
SPEAKER_02: that's when we get our work done.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: So we're talking about two,
39:08
SPEAKER_02: 100% of the time,
39:11
SPEAKER_02: if you're going to do it in what I thought of as a professional way.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: Now I could talk to you forever.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: So this is how I end every podcast is by asking my guest, why should we read this book now?
39:28
SPEAKER_02: And you should read this book now because this book will give you a way of seeing your,
39:36
SPEAKER_02: our world through my eyes and nobody else has my eyes.
39:44
SPEAKER_02: I am a black person of a certain age,
39:48
SPEAKER_02: so I have lived through a lot,
39:51
SPEAKER_02: and I have done a lot of research,
39:53
SPEAKER_02: and I think having the past in mind gives me and readers
40:01
SPEAKER_02: a way of understanding the world around us now,
40:06
SPEAKER_02: our society,
40:07
SPEAKER_02: and maybe even our economy,
40:11
SPEAKER_02: but certainly our politics,
40:13
SPEAKER_02: in a way you couldn't see if you were not looking through my eyes.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: And that's it for today's show.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
40:41
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40:45
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40:49
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41:23
SPEAKER_01: Why Now and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
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41:35
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41:36
SPEAKER_01: See you next time.