Posts Tagged ‘racism’
Book Review: Americanah
Posted on: September 30, 2015
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, 477 pp.
This book defies category. It is an epic novel, across continents and decades. It is a political commentary, full of astute observations and cultural critique, especially around issues of race and immigration. It is a good story, beautifully written, compelling and challenging. The quality of the writing and fiction are not diminished by the insertion of straight cultural commentary, nor does the narrative serve to lighten the impact of the author’s searing observations. It is masterful, and an important read both as a novel and cultural critique. All the better: it’s a great story, a love story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a book that shows us all the power of the novel as a genre, the way an extended perspective and intimate connection with a character can create new forms of empathy, understanding and a window on the human condition.
The two at the center of the story are Ifemelu and Obinze. They seem destined for one another, made perfectly suited to match one another’s wits and habits, and they fall in love while in secondary school in Nigeria. Adichie tells the story of their individual upbringings and their school years against the backdrop of military uprisings in Nigeria. After graduation, Ifemelu departs to study in the United States. Her experience of immigration changes her, and she separates from Obinze, a heartbreak to them both. The novel explores how, and if, their relationship can be recovered. Obinze may have stayed in Nigeria, but he has changed as well. Will their love persist? Can it? Should it? This is no starry-eyed romance. This is a real and deep exploration about what it means to love, to grow with another imperfect human being, and the power of conflicting commitments.
One of the central themes is the question of home and exile. To be an “Americanah” is to be a Nigerian that has spent so much time abroad that they no longer fit well in Nigeria. The novel is set after Ifemelu has spent 15 years in the U.S. before deciding to move back, and she wonders if she will be able to readjust.
One of the key experiences is Ifemelu’s introduction to the American concept of race, and the necessity for her to learn how to navigate the unspoken, subtle and not-so-subtle privilege and discrimination that attend it. She eventually begins to write a blog about it, entitled, “Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” The novel contains several complete blog entries, but those are not the only sources of cultural critique. The story itself navigates Ifemelu’s difficult relationships with American men, both black and white, as she learns the social cues and racial dynamics. The novel is peppered with these observations, and they are powerful.
For example, after her blog becomes popular, Ifemelu is hired to lead diversity training workshops. After one workshop in which she is honest about the reality of racism and its unshakable hold, she receives an angry e-mail and observes:
The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted to gesture of her presence. … During her talks, she said: “America has made great progress for which we should be very proud.” In her blog she wrote: “Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”
The italics are original, but I love that line.
There is a self-referential playfulness in the novel’s conversations about race. For example, Ifemelu is engaged in a conversation with a group of academics from Princeton, and the conversation goes like this:
“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t eve know it’s about race.” …
“Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening.” (337)
Of course, Americanah is just that kind of work of literary fiction. I hope people pay attention.
Book Review: The New Jim Crow
Posted on: June 13, 2014
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, The New Press, 2010, 312 pp.
There is so much to say about this book that I don’t know where to begin. I finished reading it months ago, and the prospect of writing this review was so daunting I got way behind on all my reviews. You just need to go read this book for yourself, because it is a seminal summary of the social mechanism of mass incarceration, and the way it is exercising social control in communities of color in the United States. This can be such a hot topic that I fear people will read this review, react negatively, and begin to respond without actually reading the book—where Alexander has the space to actually make the case. So, let me say again, READ THE BOOK. If you think racism isn’t systemic, read this. If you think we’ve taken care of civil rights issues, read this. If you think prisons are full of “bad” people, read this. If you care about social justice, racism, youth at risk, the war on drugs, voting rights, for-profit prisons, read this.
Alexander begins with a history of social systems that functioned to control and oppress black people in U.S. history and create a racial caste system that preserves white privilege. The first, obviously, was slavery. Slavery replaced indentured servitude and served to create a racial caste system that separated poor whites and blacks by according privileges to whites. When slavery was abolished, Jim Crow segregation took its place, maintaining the racial caste system. After the Civil Rights movement, Alexander details how the rhetoric of “law and order” replaced segregation as a system of racial control. Stereotypes of black “welfare queens” and criminal “predators” proliferated. Massive job loss in inner cities was accompanied by the rise of crack cocaine. The law and order rhetoric responded with the War on Drugs, including mandatory minimum sentencing and exploding budgets for law enforcement and prisons. Mass incarceration is born, and millions of people—with a massive preponderance of men of color–are placed under the jurisdiction of the prison system. It’s not just about the time spent in prison, but about the time spent on probation and the permanent second-class citizenship of a prison record.
And that’s only the first chapter.
Alexander’s next chapter deconstructs the War on Drugs as a mechanism of controlling whole communities by way of stop and frisk, consent searches, pretext stops. She documents the ways that law enforcement agencies prosper by these methods, the way that they impact communities of color far more than white communities, the lack of legal representation, and their link to ballooning prison populations. After documenting this racial bias in detail, the third chapter tackles the question of how and why the court system does not stop such blatant racially unequal justice. Alexander identifies a series of court decisions that promote a “colorblind” justice system that ban any suits or claims of racial bias. In short, it is a two step process:
The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. … Then, the damning step: close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in a racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination–i.e., the work of a bigot. (103)
Chapter Four, “The Cruel Hand,” moves forward to the enormous loss of rights suffered by those who bear a criminal record, which Alexander has already shown are predominately people of color. The loss of rights and privileges is enormous—access to public housing and public assistance, difficulties in the job market due to the need to disclose a conviction, debts accrued for court and probation fees, the loss of voting rights and the ability to serve on a jury, and general social stigma attached to “ex-con” status. The fifth chapter rounds up the evidence of the other four and paints the full picture of how the system of mass incarceration functions as a massive form of social control along racial lines, with more African American adults today under correctional control than those enslaved in 1850 (180). In sum:
The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. (188)
If this seems absurd to you, I have only one reply: go read the book. Then we can talk more about it.
The final chapter, “The Fire This Time,” points some direction for a New Civil Rights movement with overturning the system of mass incarceration as its target. There are many obstacles, including the economic employment of massive numbers of people in the prison-industrial complex, the stigma and belief that those incarcerated are criminals who deserve their fate, and a long line of court cases that refuse to acknowledge the problem. Reading her arguments in the rest of the book, it seems insurmountable—but it is helpful to remember that segregation seemed insurmountable a mere 60 years ago. And doing nothing is unthinkable for anyone who cares about justice.
Michelle Alexander is not the first or only person raising this issue. (My husband reminded me of going to see Angela Davis at a conference on this topic in Berkeley in the lat 1990s.) However, The New Jim Crow makes the argument concisely and convincingly that mass incarceration has replaced segregation as the tool of oppression for communities of color in the post-Civil Rights era. We who care about justice must find new strategies to overcome. READ THIS BOOK.
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Let me start with a disclaimer: I have not watched the play-by-play of the George Zimmerman trial in the last few weeks. This post is not about what happened at trial or why the women of the jury decided what they did based on the evidence they were presented. While I do think that the prosecution clearly failed, I am not about to dissect the legalities of the case. This is instead a commentary on the wider context of this trial, and what it says about the nation in which we live.
Tonight, George Zimmerman is a free man. The basic story is not in dispute: Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin walking in the neighborhood, and decided that a young black man in a hoodie posed a threat to his safety. He openly admitted to following Martin in a van, calling 911, and hearing the 911 operator tell him to back off and not get out of his vehicle. Yet he did get out, a scuffle ensued, and then Zimmerman shot Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old boy, because he was afraid of him. The jury concluded that this was not a crime, and Zimmerman is not guilty.
In other words, it’s legal to shoot an unarmed black teenager if you are afraid of him.
When you put it like that, it seems crazy. How is this outcome even possible?
This case is only understandable when viewed through the intersection of so many cultural narratives in our nation. I want to spend a few paragraphs naming and explaining those narratives, because they help explain how we got here, and why there is so much tension around this case.
1. Our culture loves guns, and the freedom to use them. We tolerate an absurd number of gun deaths, accidental and intentional, because we associate personal freedom with the ability to arm ourselves. No one questioned Zimmerman’s right to carry a gun, or to shoot someone who threatened him, even if that person was unarmed. If Martin had also been armed, we would have understood and tolerated a shootout on the street of a quiet neighborhood.
The best argument that the gun lobby has is that every American has the right to defend his or her life, liberty and property by carrying a weapon. But in this case, Zimmerman’s right to carry a gun overtook Martin’s basic right to life. Neither Zimmerman’s liberty nor his property were at risk, and if his life was at risk it was only because he provoked a confrontation. Their rights collided–and the verdict declared that Zimmerman’s right to defend himself with his gun was deemed more important than Martin’s right to life. Something is terribly wrong with that.
2. This case unmasks the living legacy of racism, especially the historic fear of young black men. If you doubt this case has anything to do with race, imagine if the man carrying the gun had been black and the dead boy had been white. Would the outcome have been the same? I doubt it. But it’s far more complicated than that. The U.S. has a long history of murdering young black men out of fear and prejudice and a perceived threat. Emmett Till comes first to mind. Or the fictional version in To Kill a Mockingbird, which shows that the story was common enough to be recognized immediately as a cultural reality–a young black man who was perceived as a threat, taken down by mob justice and never given fair hearing in a court of law.
We like to imagine that things have gotten better, that we are beyond the days of lynch mobs, that the Civil Rights Movement ended the fear of violence against African-Americans–but this case brings back all those bad memories and shows us that racism today is as violent and ugly as the black-and-white images of bygone eras. Trayvon Martin’s story is not new–it is very old. Many had hoped (and some had convinced themselves) it could not happen again, but it did. Those who recognize racism’s persistence were not surprised by Martin’s death, nor shocked that the jury refused to convict the man who confessed to killing him. It’s a familiar story–like all of these familiar narratives–even if Zimmerman was Latino and not a traditional white man.
3. This case makes us question our adoration of vigilante heroes and those who take the law into their own hands. As a culture, we worship lone rangers and nonconformists. Think of pretty much every summer disaster flick in the last two decades (or almost anything starring Bruce Willis or Will Smith)–it’s one guy (or a small band of folks) saving the world, because they refuse to play by the rules and follow orders. Whether it’s aliens or asteroids or giant bugs, we love to watch heroes who break the law in order to get justice. We don’t trust the system to take care of problems. We have to do it ourselves.
Except this time it didn’t go quite so well. Zimmerman followed his gut and took the law into his own hands, but he was wrong and he killed an unarmed boy. We turned to the justice system to make it right, but the system failed–just like Zimmerman expected. Just like the movies. Now there are predictions of mob justice for Zimmerman, or retribution by riots. Nearly all will publicly shake their heads at this vigilantism, but we all understand it, and many secretly support it. But do we recognize that it’s the same behavior that started this whole thing in the first place? Do we admit that this problem’s roots in American culture with our worship of individualism?
4. This case amplifies the confusion between the workings of the legal system and the idea of justice. We may refer to it as the “criminal justice system,” but the conviction and punishment of people for committing crimes is not synonymous with justice. Justice is much more than simply punishing people who do bad things. In common parlance, justice is a sense of fairness and equality before the law. In the Bible, it includes a broader picture that incorporates grace, forgiveness, abundance over scarcity, economic security, mercy and peace.
Our criminal justice system, with its “presumed innocence” and “beyond a reasonable doubt,” is designed to punish the guilty and exonerate the innocent, and has nothing to do with fairness or equality, much less the broader conceptions of justice. Even more, it is obvious to anyone who participates in the system that it generally does a bad job even by its own standards, regularly imprisoning the innocent and exonerating the guilty. Prejudice, racism, money, poor lawyers, good lawyers, aggressive police work, lazy police work–all these things can change the outcome of a trial, and none of them have anything to do with justice. Justice is not the same thing as legality. (If you doubt this, compare the Zimmerman verdict with this one.)
We may have been hoping for #JusticeforTrayvon, but only the most paltry conception of justice can be found in the legal system, and even that is a rare find.
These four narratives intersect in this case, just as they do in our culture. I found it helpful to pull apart the web and look at each one individually, as well as looking at the ways they influence and pull on one another in this case. They help me understand how a jury in 2013 can reach the conclusion it did tonight: that it’s legal to shoot an unarmed black teenager if you are afraid of him.
My brain can analyze and dissect and trace threads to make sense of it all, but my heart cannot. There is no excuse, no defense, no reason for the death of Trayvon Martin. The verdict feels like betrayal. I feel angry, sad, frustrated, indignant, powerless, heartbroken. I cannot imagine the grief of the Martin family, the first inflicted by Zimmerman’s gun, the second inflicted by a verdict that seems to say their son’s death was not worthy of consequences. The whole situation makes me want to weep at the sin and brokenness of the world, and beg for God’s “justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like a flowing stream.” (Amos 3)
I look at my own son. He will be 17 someday, and walk with that adolescent swagger, talk with that constant tone of insubordination. He may get into trouble, but his blonde hair and blue eyes will offer him a level of protection and privilege that his dark-skinned friends will not share. My heart aches for their mothers tonight, recognizing that this is not a new fear in their lives.
I pray for the safety of your sons, even as I pray for my own. I pray that they will do a better job than we have of negotiating the tensions around guns, race, heroes and justice. I pray that even though the legal system failed to act, Trayvon Martin’s death will have consequences, both for George Zimmerman and for our nation. I pray that a greater justice will indeed come to our land, that one day racism will be no more, that freedom will no longer be measured in our ability to carry weapons but in our ability to live together in peace. I pray for righteous anger that will spill over into righteous action rather than endless violence. I pray for ways to tell different stories than the ones we’ve always known, to free ourselves to truly build a nation of justice and peace, with liberty and justice for all.
For The Someday Book 