I
stopped in the Lakeview Branch to pass along a flyer. The librarian
pointed behind me, and I turned around to see a display
of books including the book named on my flyer. The librarian
said that these were “challenged or banned” books. I had
in my hand flyers announcing my attempt to get a community
of readers together to read and discuss Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
This
is Banned Books Week 2007, September 29 to October 6, 2007,
as part of the American Library Association’s (ALA) twenty-sixth
annual celebration “of the freedom to read.” According
to the sponsors, “this freedom, not only to choose what
we read, but also to select from a full array of possibilities,
is firmly rooted in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” I
think of Black slaves like Fredrick Douglass’s subversive
defiance of the law when he learns to read.
The
ad continues: while these challenges are motivated by a
desire to protect children, “this method of protection
[challenging and banning texts] contains hazards far greater
than exposure to the ‘evil’ against which the protection
is leveled.”
I
am disturbed by this word “evil” in the context of a
discussion about challenged and banned books. “Evil” is
what? Who determines the definition of “evil” and for
what purpose? What form does it take? Historically, what
form has been
given to represent “evil”? “Evil” has been thought of as
the unknown, the unfamiliar, the wilderness, the lawless,
the shadowy, the ungodly, and the blackness of nightmares
and of people. In Euro-American literature, the blackness
of nightmares have represented, as Harry Levin (The
Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville) has noted,
the “visitations of insecurities” where blackness penetrates,
invades, encircles whites. The “power of blackness” has
been a “touchstone,” the works of Shakespeare, Hawthorne,
Melville, and others. To use Levin’s phrase, white writers
of the Euro-American literary tradition have been connoisseurs
of blackness.
From
this lingering in “blackness” emerges what Toni Morrison
(Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination)
calls “impenetrable” images of whiteness” that begin to
appear in conjunction with “the representations of black
or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete
control…” Morrison continues: "these images of blinding
whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation
on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness — a dark
and abiding presence that moved the hearts and texts of
American literature with fear and longing. This haunting,
a darkness from which our early literature seemed unable
to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory
situation in which American writers found themselves during
the formative years of this nation’s literature."
In
literature, darkness, blackness, “evil” takes the representation
of those African enslaved bodies rather than the reflection
of internal “blackness” in the white subjugation of human
beings. The transference of “internal conflicts,” Morrison
writes, to a “blank darkness” bounds and “violently silenced
black bodies.” This subject, she concludes, becomes “a
major theme in American literature.”
Literature
is not an “innocent” use of words or creation of images. As
a crucial cultural production by which individuals come
to recognize themselves and others, literature has always
been political, ideological, and therefore an influential
tool for evading blackness within by focusing attention
on blackness without. Ultimately, we are talking about
a process of suppressing cultural difference, dissent,
normalizing marginalization or even extermination in the
physical sphere while establishing the literary representations
of whiteness. Formal “education” engages in evasion, rendering
silent, suppressing “blackness," even if the participants
can’t articulate why or recognize the origins of this practice.
The
Black literary tradition precedes the American literary
tradition and has its origins in the African traditions. As
a Diaspora tradition, its texts feature the “blackness” of
subjugation, colonialism, slavery, exploitation, inequality,
and injustice — evaded topics in the romantic/Gothic representation
of whiteness. Consequently, as a collective of Black
literary traditions, Black American literature has a unique
role in the edification of American’s Empire agenda. At
the communal level, it serves to educate Black people in
the ways we have survived what Marimba Ani (Yurugu) calls
the Maafa, by offering a way to demystify the “impenetrable” image
of whiteness. Black literature, then, ultimately speaks
of and to the Spirit of Black people on this earth.
A
day after my encounter with the display of challenged
and banned
books at the local library, I heard a representative from
the ALA, the “progressive” radio. Apparently, the ALA
will sponsor local readings of these banned books. At
one point, the host asked her why books were challenged
or banned. She answered that often the context contained
elements that the censors found, to use her word, “dirty.” She
assured the listeners that unlike some “professors” who
focus on the “dirty” parts, the ALA readings would focus
on “literature”! I suspect reading only “literature” and
not the “dirty” parts refers to reading the description
of leaves blowing on some trees — not that one in Jena,
Louisiana; they hurried and cut that one down: we will
just cut down the tree where the “evil” nooses hung, thus
protecting our children from confrontation with “blackness” via
Black people’s response. As the source narrative for the
La Salle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters and the
mainstream media, whiteness eliminates its “dirty” parts
and reigns free of retribution.
Did
I say that there are a significant number of key Black
literature texts listed on the ALA “challenged and banned” books
list for 2007? Well, of course, and not by accident. Someone
will say that there are a number of texts written by whites
on the list too. But thanks to white privilege, white
children will not suffer a short of texts written by whites. But
Black children are forced to be connoisseurs of whiteness,
images that dehumanize, abuse, and exclude them. With
censorship on Black literary texts, they are told to deal
with it in this police state. The “challenged and banned” books
written by Black authors include Toni Morrison’s Bluest
Eyes, and Song of Solomon. Maya Angelou’s I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Gordon
Park’s The Learning Tree, Ernest J. Gaines’ The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, and Dean
Walter Myers’ Fallen Angels. I am surprised that
the actual slave narratives are not included on this list — after
all Sojourner Truth’s autobiography notes that she exposes
her breast in public, and in Incidents of a Slave Girl, Harriet
Jacobs recounts how she had to seduce another slaveholder
and bears children by him in order to retain control over
her body. These books, according to the censors, employ “offensive” language
or contain “sexual content.” Never mind that throughout
this nation, children engage video games or blogs with
offensive language and sexually graphic images — gratuitous
violence as a matter of normalcy! Never mind that a few
of them in Jena, Louisiana could string up three nooses
to a tree and the authorities did not find this behavior “offensive.”
And
yes — one of the books on display at that library and on
the list is Beloved. As we know, Beloved is
filled with “dirty” parts… the hanging of those boys from
the “most beautiful sycamores in the world” or the jagged
saw that crossed “crawling” baby’s neck or taking the milk
from a prone Black woman. They can’t wrap their minds
around that first image in the barn, of Schoolteacher and
his nephews surrounding that Black woman. Too much for
their children to see! It is too much for their innocence to
see Sethe in that second barn passing that saw across her
baby girl’s neck…
"They
could dirty you," Sethe says to Denver, "more
than work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you
so bad that you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty
you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it
up.”
And
get away with it!
“Evil” and “dirty” parts
are certainly not unrelated, are they?
Bodies
left to float in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans for days
while the world watched on. The attempt to expel from
the narrative of innocence the very “dirty” image of nooses
hung on a tree with whitewashing words: “teenage pranks.” By
banning the reading of Beloved, are the censors
suggesting that the rape and milking of Sethe by Schoolteacher’s
nephews is irrelevant now? Are white and Black children
to chalk those past crimes against Black women as mere “teenage
pranks”? If there are two Black literary texts on the list,
there’s two narratives of the Maafa (the disaster) too
many. These would be two narratives less that could serve
as anchors for our children’s spirits. We can’t afford
to look at these occurrences of the narrative of whiteness
at work as isolated incidents.
These
narratives of whiteness form a collective of socializing
thought and behavior embedded in the U.S. Empire agenda. It
is not an accident that Malcolm X, the Black Panthers,
and outspoken Blacks in the 1960s and 1970s ended up in
graves, in exile, in prison, or in historical narratives
that featured them as “militant,” “criminal” and therefore “violent” at
the same time Black women like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,
Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou were writing
the Black contemporary experience in continuum with the
Black literary tradition. With the U.S. under Nixon and
then Reagan leadership well on its way to fulfill its Pax
Americana dream, Blacks who reminded this nation about
its responsibilities to follow through on its promise of
equality and justice had to be eradicated literally or
figuratively. In the meantime, our children are not educated
with the knowledge to either arm or defend themselves in
a social system that has determined them worthless unless
profit can be acquired from their imprisonment. The challenging
and banning of the Black literary tradition is fundamental
to the process of eliminating blackness, that is, Black
people. Yet, there are Blacks and whites who refuse to
recognize these connections as evidence of an ideological
agenda to maintain whiteness on a global level. In a city
with one of the highest per capita Ph.D. populations, it
is still necessary for me to explain that my “opinions” are
not solely the singular expression of one Jean Daniels
but based on the collective conditions and lived experiences
of other Blacks in the U.S. But, alas, where are
the intellectual articulations of Black Americans? How
are they differentiated by those with an interest in preserving
the hegemony of whiteness? How are we differentiated in
the media?
We
are criminals, violates of all American traditions and
values. Therefore, crime is labeled Black. Everyone hears
on the news, “a Black man killed…” Blacks understand that “a
man killed…” means a white man killed someone. Criminality
is identified as Black, something Black people do. That
is what people hear. They do not hear in the “absence” of
Black people crime, “evil,” or dirtiness. Thus, the rest
of the news refers to the killing and suffering of hundreds
adding up to thousands and then millions of people around
the world by the white U.S. hegemonic power. How many
children died from lack of milk and food because of U.S.
economic sanctions? That is news too. But it is not heard
as racial — and yet, what else is it? The victims experiencing
hunger are Black and Brown skinned people, but white Americans
don’t see themselves as a collective race responsible for
slaughter and suffering on a daily bases. As “whiteness,” they
are “everybody” in general and “nobody” in particular. And
even in this thinking is the collective acceptance of an
ideology that speaks of white privilege as an entitlement
to dominance and a right to evade responsibility for any
crime against humanity. Don’t pay any attention to the
man behind the white curtain, the biggest gun dealer and
drug dealer in the world. Focus your anxieties and fears
on the Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow figures right around
you! In the meantime, the U.S. military patrols the world,
knocks down doors of the homes of Iraqi citizens looking
for “terrorists” while, domestically, the state police
apparatus in city after city is given carte blanche to
apprehend and imprison the “usual suspects of crime.”
“Alleged
rise in crime…in portions of the west side” of Madison,
Wisconsin, according to the editor of the City Capital
Hues (CCH), has prompted the mayor and the police department
to commence a “surge” in police surveillance and ticketing “in
the suppression zone.” The editor, responding to an article
published in the Wisconsin State Journal (WSJ),
challenged remarks made by West District Capt. Jay Lengfeld
who strongly suggested that it was “the newcomers from
Chicago” causing the increase in crime. “People from Chicago,” according
to Lengfeld “are used to it being noisy at night.” The
police chief, who is Black, observed that while “race or
ethnicity” were not mentioned, of the eight hundred present
at this meeting regarding safety on the west side, only “a
dozen people of color” were in attendance! A familiar narrative
of whiteness confronting its Gothic nightmare, re-constructed
for a particular audience who are nonetheless “educated” to read race,
specifically Black in the place of “people” in the
phrase “people from Chicago.”
In
the Wisconsin State Journal article, Lengfeld said
he noted a “difference in customary bedtimes and patterns
of supervision of children.” And these people, Lengfeld
added, congregate outside on front porches instead of backyards: “People
in big cities socialize in groups in front of their houses
in their neighborhoods…Going into the backyards is formal,
although it may seem more normal to you and I (sic).” The
editor of the CCH reminded Madisonians that good-paying
factory jobs have been shipped over seas, and there’s an
ever-increasing gap between high income and low income
households. In addition, he stated “while most of our
community has the good life, others are living in recession.” With
the rising price of energy, my editor writes, “air conditioning” or
trips to the Vilas Zoo may be the reason people congregated
on front porches — not that they are engaging in drugs
or some other crime.
“What’s
going to happen when the police start writing more tickets
to low-income people living in the ‘suppression zone,’” he
asked. The increase in crime, he argued, is not caused
by Blacks “from Chicago.” He was right to point out, however,
that “a diversity of African American people,” painted
with the stereotype of “those people from Chicago,” will
be “treated negatively as “those people from Chicago” no
matter what the situation,” for the phrase will come to
identify all six percent of the Black population in Madison,
the editor concluded. I might add that this is a college
town with a huge pre-dominantly white college-aged population.
Are we to believe that the dorms and campus apartments
are zones free of drugs and crimes or just free to pursue
the agenda of whiteness? These young adults within this
physical locale are protected, like the children K-12,
by a narrative free of the “evil” and “dirty” parts, with
a fresh white coat of paint!
There’s no defense for it, Baby Suggs tells her granddaughter.
We
defeat the narratives of whiteness by regaining control
over our cultural traditions. The Maafa, writes Ani, “has
disconnected us from our cultural origins, we have remained
vulnerable in a social order that does not reflect our
cultural identity.”
But we must go on…
“The
answer to our social dilemma,” Ani continues, “is the resocialization
of our people into the cultural value-system that affirms
our spiritual being. Our Ancestors are calling us ‘home’ back
to our cultural selves. We must begin the process of Sankofa.”
BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The
City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer
at Madison Area Technical College,
MATC. Click
here to contact Dr. Daniels.