This history book on race may be dated (1968), but it has endured without much controversy. White Over Black, by Winthrop D. Jordan, analyzes the history of Anglo-American attitudes toward black slaves during 17th and 18th century America. While Jordan's underlying question is simple, his thesis is not, as the book is over 600 pages of encyclopedic detail. On first glance the book may be dated (we now use the term African American instead of Negro). But it is still, as the publisher University of North Carolina Press states, "the definitive work on the history of race relations in America." Furthermore, "every book published to this day on slavery builds on his {Jordan} work; all are judged in comparison to it; none has surpassed it." Noted early American historian Gordon S. Wood calls White Over Black "one of the most important historical works of the past 40 years, contributing to the cultural shift in white thinking that made possible the election of Barack Obama." White Over Black has so many details, but Jordan argues that racism toward Africans began in the fifteenth century, when European nations (principally Portugal and Spain) started to expand into America and Africa. Europeans believed that Africans descended from one or several of the four sons of Ham (whom God had cursed in the Bible) and all their descendants bore the color black. This way of thinking carried down all the way to the late eighteenth century, when one pamphleteer in Philadelphia wrote in 1773 that blacks were descended from Ham and "a race of men devoted to slavery." Thus, when English colonists in Jamestown, Virginia met the first "twenty Negars" in 1619, they had already acquired a racist attitude toward Africans, leading Virginians to adopt the "unthinking decision" commencing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Blacks were part of a "Chain of Being" that relegated them in place in society. At the same time white Americans debated blacks' intellectual abilities and skin color, they also sought to explain the presence of another subjugated people: Native Americans. White attitudes began to change during the American Revolution as freedom and liberty became questioned, but slavery endured until the Civil War. Jordan's book has had a tremendous impact on American historiography. Seven years later Edmund S. Morgan published his seminal work American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (which I and countless other history students read in college), building on Jordan's groundbreaking text. White Over Black was the first academic book to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with slave Sally Hemmings and Jefferson's contradictions as a slave owner and writer of the Declaration of Independence while maintaining negative views of African Americans and their role in the new United States. However, some readers might find White Over Black's sheer size to be overwhelming. Instead, they might like to read Jordan's abridged version The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1968. TS
0 Comments
This book review is probably the toughest one I’ve ever done. Since its publication last July, Go Set a Watchman has been the center of literary controversy. It is the second novel by Harper Lee (author of the 1960 acclaimed work on race relations, To Kill a Mockingbird). Honestly, I felt that I had to read Watchman myself to form my own opinions. Several years earlier a friend made an April Fool’s Day joke that Harper Lee was publishing a follow-up to To Kill a Mockingbird. Little did we know that he was right. The story of the story itself could fill up volumes. At first glance, Watchman may seem like a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. But Lee wrote Watchman as her first draft in 1957 to her acclaimed novel. The editor rejected her first effort. After several drafts, Lee finalized the story and renamed it To Kill a Mockingbird. There has been heated discussion about how and why Go Set a Watchman was finally released over 50 years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was published. Reading Watchman can be very uncomfortable. Set in the 1950s, 20 years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird, a grown up Jean Louise Finch returns to Maycomb, Alabama for a visit from New York City. Jean Louise, of course, is the daughter of Atticus Finch, the famed lawyer who defended an African American man accused of rape during the Great Depression. However, Atticus in Go Set a Watchman is almost from a mirror universe. He is opposed to integrating African Americans in Southern society, reads a venomous pamphlet titled The Black Plague detailing the horrors of a post-Jim Crow society, and rails against the NAACP. Worse, Jean Louise’s childhood friend Henry (who wants to marry her) is a lawyer for Atticus who unabashedly shares his views on race. These revelations make Jean Louise sick and disillusioned, which had the same effect on me. Atticus Finch has fallen off his pedestal. I believe that Go Set a Watchman should not be compared with To Kill a Mockingbird because the tone of each novel is markedly different. As a friend told me, perhaps Harper Lee was trying to tell two stories of racial injustice in America but decided to go with To Kill a Mockingbird because it is more uplifting. Part of me feels that Go Set a Watchman should never have been published because it ruins the image of her first and previously only work. Nevertheless, Go Set a Watchman shows continued racial conflict in the American South, which was recently exposed again with the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina and the removal of the Confederate flag (a symbol of racism) in the state’s capital earlier in 2015. TS By coincidence I read this book last week when the United States Congress voted on last July’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Iran is still the center of Americans’ overseas attention in the Middle East, considered part of an “axis of evil,” as President George W. Bush once stated. This novel will no doubt play into that image. Children of the Jacaranda Tree is set in post-revolutionary Iran, from 1983 to 2011 (the book was published in 2013) a time of turmoil in the country, including an inconclusive and bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s and unrest toward the revolutionaries in 2009-11. The book shows the disillusionment of many Iranians who hailed the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 but were oppressed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and later regimes that betrayed them. It is also the debut novel of Sahir Delijani. Children of the Jacaranda Tree follows several characters, including one child born in Tehran’s Evid Prison to a couple jailed for their political beliefs. Delijani, an Iranian born in Evid Prison herself in 1983, writes from first-hand experiences and perfectly conveys the sense of terror of post-revolutionary Iran. Many of these children survived the violent purge inside Tehran’s prisons during the late 1980s to have children of their own and face revolutionary upheaval in 2009-11. Although Delijani creates sympathetic characters, she has so many of them it is often hard to keep track. The novel often jumps back and forth in time, making it more confusing with the numerous characters. A better book (in my opinion) about Iran in roughly the same period (up to 2003) is Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Reading Lolita, a literary biography, is concerned with an Iranian professor of English whose classes read Western literature considered “evil” by the Islamic Republic. Both books give the reader a sense of life in revolutionary Iran and where the country might be headed. TS September is National Hispanic Heritage Month (between September 15 and October 15), so this review is early. Victor Villaseñor’s fascinating biography of growing up Mexican American in mid-20th century California is a story of both anguish and resilience in a hostile environment. (Villaseñor has written acclaimed books such as Macho! and Rain of Gold). He describes his bad experiences in Anglo-dominated schools with such poignancy; his white teachers degraded him as a Mexican and forced him to speak only English. Villaseñor tried hard not to be stereotyped, but his cultural heritage found nothing but scorn in the schools. Worse, he could not read and had to repeat the third grade twice, reinforcing his peers’ attitudes that he was a stupid Mexican. Burro Genius raises several questions about the history of education in the United States. Were schools designed to make people like Villaseñor “white”? Is education about control and conformity? As I read this book and his experiences as a Mexican American, I kept thinking about the Indian boarding schools and whites’ efforts to strip Native Americans of their culture. Villaseñor, like Native Americans, was taught to “know their place” in white-dominated society. Interestingly, he learned more about practical education outside the school. One of his fondest moments in school was when a substitute teacher instructed the class to write about what excited them about learning rather than emphasizing punctuation and grammar like military drill. Villaseñor’s book is also about triumph of the human spirit as the author learns to forgive and coming to peace with himself, without succumbing to the labels of being Mexican American. He suffers tragedy, including the death of his older brother (which he blames himself for a while). But he has a strong foundation with his parents, which helps him grow as a person. This biography is very moving with its tale of rising above adversity, and its comic moments make it more inspiring. Villaseñor, Victor. Burro Genius: A Memoir. New York: Rayo, 2004. TS |
CategoriesAuthorTom Schmidt lives in Prescott Valley, AZ. Archives
October 2018
CategoriesArchives
October 2018
|