Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith

Source of book: I own this.

This was my selection for Banned Books Week. It took longer than a week, but I did start it during Banned Books Week. 

Just as a reminder, I use the week to read books which have been banned, which means that a government has outlawed sale, publication, or possession of the book. I do not count challenged books - those which citizens or parents have sought to keep out of school curricula or libraries. This isn’t because I think challenges are uninteresting, but because I wanted to focus my once-a-year project on those where the power of the state was employed in censorship. I believe that is a different level from a challenge. After all, any library has limited space and budget, and decisions must be made. (Personally, I would have preferred an extra - and local - copy of The Rest is Noise rather than one of the 20ish copies of Eat, Pray, Love.) Likewise, students can only study so many books, and the choice of which to study is a judgment call.

Here are my past selections, plus the introduction to Banned Books Week.

Thoughts on Banned Books Week

Areopagitica by John Milton (2011)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (2012)

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf (2013)

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (2014)

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (2015)

July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (2016)

Into the River by Ted Dawe (2017)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

***

“BANNED IN BOSTON!” is now a bit of a badge of honor, and it has a long history. Strange Fruit may not have been the first work that the overzealous Boston city officials (influenced by Anthony Comstock and his eponymous law), but it was the first number one bestseller to be banned in Boston. 

Strange Fruit was ostensibly banned due to references to sex - which are both crucial to the meaning of the book and handled in a tame manner by today’s standards - but everyone knew the real reason it was banned: the book is about a forbidden sexual and romantic relationship between a white man and black woman. In the Jim Crow South, this was literally illegal at the time the book was written - and was considered immoral and scandalous even in the North. 

It took me a while to get into the book, mostly because the first 50 or so pages jump around in time a lot. We know very early in the book what has happened: Tracy Deen has gotten Nonnie Anderson pregnant, and she is happy about it. Smith then fills in the backstory of both families. Nonnie Anderson is an elegant and educated young African American woman. Her family is well respected (after a certain fashion), and Nonnie turns everyone’s head. Her sister, the stolid and responsible Bess, can’t understand why Nonnie still works as a maid, rather than go north with their brother Ed, who has gotten a white-collar job. Nonnie claims to just not be ambitious, but the real reason is that she loves Tracy Deen.

Tracy is the feckless son of the local white doctor (the black doctor, Sam, figures prominently in the book as well - he is the best and most complex character in the book, in my opinion.) As we learn, when Nonnie was age 6, she was saved from a sexual assault by a group of white boys by Tracy. This is a moving incident, because the boys assume that Tracy “owns” Nonnie, and that is why they leave her alone. The idea that raping a black child was wrong never occurs to them. 

In fact, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that many - maybe most - of the white men in town have had sex with black girls and women. Some of them openly keep a black woman as a concubine. (“That’s the bible word for it,” Tracy says.) 

Tracy is, despite his inability to figure out what he wants to do with his life (other than that he hates his dominant and controlling mother), isn’t a bad guy. He and Nonnie do eventually become sexual, coming together occasionally in their teens and then after she returns from college, and he from World War One. It is in their 20s that she gets pregnant - to his surprise - he figured that a college educated woman would somehow just know how not to get pregnant. (He’s not the sharpest tool, but, to be fair, men didn’t really learn about female bodies at that time. Information on contraception was still illegal to distribute in Georgia.) 

This pregnancy, naturally, causes no end of trouble. 

In a perfect world, Tracy and Nonnie would marry, and probably have a happy life together. Tracy actually considers taking her to France, where interracial marriage was accepted. But he has no nerve, no career other than his parents’ attempt to get him to take over the family store or the old farm. Nonnie doesn’t seem to know exactly what she wants. It is implied that she would accept being his concubine, but we never really know her thoughts on this. She is too smart to think he will marry her, and she never asks him to. 

Tracy is pressured by his family to finally “go straight,” which means joining the church, getting married, and settling down. The preacher (a complex character who combines some good traits with the wrong kind of pragmatism) tells Tracy that most men have had “nigger girls,” but that God wants him to repent of that and marry a virginal white girl. Tracy’s mom has the perfect one picked out. Tracy isn’t attracted to her, but he can’t tell his mother no. 

In an attempt to both “go straight” and settle things for Nonnie, he borrows a large sum of money from his mother (no questions asked), and tries to bribe Nonnie to marry the Deen family cook, Henry (who was Tracy’s childhood companion), and Henry to marry her. Henry doesn’t want to - he is in love with Dessie - but he can’t talk back to a white man in public. 

The meeting with Nonnie goes even worse: Tracy ends up hitting and raping her as a thoroughly unconstructive way of attempting to compartmentalize his relationship with her as “she’s only a nigger - they manage.” Meanwhile, Ed overheard the conversation with Henry, and when he sees that Nonnie is traumatized, he shoots and kills Tracy in the dark. 

With Sam’s help, Ed is rushed back to New York before the body is discovered in the woods. Henry is blamed for the death, and despite the efforts of Mr. Deen and the local factory boss (another complex and semi-decent character), is taken from jail and lynched. 

Billie Holiday claimed that Lillian Smith named the book after her song about lynching of the same name. Smith never confirmed this, and said that she meant “strange fruit” to mean the way humans, black and white, are twisted and damaged by America’s racist culture, rather than a literal reference to lynched bodies hanging in trees. It sure seems as if there was an intentional connection. 

There is lot to unpack from this book. The summary of the plot fails to capture all of the different facets of Southern Jim Crow culture - Smith grew up in the South, and portrays the culture with accuracy and detail. It is an unsparing portrait, painting the many ways in which the underlying belief in the superiority of white-skinned people warps and damages and destroys. 

Smith does not go easy on the role of religion. This part of the book was spookily familiar in the Trump era, where the Ku Klux Klan is again in open collaboration with white religion. It is no surprise that Smith deftly exposed the hypocrisy of Southern religion. As a young adult, she rejected religion, in part because of her experience with the double standards of the Southern church. In addition, Smith was outspoken in favor of civil rights for minorities - and also for women - both of which positions made her unwelcome in church. 

If that weren’t enough, Smith was lesbian in an era when it was even more taboo than racism. She lived with her partner, and the two of them published a magazine together. As their letters (discovered after their deaths) made clear, however, they were more than business partners. Lesbian themes make it into Smith’s books, including this one. Tracy’s younger sister (the one who seems made to succeed - and who is one of the very few truly progressive characters in the book) has a naked female figure in her drawer, and a relationship with another woman in town is hinted at, although not expressly stated. 

Another controversial theme in the book is abortion. Tracy and Bess and others wish Nonnie would just make the issue go away by quietly aborting the pregnancy. The local black herbal healer can get her some herbs, or she can go to the city and see a doctor there. But it isn’t just Nonnie. A 14 year old white girl gets pregnant from a young white boy, and her father goes to Dr. Deen to beg that he perform an abortion. There is an extended internal monologue where Dr. Deen wrestles with his conscience. What is most devastating about this is that he is clear that he would do the abortion without question if she had been raped or if the father was black. But, because it was consensual and the father is white, he can’t bring himself to do it, although part of him wishes he could. He ends up referring them to a city doctor. 

I noted above some of the more complex and conflicted characters. One of them is the newspaper publisher, Prentiss Reid, who has to keep his progressive ideas to himself or go out of business. It is an uncomfortable compromise - one made necessary by the culture of racism. He is also one of the few openly non-religious characters. He delivers this zinger to the daughter of the mill boss (who is more genuinely progressive):

“You’ve got it wrong, haven’t you? What they want you to do, my dear, is sponsor religion, not practice it. Don’t let your conscience mix you up. If you practiced the teachings of that man Jesus here in Maxwell, we’d think you were crazy - or communist. Don’t make any mistake about it--be damned embarrassing.” 

Not much has changed, alas. Try to actually practice the teachings of Christ these days, and you will, like me, be asked to leave the church. Know what else hasn’t changed? Religious views of gender and race. As Preacher Dunwoodie tells Tracy:

“On this earth, there’s two worlds, man’s and woman’s. Now, the woman’s has to do with the home and children and love. God’s love and man’s. The man’s world is--different. It has to do with work. Women teach us to love the Lord, and our children, and the we build the churches, don’t we, and we keep them going….Now, when a man gets over into a woman’s world, he gets into bad trouble. He don’t belong there...Too much love makes you soft.” 

He goes on to explain that being a good Christian means very different things for men and women. And yep, I feel like I have heard this sermon more than once. 

Tracy is susceptible to this sort of thing, of course, and finds himself trying to justify abandoning Nonnie. 

It’s like an obsession. Seems true to you, but everybody says it isn’t. You can’t love and respect a colored girl. No, you can’t. But you do. If you do--then there must be something bad wrong with you. It’s like playing with your body when you were a kid. You had to touch yourself. It felt good. It was good. But everyone told you it wasn’t good. Said it would drive you crazy or kill you. Decent people didn’t do it. Well...you did. You did it and liked it. And felt like hell afterward. You’d outgrown that. Now the preacher said time to outgrow this other. Past time. 

It’s this sort of gaslighting that characterizes so much of religious teaching about sex, of course. But in the American version, the sexual puritanism and the racism are one and the same. They are inseparable. Tracy never does get over Nonnie, as much as he tries. 

You’d think God wanted to play a fine joke and had made Nonnie. Here, He said, is a woman any man would love and be proud of. She has everything you could desire. But you can’t have her. No. You can have sips and tastes, but you can’t have her. And you’ll be ashamed and sneak around and feel nasty...That’s the price you have to pay--for the sips. 

Well...white men had paid it before. And thought it cheap. Guess he could too. 

This casual disrespect for the humanity of non-whites permeates the culture in the book. Even the “good guys” accept white supremacy at some level - nobody can escape it. Ms. Sadie, who is horrified by the way white men treat blacks, still thinks that “the entire Negro race was a mammoth trick which nature had played on the white race.” 

There is another great line about Mrs. Stephenson, who is quietly a loving and gracious person - but one who was strangely detached. 

You had a queer feeling about it--as if Mrs. Stephenson had died some time when nobody was noticing and now nothing was left of her but good deeds blooming like little flowers on her grave.

I want to return a bit to the role of religion as shown in this book. Preacher Dunwoodie shares something with modern preachers: he wants to save the “respectable” sorts. Meaning the wealthy, who will keep the church in business. All the Tracy Deen’s of the world are nice and all, and it is a good thing to save the mill hands, but what he really wants - and how he knows God is blessing his ministry - is for the “prominent citizens” to return to the church. And my goodness is this still true. I firmly believe one of the reasons my former pastor couldn’t do the right thing - even a little thing like keeping hate groups out of the church - is that certain prominent (and tithing) members were the driving force behind it. Address the white supremacist beliefs, and he would have lost some of his financial base. It’s that simple. 

But white supremacy goes deeper than money in religion, then and now. There is a chilling scene when the lynching party sets out. Smith makes it clear that the point isn’t justice - it is putting the “nigger in his place.” And lynching, just like our current cruelties toward brown-skinned people, is driven by a weird religious feeling. Smith describes it thus:

And sometimes there was laughter, or drawled words of voices not unkind in sound and not without humor; but eyes were hard and hating as they hunted a black victim to sacrifice to an unknown god of whom they were sore afraid. 

There is so much fear in white religion in America. A desperate fear of outsiders, of people who are different, whether racial minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, atheists, and especially people who don’t vote for Trump. Lillian Smith is on to something here - they seem eager to sacrifice other humans to an unknown god who they cannot name, but who terrifies them. Every time you see a brutal and cruel separation of immigrant families, children in cages, another African American murdered by the cops, or another gay or transgender person denied housing or a job - well, you are seeing a human sacrifice to a terrifying god that Evangelicals cannot name, even to themselves. 

Near the end, even as he realizes he can’t really publish an anti-lynching article, Reid thinks to himself of the core problem. 

That’s the South’s trouble. Ignorant, Doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t even know what’s happening outside in the world! Shut itself up with its trouble and its ignorance until the two together have gnawed the sense out of it. Believes world was created in six days. Believes white man was created by God to rule the world. As soon believe a nigger was as good as a white man as to believe in evolution. All tied up together. Ignorance. Scared of everything about science, except its gadgets. Afraid not to believe in hell, even. Afraid to be free. 

You can perhaps put “Evangelicalism” in for “South,” and “White Republican Americans” for “white man.” It’s the same thing today. Walled up in its own bubble of fear and ignorance and hate. It has been nearly three years since I left that cesspit, and as time goes by, I am ever more thankful I got out. 

This wasn’t an easy book to read. There is so much darkness in the human heart, and so much destruction caused by racism and hate. And religion, then and now, seems all too eager to feed the hate. This book is well worth reading, though, and shines an uncomfortable light on the dark realities of our culture. 

***

My wife found this book for me used. This hardback was the 13th printing (copyright 1944) Inside are a few notes by the previous owner, Kae Bell, and an inscription from the person who gave the book to her, apparently in 1944.

 Click to expand. The inscription appears to read "To Kae "44 from Bobby and Jan."

 

"Good comparison of life of a white & negro - so different? Afraid not. Damn these prejudices."

"Life goes on....... with or without the necessary corrections --"

***

Take it away, Billie Holiday:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

Florida by Lauren Groff

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

Believe it or not, I DID check out this book before the “Florida Man Challenge” swept the interwebs. Actually, I have had this on my list since NPR did an interview with the author last year.

I have always loved short stories, and try to read a few collections each year as a contrast to the longer novels I read. For some reason, lately, I have ended up reading quite a few written by southern authors. It seems as if the last century or so has been particularly rich in authors from that region, perhaps because the rural South still seems foreign to many of us.

Florida is very much in the “gothic southern” tradition, with an underlying pedal tone of menace. I think that is the best way to describe it. There is a bit of a similarity with Flannery O’Connor (who I enjoy, even though I am not always certain why), but Groff doesn’t take things to that extreme. In fact, thinking back, most of the stories have a more or less non-terrible ending. I won’t say “happy” exactly. But people don’t necessarily end up dead, dismembered, or devastated either. Although I think there is the portent of divorce in a couple. I guess you could say that things end reasonably well given the circumstances, people are traumatized, but they mostly survive.

The menace comes from multiple directions. On the one hand, everything in Florida wants to kill you. The snakes and alligators. The mosquitos. The hurricanes. The heat. But even more dangerous than nature is humanity. People range from blithely uncaring to outright hostile and abusive. Perhaps the worst, however, is the monster within. Many of the characters battle their demons, and it isn’t clear who will win. Often, the story ends, but it is clear that the battle awaits another day.

Groff often tells the story from the point of view of a woman who is not quite her, but a lot like her - so the viewpoint is generally that of a middle class white woman. But Groff also intentionally expands outward from there. As one of her characters puts it, she refuses to “barricade myself with my whiteness in a gated community.” But she is aware of the privilege that comes with a choice.

One fantastic line comes in that story:

“Isn’t it...dicey? people our parents’ age would say, grimacing, when we told them where we lived, and it took all my willpower not to say, Do you mean black, or just poor? Because it was both.”

Some of the stories are about pretty normal situations, with relationships and tensions and discovery. But others are pretty crazy. There is the man who collects reptiles and eventually dies after a bite in the field. (He isn’t the main character - but his life sets the stage for the rest of the story.) There is a particularly harrowing tale of two small sisters abandoned by their mother and her boyfriend right before a hurricane hits their island. They are resourceful, and manage to survive for weeks before they are discovered. This is one where things end well, but just barely. It is also one of a few hurricane stories. There is another where a woman falls and gives herself a nasty concussion - and she has to hold it together enough to care for her small boys until her husband returns in a few days. Another is a story of a grad student whose life spirals into homelessness when her boyfriend leaves her, and she cannot afford a place to live.

There are also a couple of interesting longer stories about Floridians on vacation in France. The theme seems to be one of leaving Florida, but still having too much Florida in you. (I can sympathize - I am a Californian through and through, even - especially - when I travel.) You can travel the world, but you can’t really leave yourself behind...

Groff’s writing is excellent - this is definitely literary fiction, not genre fiction. I admired a number of turns of phrase as I read through the book, and the psychology was intriguing. The story about the concussion was particularly impressive in the way the narrator’s story blended between her rational brain and the addled and concussed brain in unexpected yet entirely believable ways. It is vivid, carefully crafted storytelling, and compelling.

***

Hey, this is a good excuse to link one of my favorite Clint Black tunes - it has been my anthem (or better yet, an anti-anthem) for the past couple decades.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by Daina Ramey Berry

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This was another of those books on the New Books Shelf that called to me with its siren song as I walked by. Apparently, I am not the only one to hear its call, as both my older daughters want to read it when I am done. 

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is an interesting and highly disturbing book. It combines the dry statistics of the economics of slavery with the voices of the enslaved themselves. The book examines the valuations of the enslaved from prebirth (in the form of the value of a fertile female), through the various stages of life, down to the value of corpses and body parts on the market after death.

The author has an interesting story herself. In her note at the beginning, she describes growing up in a California college town as the daughter of two college professors. She also experienced being black in a white world. She too would follow the path of academia, and decided to research and write this book to attempt to communicate the stark difference between the value that our society places on black bodies and the valuation that said human beings place on themselves. I strongly recommend reading the introductory materials for that reason. Her own experiences (like that of many of my non-white friends and colleagues) is of being devalued.

I also want to make a particular note of the way Berry uses language in this book. She makes a deliberate and highly effective choice in how she describes the players in the tragedy of American slavery. You will not see her use “master” or “owner.” And she will not use “slave” except when quoting others. (Particularly in advertisements of slave auctions.)

Instead, she uses words that more accurately reflect the reality of the “peculiar institution” and those participated in it.

Thus, she uses “enslaver” and “enslaved.” Both of these reflect the reality and the inherent worth of all humans. A person is not a “slave,” which implies some sort of status or lower value. It isn’t the person who is a particular way. And likewise, people are not owned. You cannot “own” a fellow human in any real sense.

Rather, all that you can do is use violence (legally sanctioned, but violence nonetheless) to enslave someone. These words thus bring into stark and unforgiving light what slavery really is. Enslavers (those who “own” those they enslave) have and continue to exercise violence against their fellow humans. Every single minute that they profit from this violence, they have intentionally, actively, chosen to do evil to their fellow man. It is analogous to rape. A person is a rapist during every single minute they are raping (and afterward too), and to enslave is a continual rape of another human’s dignity and inherent human worth.

Likewise, a person does not lose their inherent human worth and dignity because he or she has had violence perpetrated against them. That is why “enslaved” works so well. They were not any different in value, but they were the continual victims of violence by the enslavers.

Words matter, and I believe I am going to adopt this usage in the future, because it focuses attention not on status but on the perpetual, intentional evil of what was done.

One more observation that the author makes really struck me. This book is new, so it mentions the Black Lives Matter movement, and its relationship to history. The author notes that the name itself as well as the movement is an attempt to reject the devaluing of their lives and worth. But the author also insists that the historical record is that Black Bodies Matter. During American Slavery, in fact, the value of a black body was pretty easy to determine. After slavery was ended, however, black bodies ceased to be of economic value to whites, and thus, in our current day, they are devalued. I think there is a lot of truth in this. As I previously blogged, I believe that the most significant reason why we have not adopted universal health care like the rest of the civilized world is that we have a huge hangup about valuing non-whites as much as whites. Poverty, whether accurately or not, is racialized in our nation, and the rhetoric around everything from healthcare to education to wages is infected by the fear that we might actually do something to benefit blacks.

This book is extensively researched - just reading the bit at the end of all the primary sources she waded through, the archives of documents from insurance records to plantation records to auction notices spanning 100 years. Links to many of these sources can be found on the author’s website. She uses three categories of valuation: the appraisal value (which was typically listed on the auction notices), sale value, and insurance value.

The book is divided into chapters based on the stages of a person’s life. Thus, the first chapter deals with “Preconception,” the premium of value placed on fertile enslaved women. This is a profoundly uncomfortable chapter to read. Berry quotes extensively from primary sources as she describes how the enslaved were bred and mated and described using the same language as that of animal husbandry. This is contrasted with the way the enslaved themselves described their love, their dreams, and their bodies. I dare you to read this chapter and not walk away shaken. (Unless you are Doug Wilson, of course. Or a sociopath. But I repeat myself.)

The next chapter tells of infancy and childhood. And it too is heart wrenching. Despite the lies of those who would minimize slavery, it was all too common for children and infants to be sold away from their parents, particularly around the age of the first signs of puberty, when the value of an enslaved person started a rapid climb. And parents and children knew they would usually never see each other again. This is the dehumanization of the enslaved that Harriet Beecher Stowe so poignantly portrayed in the book that Abraham Lincoln claimed started the Civil War.

After this comes the chapter on the prime of life. While whites had relatively short lifespans in the 1700s and 1800s, those of slaves were far shorter, for a number of reasons. First, infant and child mortality rates were high, largely because of poor nutrition and lack of medical care. Second, and there is no way to sugar coat this, the enslaved were worked to death on poor food. Their lives were valued for the brutal labor which could be extracted by violence. Interesting in this chapter was the parallel with modern professional sports: the ages of 18 through 35 were the prime years, and values declined sharply after that. Understandable for those who depend on microscopic advantages of strength and coordination in playing a game. But not so much for the value of a human life. I’m already an old man by those standards.

Old age and disability get a chapter too, and the various values placed on older enslaved persons. There is also a significant difference here between the economic values placed by enslavers versus the values the enslaved themselves put on elders.

One chapter that was filled with information that was completely new to me was the one on postmortem values. The era of American slavery coincided with the rise of modern medical knowledge. That knowledge was gained, then as now, through the dissection of cadavers. The problem was, where to get them? Well, around the world, criminals were often fair game, as were the extremely impoverished or those with no known relatives. So almshouses, hospitals and prisons were common sources. These rarely produced sufficient specimens, so grave robbing became a common practice. To a degree, the authorities looked the other way when this was done.

In America, though, there was another source. Enslavers could sell the corpses of the enslaved to medical schools, and they often did. In addition, robbing the graves of the enslaved was rarely punished, and thus less risky than looking for white victims. This chapter has more macabre information about the illicit cadaver trade than I had anticipated. It is both fascinating and horrifying.

Also particularly interesting was the existence of “resurrectionists,” persons who specialized in exhuming corpses. A couple of these were particularly well known, and were enslaved persons who worked for Southern medical schools. Chris Baker gets a number of pages, because his life was well documented. (He continued his job after emancipation, and appears in a number of pictures with (white) medical students.) Just how many bodies were dissected, then buried in mass graves is unknown, but many have been found on site at these schools. There is a move now to give them proper burial.

One of the interesting points raised by the author is one that a minister, T. Doughty Miller addressed in a sermon. How ironic is it that while claiming that blacks were subhuman, their bodies were in demand for learning human anatomy. Well, are they human or not? That’s a particularly uncomfortable question to ask about those you are violently enslaving, isn’t it?

Of course, medical dissection was hardly the only possible end for the enslaved. In the case of famous insurrectionist Nat Turner, after he was hanged, spectators cut off various body parts as souvenirs. It is believed that some of his skin was tanned and used as leather for purses and such like, and other parts put on display. In fact, right before the book was published, his skull was finally found, and confirmed by DNA evidence to be likely his. It will finally, nearly 200 years later, be laid to rest.

The point here isn’t that dissection is wrong, but that black bodies were bought and sold for this purpose, often in defiance of the wishes of either the deceased or their families.

Really, this is the point, more than anything else. Slavery is violence because it strips from human beings their volition and their ability to control their very bodies, that intimate part of themselves. This is why it infuriates me when people like Doug Wilson and other defenders of slavery rise to stand in judgment of that which they will never know. To minimize and dismiss the experiences of others like that is astoundingly arrogant, and devoid of empathy. Not a surprise from Wilson, whose sociopathic tendencies are on full display in more than just his dogged insistence that slavery wasn’t so bad and that the South had the moral high ground.

What is more disappointing to me is to see otherwise decent people insist that they can sit in judgment on police brutality, stand by as non-whites are demonized by right-wing media - and a certain prominent leader - and casually dismiss the experiences of those harmed.

This is why this book is so powerful. It makes an unforgettable juxtaposition of the clinical numbers of enslavement and the words of the enslaved. The financial meets the personal, and one can only shudder at the violence done to humans made in the image of God - and this violence was done in the name of filthy profit.

It also gives us reason to think twice before making profit our only goal in our economic policy. While working for substandard wages is better than slavery, it still is a devaluing of the lives of other human beings. Just as WalMart insured the lives of its workers without their consent (this is mentioned in the book), it is too easy to just dismiss the needs of those below us on the ladder. To conclude that it really isn’t that important that they have access to medical care, that they have sufficient housing and food, that their children have an education. To the enslaved themselves, their souls had intimate value, and we do well to remember that the lives and fortunes of our fellow humans have that value too. When we determine that a few more dollars of profit for ourselves or for (in the case of GOP policy) for those who already have the most are worth less than the lives of others, when we determine that subjective fear on the part of a person with a badge and a gun is worth more than the lives of others, we do violence to them that is a close kin to the enslavement of the past.

This is an outstanding book, and one I recommend everyone read. Along with Remembering Jim Crow, it proves the power of listening to the perspectives of those who have suffered injustice, lest we be too quick to dismiss their lives and cling to our own privilege.

***

Just for fun, let me give you my own philosophy on dissections and such. My wife is an ICU nurse, so she deals with both organ donation and disposal of remains. (She also has a limited role in pronouncing people dead.) As such, I probably have a gallows humor approach to such things. In any event, I am an organ donor, I have the dot on my driver’s license, and I would be happy to let my body parts be used by someone else when I am done with them.

I also have told my wife that it would be fine with me if science could use me. There is a certain fun in the thought of medical students making Yorick jokes with my skull for generations to come. Alas, it appears that plastic skeletons are cheaper and easier to maintain these days, so not so likely there. I could, I suppose, settle for the cadaver thing.

But ultimately, when they are done with whatever they can use, spread my ashes in my beloved forest.

The Elephant in the Discussion of Public Benefits

Over a few days in the last week, I have gotten into an involved discussion over the state of health care in the United States, specifically the problem of a proposed bill that would cut $880 billion from Medicaid, the government program which provides health insurance for the lower income citizens of our nation. These are working class people, the working poor, but also the disabled, the seriously ill, seniors who are below the poverty level, and those in nursing homes. These are the most vulnerable of our population, and one party is determined to stop helping them. And because they are poor, if this lifeline is cut, they will simply have to do without meaningful access to health care. (And no, the ER is not a substitute. Try managing cardiovascular disease or cancer or diabetes using the ER. Or getting a timely diagnosis of a fixable problem.) This is the primary reason why the nonpartisan CBO estimates that about 28 million will lose health coverage as a result of the GOP plan.

In the course of this discussion, a common thread keeps coming up:

These people should pay for themselves. It is immoral to take money from those who deserve have earned it, and give it to those who do not deserve it haven’t earned it.

The working poor are accused of being lazy, of not caring enough to take care of themselves, and so on. No amount of facts will sway these people either. I have pointed out that someone who earns $10 an hour as a single person is in this category - and the same earner with a family of four is actually below the poverty level. No, the poor deserve to go without health care, and the real problem with the world is that we reward the the poor, who don’t deserve anything, with benefits, taking funds away from the wealthy, who have “earned it.”

I may well blog in more depth at some point about how Social Darwinism has become the guiding ethic for the Right - and for far too many American Christians. But for now, I just want to look at a little history.

About four years ago, I ended up researching the connection between the Christian Patriarchy movement and White Supremacy, and I ran across a fascinating and chilling document from the past.

Looking back, I believe this was the turning point in my journey away from the Republican Party and from my former political beliefs in general.

But, you asked for my opinion of this fearful question of the negro in our common schools. It is not necessary for me to repeat the points so strongly put by “Civis.” To one of them only, I would add my voice: the unrighteousness of expending vast sums, wrung by a grinding taxation from our oppressed people, upon a pretended education of freed slaves; when the State can neither pay its debts, nor attend to its own legitimate interests. Law and common honesty both endorse the maxim: “A man must be just before he is generous.” The action of the State, in wasting this money thus, which is due to her creditors, is as inexcusable as it is fantastical. I do know that not a few of our white brethren, before the war, independent and intelli­gent, are now prevented from educating their own children, because they are compelled to keep them in the cornfield, labor­ing from year’s end to year’s end, to raise these taxes to give a pretended education to the brats of the black paupers, who are loafing around their plantations, stealing a part of the scanty crops and stock their poor, struggling boys are able to raise. Not seldom has this pitiful sight made my blood boil with in­dignation, and then made my heart bleed with the thought. (From The Negro and the Common School)

That quote is by Robert Lewis Dabney, a Confederate chaplain, purveyor of viciously racist (and sexist) ideas. The whole article is worth reading, because it pretty clearly lays out the exact same argument made by the Right for why it is supposedly immoral to spend tax dollars on the poor.

After discovering this quote, and realizing that - at least back then - the argument against public sector investment was based on racism and a desire to dehumanize and deprive African Americans of full access to society, I started to look a little closer at the subsequent history.

And guess what? It turns out there is a real history of race as the undercurrent in our discussion about public benefits. (Yeah, I know, I’m late to this realization…)

First, let’s unpack the Dabney quote.

Dabney makes the argument that it is “unrighteous” to tax whites to pay for public schools for blacks. This is such a direct parallel to the argument made today that it is startling. The idea is that wealth “belongs” to those who happen to have it (in many cases because of systems which benefit them at the expense of the poor) and that it is morally wrong to change that. Basically, this is the spirit of “I deserve and earned everything I have, and the fact that you don’t have it is not my problem.”

Second, note that Dabney claims that using funds to benefit blacks deprives whites. This too is the exact same argument, that spending funds on health care (or other benefits) for the poor causes hardship to those who deserve what they have. This is also the false dichotomy at work. It isn’t “either we educate blacks or we educate whites.” As it turned out, whites still got educated after we started funding public schools for blacks. Heck, whites still get educated after Brown v. Board of Education.

Third, Dabney insists that blacks are lazy thieves, and don’t really benefit from the education. Again, this is the exact same argument made today.

And there is more, if you read the entire article. Dabney claims that public education for blacks will cause them to become dependent on government.

Dabney complains that his tax dollars - which are rightfully his, of course - are being taken from him for a project he deplores.

In what sounds appalling today, Dabney dismisses the counterargument that as long as blacks can vote, shouldn’t they be educated with a statement that he doesn’t think blacks should have the vote, so why should he pay to educate them.

And there is more: public education just encourages idleness in blacks. Education encourages him to be uppity, rather than content and hardworking at the manual labor to which he is destined. And the training for manual labor should be started at age five, and if necessary, blacks should be “apprenticed” to white folks. Hmm, at some point, this starts to sound a lot like slavery. Or at least Jim Crow, right?

And Dabney goes on to condemn the idea of education being in the public sector at all. He argues that people should take care of it - pay for it - themselves. Whites can fund their schools, and blacks can fund theirs. And even the low income whites? They should just fend for themselves. Hmm, this too sounds familiar. Let the poor take care of their own health care - they surely can make it happen if they try hard enough. And if they can’t, well too damn bad.

It struck me at the time, and strikes me even more now that this is the exact same argument.

All we have done is change the terms slightly. We now do not expressly say “negroes,” but just use “lazy takers.” The rest is the same.

How about the history of public benefits? The more I read, the more I am struck by the fact that the popularity of any government benefit is directly related to which people it is perceived as benefiting. In the case of public schools, it is clear Dabney deplores them primarily because they benefit blacks. But there are more.

Here is an early example: The Homestead Act.

This is the government program that allowed my immigrant ancestors in the 1880s to rise from poverty to the middle class. We got free land from the government (plundered from Native Americans).

Technically, the Homestead Act was available to non-whites, but whites (including 1st generation immigrants) were overwhelmingly the beneficiaries. Why? Well, you had to start with enough to farm the land - seeds, animals, tools - and build a shelter. How would you get that? Well, you might save a grub stake. Or you might borrow money. Neither of these were readily available to non-whites. This isn’t to say that blacks didn’t homestead. Some did. In fact, there is a historical African American settlement not too far from where I live, preserved as a state park.

But for the most part, this was a program that benefited whites, not blacks. I would say equally important was that it was perceived as benefiting whites, and that is what ensured its popularity.

Another example: Social Security

When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it did not apply to all workers. It specifically excluded domestic workers and agricultural workers.

Much ink has been shed about why this was, with the official SSA position being that it was “administrative,” that is, that it would be too much work to collect payroll taxes from small farms and from families that employed servants. But I think this is too simplistic. The issue isn’t whether the act was intended to exclude non-whites, but whether the fact that it did in practice tend to benefit whites much more than blacks contributed to its popularity.

In fact, 65 percent of the black workforce (and 66 percent of other, non-white races) were excluded from Social Security. These government benefits largely went to whites for decades, until the law was changed.

Those who discount the racial aspect point out that more whites were excluded (by numbers) than blacks. This too misses the point. If two thirds of white men were excluded, there is no way in hell the act would have passed in that form. If things were reversed, with most non-whites getting benefits, while whites were excluded, there would have been mass hysteria over the bill.

Again, perception is key. When most of us whites think of Social Security, we think of grandma. We don’t think of the ghetto. Social Security is (for good reason) a wildly popular program, which has made old age less of a terror for all of us.

Later on, Medicare and Medicaid were created, and their parallel yet divergent courses also shed light on the way that perception as to who gets benefits determines perception of the program. Both Medicare (which is a single payer, heavily subsidized, guaranteed issue insurance for the elderly) and Medicaid (which is similar, but for the poor, disabled, and those in nursing homes) were established in 1965. This was one year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This fact is vitally important.

The Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow and Segregation. But Medicare and Medicaid were vital parts of this change too. Neither Medicare nor Medicaid would pay anything to hospitals or other medical providers that segregated, either by excluding non-whites OR by physically segregating patients in the hospital. Money talks, and this desegregated hospitals overnight.

It is easy to forget that prior to this, it was literally impossible for many blacks to obtain health care, even if they could afford it. Doctors and hospitals would not accept them.

Medicare is linked to Social Security, and shares its perception as being the way to take care of grandma. Medicaid, on the other hand, is squarely in the sights of the GOP as a program to be abolished. Perhaps this is because it is perceived as benefiting people of color - those moochers - at the expense of whites.

Let’s look back too at the segregation issue. Along with desegregation, the Medicare/Medicaid system also brought poor people into middle and upper class hospitals. A hospital that took Medicare had to accept Medicaid as well, so the poor - and non-whites - suddenly could afford medical care. There are people I know from my grandparents’ generation who still complain about having the “riff-raff” in the waiting room with them.

Just one more comment on this. It is in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - and the ensuing kerfuffle over Bob Jones University’s insistence on remaining segregated - that the Religious Right was founded - on a pro-segregation platform. At the same time, there was the recognition that naked racism wouldn’t necessarily play as a political cause. The Religious Right made an intentional pivot to abortion as the cause celebre, while embracing a libertarian and Social Darwinist economic vision - same result, but without the racist baggage.

Now, with the triumph of the Paul Ryan sorts, the official economic policy of the GOP is indeed one of Social Darwinism. (This is in contrast to even 9 years ago, with George W. Bush, who still believed that we should try to alleviate suffering.) The teachings of Ayn Rand, of Ludwig von Mises, and of Murray Rothbard are the official doctrine of the Right at this point. A discussion of the specifically Social Darwinist views must await a future post.

But it bears mentioning that all three of the above called for the abolition of civil rights laws. Rand herself said that the Civil Rights Act was worse than Communism (!!). Von Mises abhorred the Civil Rights Act, particularly the part that forbid employers from refusing to hire non-whites. Rothbard too made abolition of the Civil Rights Act central to his economic vision.

I do not believe the embrace of these ideas by the Right is an accident. It allowed people to come to the same policies while still thinking well of themselves.

I believe that at an emotional level, whether it is acknowledged to one’s self or not, we are still fiercely tribal creatures. Our willingness to share with others is directly proportional to how alike we perceive them to be. When we denigrate others as “lazy moochers,” or “unwilling to work hard,” or say they “didn’t earn it,” we aren’t envisioning our own children, our own relatives, our own tribe. We are envisioning “those people,” whoever they happen to be.

With 150 years of US history showing an ongoing problem with racism - really our national sin - it seems unlikely that we would be saying the same things about who does and does not deserve basic needs like health care unless we, deep down, meant the same thing. Even if we have somehow overcome the racial element, we have merely shifted into class hatred, and view all the poor (not just the brown ones) with contempt. Whatever else this is, it is in no possible way a Christian sentiment.

I’ll end with this thought:

For 150 years, we have justified withholding public benefits of various sorts, from education to health care, because of racist views. We have used certain arguments about why we shouldn’t help those outside our tribe.

Now, once again, we are making the exact same arguments, just with a more esoteric explanation - really a utopian philosophy that everyone benefits when we refuse to help the poor. Is it really likely that we rejected our racism, started from scratch, and came to the exact same conclusion, but this time for totally valid reasons? Or is it more likely that we continue to harbor the same tribalist, selfish instincts, and the same belief that non-whites are just a bunch of lazy moochers, unworthy of the basic humanity we grant to ourselves and those like us. We just know that we can’t say that out loud - even to ourselves…

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More Dabney racism. 

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The worst part about all of this is that every single person who made the above argument to me was:

1. White
2. Male
3. Middle to upper class
4. Considered himself to be a devout Christian

I believe that the reason that American White Evangelicals (and Dabney back in the day) have embraced the Social Darwinism of Ayn Rand, and also embraced the lies about the poor that go along with it, is that they are faced with a lot of cognitive dissonance: the founder of our religion clearly tied our eternal destiny to how we treat “the least of these,” so we have to have some rationalization for why we do not do what Christ commands - and why our politics works toward the opposite goal. Perhaps I will write about that in the future.

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Note on comments: Please read my Comment Policy before commenting.

Also, for purposes of this post, I will delete any comments that repeat the same talking points, particularly:

1. The poor are lazy
2. Taking taxes and redistributing them is “theft.” I already know the Rand/Von Mises/Rothbard position.
3. It isn’t the job of the government - it is for private charity. See below. And, if you can show any society since the invention of modern medicine, which has provided healthcare for its poor without government aid and only with private charity, then fine. But I have been able to discover evidence of any such thing.

I doubt anyone can honestly dispute that terminating or cutting funding for health coverage for the poorest citizens will cause them serious hardship. If you believe there is a better way to do it, you need to show the following:

1. A concerted effort to create said alternative. Speculation isn’t enough: it must be currently ongoing as an effort.
2. Such effort MUST be actively seeking out the poor, the sick, and those with preexisting conditions. If not, then it really isn’t addressing this problem. It may well be good, but it isn’t sufficient.
3. Such effort MUST have sufficient funding - or a viable plan to obtain it - to cover a $880 Billion shortfall. Because if it doesn’t, it will not be able to actually cover the poor, the sick, etc.
4. Such an effort MUST have a way of keeping the healthy from fleeing and leaving the sick to fend for themselves - otherwise, it will collapse.
5. Such an effort MUST cover those outside of the tribe. So one that is just for christians of a particular theology (including no alcohol,tobacco, etc.) or just for people who do not have mental health issues will by its nature exclude many.
6. It must be prepared right now to absorb 28 million who will mostly be sick and poor. If it cannot step in immediately to assist those who will be cut off, then it is illusory. If you burn my house down, it is of cold comfort that someday in the future, someone might rebuild it.

So, this rules out existing programs like Medi-Share, which does not fit any of the conditions except the first. If you try to sneak your “alternative” in and it does not satisfy these conditions, I will delete your comment.