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Why haven't we paid reparations, again?

Calvin College's History Department just posted a link to this article on their facebook wall.

History and guilt

Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust?

History-guilt is one of those topics that, for me, I can't help but muse about.  As an upper-middle-class white American who happened to take an unconventional course track to achieve an undergraduate history minor, I've faced my nation's (and, though I'm less certain of it, my ancestors') past sins in convicting ways in convicting contexts.  Such convictions are not something I put aside easily.

The above article talks about collective guilt versus collective responsibility, and one conclusion drawn from that discussion is that, while we are not, as a nation, continuously guilty for the atrocities of our nation's history, we are responsible for them and it is morally imperative that we not sweep them under a rug, that we not gild them with narratives of triumph and teamwork, and that we address them in our present and accept them as our past.

The Americas were settled by conquerors, and by the time America declared itself a country, many of those conquerers considered their native enemies to be subhuman pests in need of eradication.  Pre-America Americans treated the native tribes around them in much the same way that modern Americans treat packs of wolves today: as dangerous, incomprehensible, curiosities that might deserve their own place in the world, but only if it does not interfere with our livestock.  It's true that some early settlers of North America worked within an understood peace with Native American peoples, trading with them instead of killing them outright, marrying into their tribes and developing mutually beneficial hybrid cultures.  But for the large part, mutually beneficial relationships were not the ones that formed the foundation for the United States.

While the British still controlled the North American colonies, they used them as penal colonies for their worst criminals as well as their Irish and Scottish rebels.  Indentured servitude was the name of the game, establishing a divide that is still alive today, wherein the working class is often seen as second-rate citizens, as ignorant, and even evil.  This was only intensified with the growth of the popularity of slavery, and as white slavers shipped in foreign workers from Africa (and possibly India), America continued to build itself up on the backs of people whose liberty had been stolen from them.

Our country is a great country.  It could be a better country, I think everyone agrees, though they may disagree on what changes should be made.  Our country is full of opportunity, where people who work hard can often change their stars, where the descendants of Irish immigrants who came here with naught but the clothes on their backs are able, today, to go to college and become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professionals.

But our country's past is not great.  It is not forgivable, nor has it been sufficiently paid for by those who have benefited from the persecutions of others.  Though our president is African-American*, poor people and imprisoned people are also largely black.  A sobering look at American history shows us that, though there are modern factors at play in those realities, many of the stumbling blocks that caused them were established at the founding of this country and have only grown since.  The real-estate practice of red-lining--keeping black Americans from buying homes in certain neighborhoods--cut off economic opportunity to blacks for decades, opportunity that was open to whites who were able to buy houses and use that capital to lend money to children for college payments, car loans, and even mortgages.  Red-lining was born out of a racism that believed that blacks brought crime with them wherever they went and so would lower property values of any neighborhoods where they lived.  That racism stems from the same racism as slavery, and the same racism as the European conquest of the Americas.

Our country was founded and expanded on that racism.  I likely have many of the opportunities I have because of that racism.  It's not a pretty picture; American history.  But whitewashing it only makes it uglier.  From the above article,

"Rather than looking at the history of Jim Crow, we turn Martin Luther King’s birthday into a national holiday and put his statue on the Mall. Yet we would be disturbed by a German lesson plan that mentioned the Holocaust as a terrible thing, and then went on too quickly to described those heroes — Willy Brandt, Sophie Scholl, Claus von Stauffenberg — who opposed it. With far too few exceptions, America’s history of freedom-fighting — from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall — is doing just that."

Paying monetary reparations, establishing affirmative action, and enforcing strict equal-opportunity laws are important steps for our nation to take in order to accept legal responsibility for its actions.  What does it look like when we, as individuals and as a country, begin to take moral responsibility for our past?  I haven't sold any human beings into slavery and I didn't build my house by bulldozing someone else's while they were still living in it, and maybe if I had done those things in the 1700's, someone today could  make an argument that I shouldn't be held to a modern moral standard for things done earlier than the standard's creation.  But we have the morals now, and that past isn't magically wiped away; we know it, we're still studying it, but we haven't paid for it.  Right now, all the wrong people are paying for it, because those of us who have benefited refuse to look at those who were stepped on to get us to where we are today.

We are not guilty of our ancestor's crimes.  We are responsible for the consequences that still exist today, and we are responsible for seeing that those who suffered are restored.  This is an American problem.  What is the best American solution?

Human in the end

I have no internet at my apartment and I still have scads of unpacking and arranging to do, so naturally, I am watching a lot of television. I'm limited to the shows whose seasons I own on DVD--DVDs I stopped collecting after I got my Netflix account three years ago--so I'm currently on side B of disc 1 of the first season of The West Wing.

For those of you not familiar with the show, it's a fast-paced, über-witty, Aaron Sorkin extravaganza that follows the administration of a fictional Democratic POTUS whose term is supposed to appear to take place around the turn of this century, when the show was on the air, but doesn't interact with almost any specific, real-time events or people in the real world. It's incredibly well written and intelligent, and, if my Poli-Sci 101 grade is any indication, it's pretty educational. I've seen the first season probably a good three or four times more than any of the others, in part because my mom has this morbid fascination with the first seasons of shows, and in part because it was the only one I was able to swipe from my parents' house.

The episode that I just finished was called "Mr. Willis of Ohio." It's a fascinating episode for many reasons and it's one that I gladly rewatch every once in a while, but I was engaged this time by something I'm not sure Sorkin meant to call attention to. (I mean, I can't be sure; Sorkin has always struck me as a man who walks a thin line between being a god among writers and being an arrogant guy who would claim coincidence as art to keep from looking too mortal, so maybe he does plan everything people experience while watching his shows, or maybe he'd swear he does.)

There's a particularly dramatic scene in "Mr. Willis" where The President is explaining to his 19-year-old daughter that she is a huge security risk, especially since she is about to start college. President Bartlet is a passionate man who uses eloquent and, in this case, terrifying rhetoric to make people see his points, so instead of calmly illuminating the situation, he enacts quite the display.

The look on Zoe's face as her father is reaming her out for being a teenager when he has a country to run made me think, in a way I hadn't before, about celebrity and its costs. Zoe Bartlet never existed, but Barack Obama does have a wife and two daughters, and their family existed before his presidency. Before the campaigns, the fund raisers, the approval ratings, before the late nights, the death threats, the "friends" coming out of the woodwork, they were a family. But trying to imagine even that family's camping trips that involve hacky sacks instead of cell phones and late nights that result in nothing more than children being grounded for a week seems unrealistic to me.

I don't like politics, I don't like reality television, and I kind of thought North was a nice name and definitely thought it was a stupid topic of conversation, but I would be a dirty hypocrite if I said I didn't understand and even relate to their popularity. I'm an avid reader and amateur writer, I understand and enjoy drama. Every time I'm in the grocery store check out line, I do glance at the excitement there, if only just to look smugly down my nose.

My derision doesn't make the stars of these big stages any safer, any more common, any less of a spectacle. It doesn't give them any more opportunities to take control of their own lives. Even in my entertainment snobbery, I am still a stranger inexplicably involved in a stranger's life, and it is the existence of vast groups of so involved stangers that necessitates that conversation between a president and his daughter, and that leads to that look on Zoe Bartlet's face. A girl fearing for her life and the influence it has that she never asked for and that now she doesn't know what to do with.

Some people do work to get that influence, but it always comes with unforseen if not undeserved consequences.  What is the correct response, as a common person, to celebrity? Even when the phrase "they knew what they were getting into" applies, does it cover all the sins people in the public eye have to endure?

I was in London during the Royal Wedding two years ago. When asked to write my congratulations to the happy couple in chalk on the sidewalks outside Buckingham Palace, I wrote "Better you than me." Royalty, especially modern royalty, is the perfect example of celebrity without choice, and that little Prince George was a household name before the boy even had a name strikes me as sad and frightening. I can't put my finger on why, though.

That other blog

As always, I have a new post over at The Post Calvin.  If you like mild conspiracy theories, unofficial psychological studies, and analyses of my eccentricities, check it out.

You fill up my senses like a night in a forest

I just returned from a week of camping in the Rockies with my extended family on my mother’s side.  The biggest life-lesson take-aways were these: 

1) On a dewey morning, it feels practically impossible to start a campfire without using lighter fluid. 

2) No campfire is as satisfying as the one you ignited without using lighter fluid.

3) Watching people cook food over a fire you started and tended largely by yourself makes you feel like a breadwinner, even when you’re unemployed. 

4) Charred marshmallows are very tasty.  Charred bagels are useless. 

5) Spitting Knob Creek whiskey into a 8-foot bonfire is an almost certain method of ridding your entire family of eyebrows. 

6) Nothing brings a family together like a mutual lack of eyebrows.

You may have noticed a trend.  Don't worry; so did I.

Poetry of the Periodic

If you’ve read any works of English literature, especially fiction, and, perhaps especially old fiction, you know what a periodic sentence is.  You might not know that you know it, which is something delightful about grammar and linguistics that I’ll save to discuss another time. 

A periodic sentence, by definition, is a sentence in which the main clause—the one with the subject and the verb—comes at the end. 

For your pleasure, see these examples:

Having no where else to go and seeing no end to the long, cold, dark of the night around him, Sanjay shuffled into the dirty, dimly-lit place. 

The rain threatening to drown both players and spectators, the football game nevertheless continued.

 Living alone in a house with no one but a dog for company, Mary Margaret watched way too much Netflix.

You’ll notice that I have underlined the subject and bolded its predicate (or the verb and all other words that talk about the subject).  You’ll also notice that there is more to this syntactical construction than its definition.

Take, for instance, the first example sentence.  Think back to the first time you read it.  It was more than half over before you even knew whom you were reading about or what his seemingly dismal position would lead him to do.  Placing the other clause in front built the suspense for you, made you want to finish the sentence, made it so you couldn’t guess the end if you wanted to.  Moreover, once the sentence was over, you probably felt a strange sense of release.  “Ah, yes,” you may have thought to yourself, either consciously or subconsciously, “Sanjay and that dirty, dimly lit place.  Good, good.  It all makes sense now.” 

There’s probably some solid psychology that could be brought in here.  It seems to me that periodic sentences are like a puzzle that the brain longs to solve. Fluent English speakers are trained to look for the subject early and when we don’t find it, our brains just whirr and whirr like little wind up cars with the wheels held off the ground.  Once we find the subject, the sentence makes sense and our brains can slow down again.  But that extra little burst of effort flags that sentence as important, as something to remember, like a little trophy our brains can hang on a wall saying, “I solved that puzzle!”

Now that you know the basics of the periodic sentence, what do you want to do with the little gems?  You already see how they can be used to build suspense and create memorable moments out of otherwise mundane prose, but what other tricks do periodic sentences have at their disposal?

Well, art, for one thing.  Suspense is not something reserved for mystery novels or comedic writing with punch lines.  There is poetry in the periodic sentence.  A famous example of someone who saw a periodic opportunity and took it is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem, “Snowflakes.”

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow,
Descends the snow.

Oooh, do you feel the chill down your spine?  That’s what art feels like.  Certainly, the artistry in this little ditty is not contained solely in the delayed syntactical gratification of the subject and predicate, but surely we can all agree that

The snow descends
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow.

Is a very different—and somehow, inexplicably less spine-chill-inducing—poem.

Can a sentence can be too periodic to be useful?  Of course.  You throw too many clauses in front and they can get confusing to the point where even a puzzle-loving brain can’t keep it all together by the time the subject comes around to clear everything up.   Some critics of the periodic sentence will tell you that its construction in most literature is used primarily as a tool of pretention to make writing seem more intellectually elevated.  Others will say that it has no place in literature because it breaks up reading flow, or is so often written poorly.

One way to ruin a good periodic sentence is to dangle or misplace your modifiers.  People will joke about such things, but I hardly think some of these gaffs are laughable.

Stepping into the room, the light turned on.

Do you see what I’ve done?  Heinously, I’ve given a mere light enough physical control to not only step into a room, but also to turn itself on.  Let us hope that the light is of an age to use such control responsibly.

Walking to and fro, Michelangelo was the topic of conversation between Ke$ha and her mother.

We can set my excessive use of the passive voice aside for now when we see the atrocity I’ve committed at either zombifying a long-dead Michelangelo or sending Ke$ha and her mother back in time as time ambassadors.  These are puzzles no brain can solve.

However, I am of the mind that periodic sentences—when devoid of the atrocious modifier mistakes—can be so overdone, so overtly pretentious, and so useless, that it crosses that invisible barrier, does a U-turn, and returns to the realm of art.  If periodic sentences are puzzles, then, taken on their own, without the need for speed or ease of reading, they can actually be rather stimulating to read and decode. 

This whole post has been a ploy for me to be able to show you my own carefully constructed, prize-winning periodic sentence.  Earlier this year, it was vetted by a classroom full of undergraduate grammarians and their professors, and deemed worthy of the reward of a singing Lady Gaga toothbrush.

For your pleasure, read it below.