Books about White People

Here is a picture of five books, all published between 1969 and 1972:

And here is a sixth, published in 1969:

I came across these while unpacking books into a new bookshelf, and had for the most part forgotten about both owning them and having once read each of them. (The occasion for first reading them was a dissertation chapter on Norman Mailer's journalism.) The books are striking today for their contemporary relevance.

Each deals with what, in the wake of Richard Nixon's election, seemed to be a movement toward a kind of white identity politics. White Americans, particularly working-class white Americans,  these writers argue, had come to see themselves as a kind of aggrieved identity group and were now voting on those grievances. The result was the election of Nixon and a a cultural "backlash" against the Civil Rights movement and the counterculture. The writers presented here disagree considerably both about the legitimacy of these grievances and the likely longterm political consequences of them.

What they agree upon, however, is that whiteness had been, in the late 1960s, politicised. Once taken as simply the given background of American life, whiteness was now the terrain of political discussion, its meaning and value argued over by professional critics and shop foremen alike. 

This is perhaps the first lesson these books hold for our current cultural and political moment. It is not so much that Donald Trump is like Nixon (to the extent that either of them is psychologically knowable from afar, they seem strikingly different). Rather, it is that the politicisation of whiteness was a necessary precondition for the rise of both. To put that more starkly: politicised whiteness would seem to be a threat to progressive politics, and perhaps to the political order as a whole. 

The second lesson these books hold is that not all identities are politicised equally. Each of these books speaks to the concerns of white voters and of working-class voters and they for the most part see the working class as white by default. All of that remains mostly true of our current concern with and politicisation of white Americans. (The one important difference might be the post-industrial blurring of the distinctions between working-class, unemployed, and chronically under-employed people.)

The Nixon-era books, however, politicise another identity category, one that is almost entirely absent from political discussion today: White ethnicity. Pieces of a Dream is subtitled The Ethnic Worker's Crisis with America, and that concern with ethnicity is a theme that runs through all six books. The difference between a descendent of English Americans and a descendent of Italian or Lithuanian ones was, in the Nixon era, front and centre. Today, it hardly registers.

There is, maybe, a glimmer of hope here. Not that the identity category of "white" might be segmented into different ethnicities and pitted against itself, but that identity categories might be re-articulated in different and more productive directions. To put that another way, the importance of ethnicity to writers 50 years ago is a reminder that all politics is identity politics. A person is no more "naturally" an Italian American than she is a white American, nor more naturally a "worker" than she is a "Christian." Cultural work is required to create and then to politicise each of those ideas. And if our culture has, at this moment, created and then politicised the idea of a monolithic whiteness, then it might in the future create and then politicise categories which today seem irrelevant to politics and which might, looked at from a distance, hold more political promise: neighbour, producer, conservationist, caregiver, etc. 

Writers once thought it crucial to figure out the meaning of Slavic-Americanness; today they could hardly care less. Perhaps, then, we might one day worry not at all about what it means to be white, having turned our attention instead toward what it means to look after children or care for the elderly. 

Persepolis, Islamophobia, Unit Planning

Should we teach Persepolis? Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel and memoir of her youth in revolutionary Iran is, at this point, clearly a part of the high school canon. And perhaps rightly so; it certainly checks a lot of boxes: Given it's visual nature, it is accessible to weaker readers, and yet complex in theme; it is a female- and minority-authored text adrift in a white, male sea still too full of Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Jack London; it allows students to take a "literary" approach to a text type still sometimes dismissed as childish or simplistic (I had such a conversation with a parent just today); and, lastly, it allows students relatively easy introductory access to literary nonfiction, a genre worthy of study in its own right and granted renewed importance by the Common Core State Standards. So the book works on a number of levels.

There is a problem, though, with teaching Persepolis in the high school classroom: Islamophobia. In some senses, the text combats Islamophobia in that it introduces students to the details of a particular moment in the history of one Islamic society, including some of the fissures that divide that society, and in so doing it undercuts some of the sillier abstractions that pit a monolithic "Islamic World" against a "Western" one.

Beyond that basic emphasis on historical specificity (and that point is not nothing in a world that still too often trades in ahistorical colonialist generalities), the text does not bear out a postcolonial or anti-Islamphobic reading. For example, on the very first page of volume 1, the text establishes the Islamic headscarf as a potent symbol of unfreedom, juxtaposed against the previously free world of French, secular education. This trope continues for the duration of volume 1, with French education associated with equality of the sexes, individual liberty, and an honest pursuit of truth. In the final pages, these symbolic resonances are made literal as Marji escapes the Iranian revolution to a European boarding school, thus finding artistic freedom in the West when she could not in the Islamic East. The myriad ways in which Islam (and not Marji's parents' secular vision of the world) is associated with violence and repression are obvious enough, from stories of torture at the hands of the Islamic regime to women's protests quashed by Islamist thugs to a pointless war deploying tens of thousands of child soldiers.

(To push the point slightly further, the text puts Marx to fascinating use. Throughout the book, the truly idealistic revolutionaries are Marxists and the pragmatist champions of the status quo are westernised liberals; it is only the Islamist revolutionaries who are craven--represented as primarily interested in a crude sort of Puritanism, sadism, and misogyny. Thus the forces of classical European revolution, liberal capitalism and Marxism, are synthesised into twin pillars of good intentions while it is the non-Western revolutionary force, Islamism, that is cast as the bad guy.)

One would not want this postcolonial point to swerve too far into a criticism of Satrapi herself. It goes without saying that her experience of the Iranian Revolution should be widely read and understood, and that her criticisms of the, by the all accounts, terrible revolutionary government of Iran are entirely warranted. It is also entirely correct that a story of horrific sexual violence committed by men against women is of particular interest in an era of heightened concern about sexual assault and a renewed interest in the relationship between gender and violence. So, to put that more succinctly, there is no question of veracity here, or at least not one I am aware of or qualified to make, nor any question of best intentions on Satrapi's part.

The issue, though, is, as it always is in an English classroom, one of selection. Students will not be exposed to infinite representations of Islam, nor will they be exposed to texts in a political vacuum. And so it might seem that, in 2016, for a European or American or otherwise "westernised" audience, a text that represents Islam primarily as un-freedom is problematic. Does it reinforce Islamophobic stereotypes that are otherwise widely circulated in the culture and also politically problematic? I think this answer is largely, "yes."

So what, then, is one to do? The simple answer would be, "Don't teach Persepolis." But that, in turn, raises potentially bigger problems about quiet censorship and the narrowing of the canon to only the most certifiably "liberal" (in the 21st-century, American, collegiate sense of the word) texts.

The answer to this conundrum is neither political nor literary; it is curricular. The problem with teaching Persepolis as the sole representation of Islam students encounter is that you are teaching Persepolis as the sole representation of Islam students encounter.  And here in lies the problem with the English Language Arts unit built around a particular text. Were students to read Persepolis in the context of several other, diverse representations of Iran or of Islam, the problems Persepolis raises would largely disappear. To take just one example, one could imagine discussing Persepolis' veil imagery in the context of The New Yorker's recent article on Islamic modelling and alternative views of beauty and freedom.

Both texts, of course, would have to be consciously taught in order for these matters to come to the fore. And this, it seems to me, is a strong argument in favour of ELA units based not in specific texts (even when supplemented by additional short pieces) but in broad questions. If the question was, "What does Islam represent?", it would be hard logically to conclude that the best way to answer the question is by reading a single person's representation of Islam. If, on the other hand, the model underlying the unit is that we are teaching a specific text, in this case Persepolis, then other readings will appear at best ancillary, and arguably as wastes of time. Thus, in this narrow context, the problem of representation becomes not one of politics but one of curriculum.

Remarks at HKIS High School Commencement 2016

Good evening class of 2016. And congratulations. Here we are--After 13 years, thousands of class hours, and hundreds of valuable formative home learning experiences all that stands between you and graduation are two more speeches and 45 minutes of administrators reading out names. Then you are out of here: done with school, done with tardy slips and 7:50 am classes, done with dress code and the unexpected reintroduction of detention. Done with required courses and constant supervision; off to the unadulterated freedom of adult life with its near total personal control of one’s own sleep schedule, dietary choices, and screen time limits. No more pencils/ no more books/ no more teachers’ dirty looks, etc. etc.

But wait, wait, all of that is wrong. Popular, I’ll give you that, but wrong. You see, this is just the story we tell ourselves about graduation. It is a story of escape: escape from the repressive strictures of childhood and into the fulfillment and self-determination of adult life. Finally done with childhood, we imagine, you can now move forward with your real life. It’s a great story of growing up: the young kid escaping from a provincial life, with its restrictive and sometimes immoral rules, and striking out on her own to discover who she really is. It’s the story of Jay Gatz leaving behind North Dakota poverty to remake himself in New York; it is the story of Huckleberry Finn leaving behind a small, racist world to light out for the territory. This story of growing up as escape is the story of Easy Rider and, indeed, of the movie The Graduate itself. It’s Star Wars Episode 4, it’s The Wizard of Oz, and I am pretty sure it’s The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

And this isn’t just a fictional story, either. For, if the literary historian Richard Chase is to be believed, this is the story of America itself. It is the story of Pilgrims escaping a corrupt and restrictive church of England to found a new nation; it is the story of brave pioneers leaving fetid eastern cities to make new lives on the open plains; the story of African Americans fleeing Jim Crow to create in Harlem a new culture that would change the world. This is the story America tells about itself, and it is a great one--a story of escape, of self-realization, and of adventure.

But it’s all wrong for graduation. It’s all wrong because it gets growing up all wrong. It would be cool if adulthood was a process of increasing freedom but, in fact, that just isn’t the case. Rather, growing up, at least when it works well, is a journey not toward freedom but toward greater entanglement. If you live the fulfilled lives that I hope you do, far from escaping into total individual freedom you will find yourself taking on bigger tasks, shouldering greater responsibilities in more complex organizations. Many of you will voluntarily commit yourselves to professions like law, medicine, and education that treat their duties as almost religious obligations, complete with elaborate and medieval ceremonies of investiture, like this one. You will find yourself bound into a more complex web of familial and personal relationships, many of them extraordinarily demanding of your time and restrictive of your freedom. Indeed, some day many of you will find the greatest joy of your lives in the act of becoming parents, an act so devastating to basic human freedom that you may find yourself one day, a grown man responding to the repeated imperative “Daddy, Daddy,” with the pitiful whisper, “Can I just have 90 seconds to myself to use the bathroom?”

And those commitments will make for wonderful lives. For, I think, fulfillment comes from entanglement rather than escape. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks once put it, “Life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.”

But that doesn’t make for a very good story. It’s certainly no Gatsby.

So let me try a story that gets closer to the truth. It’s a story of departure and adventure, but one with a different sense of what an adventure can be like.

Many of you will know that the first two humans to walk on the moon were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And many of you will also know that there was a third member of that Apollo 11 mission: Michael Collins. Collins’ story, though, is less often told, because the Apollo spacecraft were designed such that while two astronauts, the ones surely to be remembered for centuries to come, descended to the moon’s surface in the lunar lander, a third stayed behind, orbiting the moon in the Command Module. That third person on Apollo 11 was Michael Collins.

On July 20, 1969, after a 3-day trip from the earth to the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the lunar lander. They separated from the command module and began their descent to the surface of the moon, taking with them the attention of the world and leaving Collins alone in the command module above.

Immediately things went wrong. Communication between the lunar lander and mission control back in Houston was terrible. You can listen to this on youtube and hear that neither party could make out at all what the other was saying--a considerable problem just minutes away from one of the most difficult technical feats ever accomplished by humans. Collins found himself taking on a mission that was nowhere in the flight plan, relaying instructions back and forth from Houston to the lander and trying to figure out how to reconfigure antennae in the meantime. But Collins knew his ship like the back of his hand, and he made it work. The lunar lander continued its descent and, after some of the most dramatic moments in the history of human travel, landed on the moon with 17 seconds of fuel to spare.

Now here is the cool part. As Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the lunar surface, Collins continued his orbit around the moon and vanished. With his sightlines to both earth and the lunar landar gone, Collins was alone. On the dark side of the moon, it was literally impossible for Collins to make contact with any other human being in the universe. As he put it in his memoir, “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it” (Collines 402). As Apollo XIII commander Jim Lovell explains in his autobiography, NASA trained its mission controllers to prepare for most any disaster when the orbiting command module reappeared on the other side of the moon. The astronaut could be dead, the ship exploded, the life support systems gone--there was no way to know if any of that had happened, and no way to help if it had  (Lovell 84-86). NASA flight director Chris Kraft would describe the 20 minutes the spacecraft spent behind the moon as “the most apprehensive time in my life” (When We Left Earth Part 3 16:20).  All Mission Control could do was wait; whatever came up, Collins would have to handle it on his own.

But here is the thing. Collins describes these moments of total isolation on the dark side of the moon not in terms of danger or stress, but in terms of confidence: “I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude,” he said. “I feel this powerfully--not as fear or loneliness--but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation” (Collins 402).

And, indeed, Collins displayed not one ounce of panic. He handled his mission brilliantly, handled brilliantly the unexpected tasks he was handed, recovered Armstrong and Aldrin exactly on schedule and, fulfilling the last clause of President Kennedy’s famous challenge, returned them safely to earth.

This is the story I want you to think about as you walk out of here tonight. It is a story of departure, yes, and of adventure. But it is not a story of escape. No, no--it is a story of entanglement. Collins didn’t accomplish what he did because he escaped his past; he accomplished what he did by building on a life’s worth of acquired skills. He did it not by fleeing the restrictions of institutions but by enmeshing himself in an institution whose employees numbered in the hundreds of thousands. He did it by learning the intricacies of a ship built by a thousand engineers, mechanics, and pilots. His is a story of singular success achieved not through escape, but through preparation and teamwork.

So get out of here, graduates. Get out of here and explore the stars. Know that you are going to be given duties you didn’t train for and tasks you have never practiced. But know also that you’ve got the skills to handle them; you are prepared. We wouldn’t send you out there if you weren’t. Know that sometimes you are going to feel as lonely as Michael Collins when he passed behind the moon, like you are a quarter million miles from home and there is no one you can call for help. But know also that if you can just hang on for 20 minutes, your orbit will bring you back around, and, when you do, you will find thousands of us back here in Houston, ready to help. We won’t be able to complete the job for you, but we will be able to talk you through it, to let you know your position and velocity, to tell you if you are a bit off course and how to correct.

So leave here knowing that you are ready for this. Get out there, explore the stars, and then come back home and tell us what it looks like out there on the far side of the moon.

North Korea and Elegy

At the level of content elegies are, obviously, pretty bleak business--all loss and mourning, occasionally leavened with the relative cheer of nostalgia. But beneath the specific content of an elegy lies a sort of intellectual game: How do you represent absence? Or, to put it in visual terms, how do a paint a picture of something that is no longer there?

This problem can be solved in any number of ways, and thinking about how you might go about it is surely part of the fun (if that is the right word for an elegy) of the form. The air force solves the problem with the missing man formation, in which a physical gap reminds us of the departed. Virginia Woolf uses a somewhat subtler version of the same technique in Jacob's Room, where the emphasis on the room rather than the protagonist sets up a whole series of absences in the text. And there are any number of other options here beyond the evocation of empty space: from the obvious use of clothing specific to the lost individual (or a uniform denoting her rank) to Walt Whitman's rather elaborate metaphor of the captain-less ship, and so on.

What I am interested in here is a much more specific application of this elegiac structural problem: it's relevance to nonfiction stories about North Korea. What I want to suggest is that writers who take North Korea as a subject face something of the same problem of absence faced by elegists. Because no one outside of North Korea (and likely very few people within North Korea) has anything like unmediated access to information about the country, those few writers and filmmakers who choose to work with it find themselves, again and again, trying to capture on the page the feeling of a country that is right in front of you and yet in some sense completely missing.

To take one example, Guy DeLisle's graphic nonfiction novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea works and reworks this problem throughout the text. The first image in the book is a full-page drawing of the Pyongyang airport. The airport though, takes up much less than the entire page, with the rest of the space fading from white and grey toward black edges. Thus the small part of the scene that DeLisle has seen personally bleeds into the emptiness just beyond his access, an emptiness where lives the vast majority of the country. That trick of an image surrounded by either white or black space is repeated throughout the book, as is the image of a small light illuminating only a tiny portion of the page. (This last image is occasionally deployed ironically, as the light in question is sometimes the illuminated torch atop the Juche Tower--thus the only light in the darkness is that of the official North Korean ideology.)

Perhaps DeLisle's best rendering of North Korean absence is his motif of a paper airplane; the book's narrator makes paper airplanes and tosses them from his hotel room window. As the airplanes leave his hand, they often travel not out over a cityscape, but out into white nothingness--the city of Pyongyang to which DeLisle has almost no access.

The structural problem of representing what you cannot see (what is "absent" at least in the sense of being inaccessible to the writer) is at the centre of the whole sub-genre of popular representations of North Korea. Vice, in particular, has made it something of a specialty, returning frequently in their various documentaries about the country to shots of empty restaurants and enormous highways with no cars on them (DeLisle makes use of both of these images as well). Both shots evoke the absent people of North Korea directly and quite effectively, though, in their Vice iteration, they do so with a certain comic brio about which one might have legitimate ethical concerns. The representation of North Korea as absence reaches its ultimate end-point in Vice's documentary on North Korean labour camps in eastern Russia. Here, representing North Korea demands avoiding North Korea all together.

North Korea might be unique in its demand for this particular aspect of elegy. With most other subjects, a writer who failed to gain meaningful access would simply not write the story until she had something more definite to say. The strict isolation of North Korea, though, demands that the writer either evoke absence or say nothing at all. Thus there is a kind of poetic convergence here between form and content: The inaccessibility of North Korea demands the structure of the elegy while the tragedy of its history demands an elegiac tone.