Scenes of Protest
This week: conversations with Eric Foner and Kimberlé Crenshaw about systemic racism and efforts to confront the legacy of slavery. Hear it today at 2 pm or anytime at our site.
Since the killing of George Floyd, protests around the planet have brought thousands upon thousands together, calling for an end to police violence against black Americans. The police response in the US has itself included more instances of brutality, however, and a US senator, writing in the New York Times, called for the US military to subdue Americans. There’s a continuation of violence here that has a history going back hundreds of years, and this week we ask: what could be done to address such violent oppression?
An early effort to address inequality after the Civil War showed promise: this was Reconstruction. But white racists swiftly undermined it. Eric Foner, emeritus professor of history at Columbia and eminent scholar of Reconstruction, tells us that after the Civil War,
the idea of Reconstruction was sort of inevitable. Once slavery was destroyed in the Civil War, Reconstruction meant creating a new society in the South. Slavery was the fundamental institution of southern life. It was a system of labor, a system of politics, a system of race relations, a system of wealth. With slavery gone, well, those things had to be remade, redone, reconstructed.
Now, there were many people who thought, “No, we don’t really need much change. All right, slavery’s gone. We understand that. But black people should go back to work on the plantations. They’re not really entitled to civil rights, political rights. They’re free. That’s enough.” . . . One of the leading proponents of that idea was Andrew Johnson, the vice president became president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a strong white supremacist. He used language that is not all that different from some of the things we hear coming out of the White House nowadays of white nationalism.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is the legal scholar who pioneered the use of the term “intersectionality” to advance understanding about overlapping kinds of oppression. She’s a keen examiner of injustice, and she has ideas for doing something about it. This moment, she says on this week’s show, is a time in which “the rawness of the inequality” among Americans is especially “legible, like in neon lights.”
One change that should be made to correct this extreme inequality, Crenshaw tells us, is to the US Supreme Court:
The Supreme Court has to be completely remade. The Supreme Court is standing in the way of meaningful race reform . . . The Supreme Court is the institution that makes possible the kind of policing that took the life of of of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The Supreme Court is the institution that says that police officers can go into your home on no-knock warrants and terrorize you. Plain-clothes. You you don’t even know that they’re police. The Supreme Court is what makes that possible.
Watch: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War
Now streaming online , this new four-hour documentary series from Henry Louis Gates includes both Crenshaw and Foner. From the website:
The first two hours of the series centers on this pivotal decade [1865–77] charting black progress and highlighting the accomplishments of the many political leaders who emerged to usher their communities into this new era of freedom.
The series’ second half looks beyond that hopeful decade, when the arc of history bent backwards . . . Less than thirty years after black men filled state legislatures, one by one, like dominoes tumbling the Southern states began drastically restricting the vote while drawing a stark color line that divided white and black America. The series concludes with a focus on both the flowering of African American art, music, literature, and culture as tools of resistance in the struggle against Jim Crow racism and the surge of political activism that marked the launch of such iconic civil rights organizations as the National Association of Colored Women, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP, all at a time when black political power had been blunted and the dream of an interracial democracy seemed impossibly out of reach.
Listen: Sights and Sounds of Protest from Boston
Thousands gathered last Tuesday in Roxbury for a vigil and protest organized by the group Violence in Boston. The event was peaceful, but became tense when, immediately after the assembly, police charged the crowd with motorcycles. Hear the protest as reported by Azan Reid with help from Conor Gillies.
You can also hear Chris’s conversation with long-time caller (since The Connection days) and friend Amber, who’s taking the bird’s-eye view of recent street protests from her home in Codman Square.
Read: Everywhere You Don’t Belong
Gabriel Bump’s debut novel Everywhere You Don’t Belong (published earlier this year) is about a character named Claude growing up on the South Side of Chicago, and it’s about so much that goes with growing up in America. There are also scenes that speak directly to the aspects of American life everyone’s talking about now —scenes of police violence and protests. Bump weaves it all together into a book of expansive scope and closely observed emotional truths.
Tommy Orange writes of the novel:
It would be a mistake to think of this book as a political one — one about the police, or gang violence, about being black in America. Such language is a legacy of the white male voice (his dominance ever diminishing, one hopes) who believes there is such a thing as an apolitical novel, a neutral position, in this country and climate. Above all this book is personal: Bump’s meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don’t know he’s hypnotized you until he’s done. Most funny things are funny because they’re real, this book included. I mean real, here, as something distinct from realism; his characters feel true to their environment in ways only an author who has known people like this, has lived a life at least adjacent to this one, could write.
Support Us on Patreon and Hear a Conversation with Gabriel Bump
Over on Patreon, you can hear Adam Colman’s conversation with Gabriel Bump, who reads a passage from his new novel and discusses its haunting echoes in the scenes of protest and police violence that have seized the world’s attention recently. Bump wrote his novel’s chapters about police violence and protest while reflecting on Ferguson, MO, years ago, and those chapters now seem to pose a link between two moments of police brutality and mass protest.
RIP: Elsa Dorfman
Elsa Dorfman was our friend and sometime collaborator. One of a kind, famous in the world of photography and famous around Cambridge. Our hearts go out to her husband Harvey Silverglate.
And Christo.
Speaking of one-of-a-kind artists who left us last week, here’s some photos of Christo and his wife Jeanne Claude’s famous environmental art installations — the “Wrapped Reichstag” in Germany, “The Gates” in Central Park, “Wrapped Trees” in Sweden, “Surrounded Islands in Miami” and more. Beauty in Realizing the Impossible.
Next Week: Ibram X. Kendi
This week’s ephemeral library:
Trump’s PR army. A throwback: Mark Greif on police violence. Racism and the American nightmare. From The Portland Press Herald this week: To President Trump: You should resign now. The CDC Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?
See you next week!
