The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 13

February 06, 2022

A few days ago Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from The View for two weeks after making comments about the Holocaust suggesting that rather than a racial purge it was another example of white on white crime.

Over the past several years teaching Racial Politics and Black Politics courses have been the complicated gift that keeps giving because I’m never out of ways to bring what we’re facing in the world into the classroom.

But this week it kind of went in reverse, because on Monday, before Whoopi made her comments, I spent a bit of time talking about racial construction. About how race itself is not even a social construct as much as it is a political construct. I usually draw on this pdf which presents a timeline from approximately 1607-1750. It charts how black indentured servants (which is what Africans brought to Virginia in the early 17th century were) with specific service tenures became slaves for life. This doesn’t just happen naturally. It has to be politically constructed in the US, because the logic that basically made such a thing common sense didn’t exist yet.

In walking students through this we talked about Maus given the book's banning in a Tennessee school district. I imagine a number of my readers are familiar with the graphic novel, but if you’re not you need to become familiar with it. I’d place it alongside Alan Moore’s Watchmen as the two works that are most responsible for pushing the US graphic novel into adult territory. I brought my copy and had the students flip through it…the first thing that stands out is the use of animals to depict different populations of people. Americans for example were dogs, Jews were mouse, Germans were cats. We didn’t talk much about the non-German instances (that is, the instances of populations outside of Germany)…rather we focused on the fact that he depicted Germans and Jews differently, even as the Jews themselves were German. He depicts then differently, and not just differently antagonistically, because the Germans themselves helped to construct the Jews in such a fashion for the purpose of exterminating them. The Nuremberg Laws get at this pretty clearly.

(But this still begs the question--why animals? Writing this newsletter pays off in a number of ways. In trying to figure out why Spiegelman made this technical decision, I found an article about racial allegories in Maus, and Spiegelman noted the following in an interview:

I went to sit in on some classes of a friend of mine, Ken Jacobs, a filmmaker and very wonderful teacher at SUNY Binghamton, who was showing some old animated cartoons in his class with cats and mice romping around, and then he was showing some racist cartoons from the same period, and it became clear that there was a connection between the two, that Al Jolson was Mickey Mouse without the ears. At that point I said, ‘I have it: I’ll do a comic-book story about the Ku Klux Kats, and a lynching of some mice, and deal with racism in America using cats and mice as the vehicle.’ And that lasted about ten minutes before I realized that I just didn’t have enough background and knowledge to make this thing happen well, that it would just come across as well intended liberal slop. And instantly the synapses connected, and I realized that I had a metaphor of oppression much closer to my own past in the Nazi Project. (Loman, Andrew. 2006. "“Well Intended Liberal Slop”: Allegories of Race in Spiegelman's Maus." Journal of American Studies 40 (3):551-71. p. 551)

Al Jolson, referenced above, is best known for his blackface performance in Jazz Singer. It turns out that use of cats and mice is a lot more bound up in the racial politics of American popular culture than I thought—and I have some knowledge of the way cartoon animals were used to depict different races, as I was a child when at least some of the cartoons doing so were still in circulation.)

We’re going to talk about it more in my class (likely by the time you read this I’ll have already done it) through Victoria Hattam’s In the Shadow of Race, one of best books on the subject. I had so many conversations about this on Facebook that I did what I told myself I would never do—made a video on TikTok to talk about it. Although it’s now pretty difficult to get through a good undergrad education without learning that race is a social construction, apparently there’s still a lot of work to do to make that education stick.

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In Capitalism and Slavery Eric Williams (who would go on to become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago) wrote one of the best three books on the political economy of slavery, with the other two being W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction and CLR James’ The Black Jacobins. Although the field of slavery and capitalism has become a cottage industry over the past several years, it is worth noting that all three of the books above were written in the 1930s…which makes the following news bit incredibly…interesting:

…84 years after his work was rejected in the UK, and 78 years after it was first published in America, where it became a highly influential anti-colonial text, a new edition of Williams’s book, Capitalism and Slavery, is to be published in Britain.

84 years later. I remember having a discussion with a political economist at Wash U years ago about slavery. He didn’t think it was an important factor in the development of the industrial revolution. Because my own training was limited—I didn’t read Capitalism and Slavery myself until after long after graduate school (when I decided to teach Intro to Africana Studies in fact)—I didn’t push back as hard as I could have. But when works like Capitalism and Slavery are kept off of the shelves you can see how this might happen.

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If you read this tonight (Sunday, February 6) or tomorrow before 6pm and you’ve got some time, I’m giving a virtual lecture on The Evolution of the Black Vote tomorrow. Hope to see some of you virtually…and I’ll share a link when it becomes available.