Words are Weeds

This morning I braved the snow and sleet (so far maybe an inch of snow on the ground and a thin coating of ice on my windshield) to hear Robin D.G. Kelley deliver the keynote address for Macalester's Seventh Annual American Studies conference. I love Kelley's work and was very much looking forward to hearing him speak. I actually experienced delight while listening to his speech, and was surprised at that (delightfully so). It's not that I had low expectations of him, it has more to do with the subject matter. After all, I wouldn't normally expect to feel delight while listening to a talk about "Visualizing Race." I might feel enlightened, or thoughtful, or occasionally despondent. I certainly felt despair and not a little anger when I read yesterday in the New York Times that College Republicans at NYU staged an event called "Catch an Illegal Immigrant" and when confronted with protesters defended their "game" as mere political incorrectness. And I tend to feel despondent a lot after I've read the news, which thanks to new reading habits I've acquired of late tends not to happen all at once over morning coffee, but several times during the day when I have a minute here and there to visit my favorite news sites and blogs.

I believe that my reaction to Kelley's talk was in part about contrast. On one hand, I think about those College Republicans going to the trouble of staging such an event and to brush off criticism because they're just being "politically incorrect." It's maddening--first the ugly provocation, but any reaction is characterized as overreaction. And I think I've spent a little too much time lately reading about similar incidents that don't only happen on college campuses, but maybe on the campaign trail or on Fox News. The other hand: sitting in an auditorium full of people who came to hear Kelley, a prominent historian, talk about what it means to visualize race, and hearing thoughtful questions from the audience. (Those Mac kids make an art of asking thoughtful questions.)

I also felt delight no doubt because I felt hope, thanks to Kelley's emphasis on the ways in which people organize in response to racism, for example in his discussion about media representations of Hurricane Katrina and the people of New Orleans. According to Kelley, even the best-intentioned media representations of black people in New Orleans made them out to be victims who would be incapable of doing anything constructive to rebuild the city or generally to better their own condition.

It's an old story, as it turns out; during Reconstruction after the Civil War slaves were also cast as passive and incapable of creating solutions on their own. One of my favorite essays, Dubois' Of the Dawn of Freedom comes to mind.

While most media showed people being rescued, or drowning, or suffering, they did not show people organizing. Of course, the worst media representations blamed victims and criminalized them, but the "better" representations that showed passive victims have significant consequences as well. As Kelley pointed out, most of the government money that was budgeted for reconstruction of the city went to corporations, not the people of New Orleans. So where's the hope in all this? I felt hopeful because I heard about grassroots organizations that were formed to demand accountability and participation, not to mention jobs--the work would help reconstruct the city, at union wages that would ensure a better quality of life for everyone. And much of Kelley's keynote focused on the strategies people have utilized as they organized against racism. I know in the abstract that the media representations aren't true, that people aren't passive victims, but I always like to be reminded about the strategies people create and their creativity and courageousness.

And since I was on the Macalester campus, of course I was thinking about the "politically incorrect" party that happened back in January and recently worked its way into both local and national media. National media didn't cover it in much depth, but they did cover it widely; a version of the story that appeared in the Star Tribune bounced around to various media outlets, including MSNBC, various newspapers and blogs. I was particularly interested in this story because I taught at Macalester for a couple of years, and given what I know about the students I was surprised a party like that would happen there. But I am not particularly interested in knowing why this party happened, or what was in those students' heads; I am more interested in making sense of reactions as represented in media. Mine is a fairly standard approach in media and cultural studies--to critique media representations for the ways in which they make sense of race and racism, and participate in creating ideologies through which people create meaning.

Kelley concluded his talk with a self-described "rant," which of course wasn't a rant at all. (I was impressed, by the way, that after he participated in the first part of the conference, which involved a trip to the Science Museum of Minnesota's exhibit on race, he decided to scrap his prepared talk and write a new one.) One of the points he made was this: "Racism is not ignorance, but knowledge, knowledge produced by systems that perpetuate white supremacy."

At that point Kelley didn't mention the "politically incorrect" party, but I read this as a brilliant response to discussion that resulted from it (as represented in the media). For example, a student who attended the party was quoted in the Mac Weekly, the college's student newspaper, as saying “I think that if I had sensed any hostility to what I was wearing, or had anyone appeared offended, I would immediately have taken it off,� the student said. “There was a variety of equally offensive costumes, and given the variety, the response targeted to one costume in particular is unfair.� I could write a whole 'nother blog entry about the idea that politics of race (or gender) is about "harrassment" or "offensiveness" and I probably will. But for now I'd like to talk about this student's comment in relation to Kelley's point about racism as knowledge.

For one thing, if racism is about knowledge rather than ignorance, the remedy is not necessarily about acquiring the kind of knowledge that helps "fill in the blanks" such as learning about the history of minstrelsy and blackface. That kind of knowledge is important, especially since minstrelsy was one of the most popular cultural forms in the United States in the years before and after the American Civil War and as popular culture continued through most of the 20th century. But equally important is that the memory of minstrelsy and blackface in popular culture has been more or less repressed, especially for those of us who are privileged and can pretend most of the time that race doesn't matter. Understanding minstrelsy and blackface in terms of repressed memory raises a lot of interesting issues. In addition to recovering that memory (as painful as it is), it means asking questions about the mechanisms of its repression. Did minstrelsy disappear, and if so, why? If it disappeared, does that mean that racism has disappeared as well? Or if the memory of minstrelsy was repressed, is it possible that it returns in different forms? In particular, I think it's important to talk about what's at stake in its repression--it seems to me that one of its functions would be to locate blatant racism safely in the past, making it something we no longer need worry about in a post civil rights society.

By characterizing racism as knowledge rather than ignorance, Kelley shifts the burden. It turns out that everyone has knowledge about race, even if it's been repressed. And knowledge about race no longer is equivalent to understanding blackness and the history and politics of representations. If everyone has knowledge about race, that includes knowledge about whiteness, even if one of the privileges of being white is the ability to pretend that "white" is not really "race." Gaining knowledge about race is no longer a question of white people reading up on black history, or worse yet, asking black people to educate them about that history. Instead, the burden shifts to the students (and to everyone who defends the party as mere "political incorrectness" or "satire" or "blowing off steam") to interrogate their knowledge about race and racism and to think not only in terms of acquiring information, but to think about the ways in which discussions about race are framed, and about various forms of complicity to racism.

What I'm writing here about the politics of representation certainly isn't new--in fact, this is old hat to most of the people who also listened to Kelley speak. But it bears repeating, I think. The news stories, and the comments I read in blogs were very narrow in their focus on "offensiveness" and "harrassment." I wasn't privy to conversations that took place on campus, but based on my participation in other such conversations I have to wonder if they unfolded along the lines of "racism as ignorance" or the more productive trajectory of "racism as knowledge."