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| Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019) |
Well, at least that's the way I remembered it right after the film. Morrison further amplifies and qualifies the idea, adding that it is how everyone else relates to African-Americans by which being American is truly defined. It felt like a light going on; not unlike the first time I heard that the melting pot metaphor itself is in fact a concept used to suppress labor: namely, if you do not allow the Irish to be Irish then they cannot organize as Irish labor. Identity politics is complicated and serious.
Morrison’s point was further driven home by the release in 2019 of The New York Times' epic 1619 Project, and even more so then by the recent academic responses to the 1619 Project, implying there is still much work to be done. This is all worth continued examination right now. We neither understand our history well enough, nor have processed its daemons. It sounds too simplistic, pandering even, to say Morrison was right. The truth is self-evident; an angelic veracity worth wrestling with, like Jacob becoming Israel.
Identity politics is everywhere in art right now, even in a white male reviewer about a white male artist. In a recent Washington Post review of the work of N.C. Wyeth, Philip Kennicott described Wyeth as “a painter who worked contentedly and productively in communities that took easy, unapologetic pride in their white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage.” And Kennicott goes on to say:
like many white men of his generation, interested in and sympathetic to eugenics, the supposed science of race that infected American culture, politics and jurisprudence, and fueled worldwide abominations including colonialism, genocide and the atrocities of Adolf Hitler;adding,
Whiteness, in this sense, is defined by absence, the missing faces of people of color, with the exception of Native Americans, who are seen as allegorical types, melancholy embodiments of a prelapsarian America...As the country grows more diverse and more authentically aware of how deeply racism is embedded in its history, no one can take whiteness for granted.As noted in a recent Time magazine article entitled “Republicans Want a White Republic. They'll Destroy America to Get It,” written by Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy:
The GOP’s membership is nearly 90 percent white and can only envision carnage and extinction as it looks upon a rights-based, religious, racial and ideologically diverse Americafurther quoting Lindsey Graham as saying in 2012, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term,” suggesting the work needs to be done to shore up the resources of resentment.
From a Paris cafe this summer I read The New York Times op-ed by Representative Ilhan Omar where she wrote, “It was in the diverse community of Minneapolis — the very community that welcomed me home with open arms after Mr. Trump’s attacks against me last week — where I learned the true value of democracy. I started attending political caucuses with my grandfather, who cherished democracy as only someone who has experienced its absence could.” It was that line that made me cry. I started balling, really heaving public crying.
Elijah Cummings (1951 - 2019)
Before I could even recover emotionally, on my phone I got a Twitter notification that the President of the United States had tweeted attacks on Representative Elijah Cummings and all of Baltimore, a city where I spent four highly formative years of high school. Later the same year Cummings, near sainthood to most, passed away. History, as it will be, will look back on his life punctuated by his strong stance against the 45th President. Baltimore is so important to me. Babe Ruth’s birthplace. Where I had my first of too many beers. The Jewish tradition that led me to The Park School, specifically created to counter the Jewish quotas of other Baltimore private high schools Macdonogh and Gilman. Diner (1982) and Mickey Rourke as the Jewish guy who created Merry Go ‘Round. That was my life, a white life informed by and adjacent to a beautiful Black world. Shoot, I was even an extra in Hairspray (1988); and I know the places Ta-Nehisi Coates elucidates eloquently in his brilliant and inspiring The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.
My family lived in Columbia, MD. The same town that acclaimed American author Michael Chabon grew up in. Columbia was founded by commercial developer James Rouse in the 1960’s. As described in Smithsonian Magazine, “In Rouse’s view, we're at our best in smaller communities where there is a sense of responsibility to one's city and to one's neighbor,” and inclusion was a major part of his vision. That was an important part of my growing up.
The other night, and for the first time in a long time, I read my son to sleep, reading an essay from Chabon’s POPS: Fatherhood in Pieces. Chabon writes about his experience as a resident of Berkeley. Still virtual neighbors, I now live in the adjacent town of Albany, CA. In one of the essays, “The Bubble People,” Chabon writes about identity and the universality of a sense of shared weirdness that unifies Americans, connecting his Columbia origins and present Berzerkely address altogether: “We were woven, in different patterns, of the same materials of language, economics, politics, and culture.” It is what we share that makes us human. We are all mirrors of each other, same in our differences.
I have worked my entire professional life in the arts and mostly in museums. I arrived in NYC in the mid-to-late 80s. At NYU I had the good fortune to study with RoseLee Goldberg and Robert Farris Thompson, then visiting from Yale. I started working in art galleries amidst a major groundswell in identity-based politics of display, much of which is captured so well in Jeff Chang’s Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (2016). Now I am the Deputy Director and CDO for the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in California. On the same trip this summer, my family and I also spent some time in London, where I had a terrific conversation with a cabbie that helped me to feel like the work I was doing made a difference.
Our driver was African, from Eritrea. He was not happy to be a Lyft driver it seemed. He had a Master’s Degree in education, and was unable to find work in London in his trained profession. He worried that the forthcoming Brexit would make it even worse. Trying to help make a connection and add a little positivity to our exchange, I mentioned to him that we had recently had an exhibition at MoAD of the work of Eritrean-born artist Ficre Ghebreyesus (1962-2012). When we were presenting the exhibition at MoAD, as a museum team, we reached out the the large Eritrean population in Oakland. Our London cabbie knew all about it, thanks to that outreach. We had reached him. He had seen Ficre’s work through the internet, on Facebook and in Oakland Eritrean affinity groups. Because of the Museum’s exhibition our conversation turned to shared understanding, global movements and museum work. It ends up that one of the more satisfying parts of his recent employment history in London was being engaged as an educator at the Victoria & Albert. All of a sudden I was, to use a term I am not that fond of: an ally.
The problem with the “ally” term for me is that it implies a war-like metaphor, and wars always feel to me unwinnable. Thanks to a local scholar and curator I admire Ashara Ekundayo, if there’s a word I like now as a non-Black person working in what needs to be a more Black world, I like the term “accomplice;” like it’s all crime or something informed by a system but working in direct opposition to achieve a shared, intended sometimes more positive outcome. The word accomplice also implies a less visible status; or as photographer and curator M. Charlene Stevens puts it, "An authentic ally knows when to take a seat and listen and does not wave his hands in the air, screaming, “What about me?” All this helps me understand why I am still in it, despite persistent trends to move away from identity politics. Is there a timeliness to identity politics of display? As Stevens observes, "My advisor told me that identity politics were currently out of style and that I should not focus on race. This was in the Netherlands, a nation where blackface is still a holiday tradition."
Amin Maalouf (1949 - )
Now as I post this at the onset of 2020 the United States sits on the brink of war with Iran, and maybe everybody. As Lebanese-born French author and scholar Amin Maalouf writes, "You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its beginnings as you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and colonization and then you'll understand it quite a lot."
The quote above is from Maalouf's book On Identity (1998) that I picked up this summer in London. The book was originally published in French with the title Les Identités meurtrières or “murderous identities,” suggesting that all this identity politics will kill us. The author articulates his dream toward the end of the book:
When an author reaches the last page of a book his fondest wish is usually that his work should still be read 100 or 200 years hence...May my grandson...look through the pages...shrugging his shoulders and marveling that in his grandfather's day such things still needed to be said.I see my own identity as Zelig-like, able to move quickly through various worlds often thanks to privilege and a certain malleable quality to how I see the world, informed further by the Jewish principles of constant critique and inquiry. There is a terrifically interesting book that explores the manifestations of Jewish identity entitled The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkin, embracing technology and constantly moving and adapting: to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The sentiment is echoed in a quote from Black artist David Hammons:
I like being from nowhere; it’s a beautiful place. That means I can look at anyone who’s from somewhere and see how really caught they are.More also, and as echoed in Morrison’s reflection on all Americans being defined by their relationship to Africa and those enslaved folks brought to the Americas. Maalouf asks, "Can anyone in the United States even today assess his place in society without reference to his earlier connections, whether they be African, Hispanic, Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish or other?" We are multiplicities we are legions. Malouf adds, "Life is a creator of differences. No "reproduction " is ever identical. Every individual without exception possesses a composite identity. He need only ask himself a few questions to uncover forgotten divergences and unsuspected ramifications..."
This echoing of multiple chosen and forced identities is also reflected in Facebook’s recent advertising push for Groups. Given Facebook's predilection for taking over the world and launching new currencies, it would give the sense that Facebook has decided that this will be an important part of their overarching plan for ongoing global dominance. perhaps these self-made groups are slowly becoming one of our more defining elements, crossing international lines. Please let us pray that this commercial work leads to more celebration of difference and less hate crimes. Still, as Malouf points out, "...we find between two brothers who have lived in the same environment, apparently small differences which make them act in diametrically opposite ways and matters relating to politics, religion and everyday life. These differences may even turn one of the brothers into a killer, and the other one into a man of dialogue and conciliation."
I work hard to be a man of conciliation. I just love this idea and had never even thought of the term “conciliation,” before reading Malouf’s book. I am more accustomed to the word reconciliation. But how about simply "conciling" from the onset? I mean, what is conciliation? It is connecting. It is empathy. It is the core religious concept. It is “The Way” of Islam. It is the "empty" of Zen, or making room for others. It is the grace of Christianity; and the chesed or “loving kindness” of Judaism. It is making room for the understanding of our shared existence. In a sense, it is belief. We must be confident in this. Malouf posits that "Societies that are sure of themselves are mirrored by a religion that is confident, serene and open; uncertain societies are reflected in a religion that is hypersensitive, sanctimonious and aloof."
We suffer from an innate sense of temporal chauvinism, thinking our present time and how we got here has something worth clinging to when, as Malouf notes, "It would be terrible for any country to have more reverence for its past than its future." Still enamored with quotes from Malouf, I’d add one more:
At the same time as we fight for the universality of values it is imperative that we fight against the empowerment of standardization; against hegemony, whether ideological, political, economic operating in the media; against foolish conformism; against everything that stifles the full variety of linguistics, artistic and intellectual expression.It is this to which I am dedicated, inspired further by Malouf’s question: "why should we take the diversity of human cultures less seriously than the diversity of animal or plant species?" This is the work of museums. This is the work of us all, our lives; and I am here for it.
James G. Leventhal
Albany, CA
2020
Sources:
Michael Chabon, POPS: Fatherhood in Pieces (2018) Harper Collins, NY. pp. 60-61
Elena Filipovic, David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2019) Afterall Books, London. p.34
Philip Kennicott, “N.C. Wyeth painted the world full of beauty, resilience and adventure. And full of white people.” July 3, 2019 Washington Post Accessed August 18, 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/nc-wyeth-painted-the-world-full-of-beauty-resilience-and-adventure-and-it-was-white-people/2019/07/02/685ea6f4-9c3e-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html?noredirect=on
Ilhan Omar “It Is Not Enough to Condemn Trump’s Racism” July 25, 2019 Accessed August 18, 2019: https://nyti.ms/2OiCv7F
Amin Maalouf, On Identity (2000) The Harvill Press, London, 2000.
M. Charlene Stevens, “When White ‘Allies’ Go Wrong” July 15, 2019 Hyperallergic, accessed January 5, 2020: https://hyperallergic.com/509063/when-white-allies-go-wrong/
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