Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Favorite Opera Recordings (and Her First Appearance in an Opera)

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | September 21st, 2020

U.S. Supreme Court jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Ginsburg’s death has thrown an unbear­ably fraught polit­i­cal year into fur­ther dis­ar­ray, a fact that has sad­ly over­shad­owed memo­ri­al­iza­tion of her inspir­ing life and career. Gins­burg was a per­son­al hero for mil­lions of activists and students—from grade school to law school; an icon casu­al­ly iden­ti­fied by her ini­tials by those who felt like they knew her. “For many women, and many girls,” Sheryl Gay Stol­berg writes in a New York Times trib­ute, her loss is “deeply per­son­al.”

How should we remem­ber such a fig­ure at such a time? If you hap­pen to find the news numb­ing, full of ener­vat­ing ran­cor and alarm…. If you want to bring the focus back to the per­son we have lost, might we sug­gest a sound­track? The sug­ges­tions come from Gins­burg her­self, from the art form—opera—closest to her heart. “She was our great­est advo­cate and our great­est spokesper­son,” says Francesca Zam­bel­lo, direc­tor of the Wash­ing­ton Nation­al Opera, “the ide­al attendee… who knows every­thing but is open to inter­pre­ta­tions.”

Ginsburg’s com­mit­ment to the opera spans decades. She and her hus­band Mar­ty were in the audi­ence when Leon­tyne Price made her debut at the Met in 1961. Forty-sev­en years lat­er, the Jus­tice had occa­sion to hon­or Pryce at a 2008 Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts lun­cheon. Also in atten­dance: Antonin Scalia, Ginsburg’s noto­ri­ous rival. The only thing the two may have agreed on was a pas­sion for the opera. It formed the basis of a frag­ile peace, and the sub­ject of its own opera, Scalia v. Gins­burg, that explores extreme judi­cial dif­fer­ences through “Ver­di, Puc­ci­ni, Christ­mas car­ols, ‘The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner,’ and jazz.”

Scalia v. Gins­berg com­pos­er Der­rick Wang heard the grandios­i­ty of opera when he read the fierce­ly oppos­ing writ­ten opin­ions of the two jus­tices. It’s safe to assume that both were lis­ten­ing to their favorite works while they com­posed. In 2012, Gins­burg gave her list of favorites to Alex Ross at The New York­er, who points to oth­er Gins­burg con­nec­tions to the clas­si­cal world like her son, James Gins­burg, “pro­pri­etor of Cedille Records, an inde­pen­dent clas­si­cal label based in Chica­go.” (Read their state­ment on Ginsburg’s pass­ing here.)

There is far too much to say about Ruth Bad­er Ginsburg’s judi­cial influ­ence, and about the pow­er vac­u­um left behind by her loss. But if we want to under­stand what mat­tered to her most as an indi­vid­ual, we should turn to the music she most loved. “Her life was about under­stand­ing people’s sto­ries,” says Zam­bel­lo. The kinds of cas­es “she made her career of are the stuff of opera.” At the top, see Ginsburg’s first appear­ance onstage, in a non-singing role as the Duchess of Krak­en­thor­pe in the The Daugh­ter of the Reg­i­ment at the Kennedy Cen­ter. Just below, see her list of favorite works, pep­pered with occa­sion­al com­men­tary from the late, beloved R.B.G. her­self. This list orig­i­nal­ly comes from The New York­er. If you have a Spo­ti­fy account, you can stream the music in this 30-hour playlist.

Ver­di, “Aida”; Zin­ka Milanov, Jus­si Björ­ling, Leonard War­ren, Fedo­ra Bar­bi­eri, Boris Christoff, Jonel Per­lea con­duct­ing the Rome Opera Orches­tra and Cho­rus (RCA).

Ver­di, “Otel­lo”; Plá­ci­do Domin­go, Rena­ta Scot­to, Sher­rill Milnes, James Levine con­duct­ing the Nation­al Phil­har­mon­ic and Ambrosian Opera Cho­rus (RCA).

Dvořák, “Rusal­ka”; Renée Flem­ing, Ben Hep­p­n­er, Dolo­ra Zajick, Franz Hawla­ta, Charles Mack­er­ras con­duct­ing the Czech Phil­har­mon­ic and Kühn Mixed Choir (Dec­ca).

Han­del, “Julius Cae­sar”; Nor­man Trei­gle, Bev­er­ly Sills, Mau­reen For­rester, Bev­er­ly Wolff, Julius Rudel con­duct­ing the New York City Opera Orches­tra and Cho­rus (RCA).

Jus­tice Gins­burg com­ments: “Lis­tened to LP record­ing many times. Pro­duc­tion was Julius Rudel’s tri­umph, opened in the State The­atre the year the Met moved to Lin­coln Cen­ter. Met opened with the not at all tri­umphant pro­duc­tion of Barber’s ‘Antony and Cleopa­tra.’ Next, my two best-loved operas.”

Mozart, “Don Gio­van­ni”; Cesare Siepi, Fer­nan­do Core­na, Suzanne Dan­co, Lisa Del­la Casa, Anton Der­mo­ta, Hilde Gue­den, Wal­ter Berry, Kurt Böhme, Josef Krips con­duct­ing the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic and Vien­na State Opera Cho­rus (Dec­ca).

Mozart, “The Mar­riage of Figaro”; Samuel Ramey, Lucia Popp, Thomas Allen, Kiri Te Kanawa, Fred­er­i­ca von Stade, Kurt Moll, Robert Tear, Georg Solti con­duct­ing the Lon­don Phil­har­mon­ic and Lon­don Opera Cho­rus (Dec­ca).

Strauss, “Der Rosenkava­lier”; Elis­a­beth Schwarzkopf, Christa Lud­wig, Tere­sa Stich-Ran­dall, Otto Edel­mann, Eber­hard Wächter, Lju­ba Welitsch, Nico­lai Ged­da, Her­bert von Kara­jan con­duct­ing the Phil­har­mo­nia Orches­tra and Cho­rus (EMI).

Tchaikovsky, “Eugene One­gin”; Thomas Allen, Mirella Freni, Neil Shicoff, Anne Sofie von Otter, James Levine con­duct­ing the Dres­den Staatskapelle and Leipzig Radio Cho­rus (DG).

Puc­ci­ni, “Tosca”; Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Ste­fano, Tito Gob­bi, Vic­tor de Saba­ta con­duct­ing the La Scala orches­tra and cho­rus (EMI).

Menot­ti, “The Medi­um”; Joyce Cas­tle, Patrice Michaels, Lawrence Rapchak con­duct­ing the Chica­go Opera The­atre (Cedille).

Kur­ka, “The Good Sol­dier Schweik”; Jason Collins, Marc Embree, Kel­li Har­ring­ton, Buffy Bag­gott, Alexan­der Platt con­duct­ing the Chica­go Opera The­atre (Cedille).

Jus­tice Gins­burg com­ments: “Glim­mer­glass Opera lat­er mount­ed ‘Schweik’ with per­fect-for-the-part Antho­ny Dean Grif­fey.”

Stravin­sky, “The Rake’s Progress”; Philip Lan­gridge, Samuel Ramey, Cathryn Pope, Stafford Dean, Sarah Walk­er, John Dob­son, Astrid Var­nay, Ric­car­do Chail­ly con­duct­ing the Lon­don Sin­foni­et­ta and Cho­rus (Dec­ca).

Brit­ten, “Bil­ly Budd”; Nathan Gunn, Ian Bostridge, Gidon Saks, Daniel Hard­ing con­duct­ing the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra and Cho­rus (Vir­gin Clas­sics).

Jus­tice Gins­burg com­ments: “Two Lieder record­ings I now and then play when work­ing at home: **Schu­bert, ‘An mein Herz,’ with Matthias Goerne; and songs by Brahms, with Ange­li­ka Kirch­schlager.”

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Acclaimed Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg Doc­u­men­tary, RBG, Air­ing Tonight on CNN

When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg, His Most Famous Stu­dent, To Care Deeply About Writ­ing

The Opera Data­base: Find Scores, Libret­ti & Syn­opses for Thou­sands of Operas Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free Jazz Musicians Intentionally Play Terrible Music to Drown Out the Noise of a Danish Far-Right Politician

in Music, Politics | September 18th, 2020

Art makes a way where pol­i­tics fail. I don’t mean that in any mawk­ish sense. Sure, art brings peo­ple togeth­er, encour­ages empa­thy and com­mon val­ues. Those can be won­der­ful things. But they are not always nec­es­sar­i­ly social goods. Vio­lent nation­al­ism brings peo­ple togeth­er around com­mon val­ues. Psy­chopaths can feel empa­thy if they want to.

When faced with fas­cism, or neo-fas­cism, or what­ev­er we want to call the 21st cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of fas­cism, those who pre­sume good faith in their oppo­nents pre­sume too much. Val­ues like respect for human rights or rules of log­i­cal debate or use of force, for exam­ple, are not in play. Direct con­fronta­tion usu­al­ly pro­vokes more vio­lence, and cor­re­spond­ing state repres­sion against anti-fas­cists.

Cre­ative thinkers have devised oth­er kinds of tactics—methods for meet­ing spec­ta­cle with spec­ta­cle, dis­rupt­ing and scat­ter­ing con­cen­trat­ed fear and hate by use of what William S. Bur­roughs called “mag­i­cal weapons.” Bur­roughs meant the phrase lit­er­al­ly when he aimed his occult audio/visual mag­ic at a gen­tri­fy­ing Lon­don cof­fee bar. But he used the very same ideas in his nov­els and man­u­als for over­throw­ing cor­rupt gov­ern­ments.

One might say some­thing sim­i­lar about the pio­neers of free jazz, a prod­uct of Black Pow­er pol­i­tics expressed in music. Coltrane drew on Mal­colm X when he divest­ed him­self of west­ern musi­cal con­straints; Ornette Cole­man estab­lished “har­molod­ic democ­ra­cy” in place of Euro­cen­tric struc­tures. These were inher­ent­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary forms, respond­ing to repres­sive times in new lan­guages. They were not, as many peo­ple thought then, just jazz played bad­ly.

But, as it turns out… free jazz delib­er­ate­ly played bad­ly makes quite an effec­tive rejoin­der to fas­cism, too. So a group of Dan­ish jazz musi­cians dis­cov­ered when they began crash­ing the staged events of far-right politi­cian Ras­mus Palu­dan, founder of the Stram Kurs (Hard Line) par­ty. As Vice reports:

[Palu­dan] is noto­ri­ous for organ­is­ing “demon­stra­tions” in neigh­bour­hoods with large immi­grant pop­u­la­tions, where he burns, throws, and stomps on Qurans behind walls of police offi­cers. A self-pro­claimed “guardian of free­dom” and “light of the Danes,” Palu­dan con­sid­ers immi­grants and Islam ene­mies of the Dan­ish peo­ple, as well as the country’s val­ues, tra­di­tions and gen­er­al way of life.

Does one respect­ful­ly argue with such a per­son? Try to breach the line of cops and knock them out? Hear out their point of view as they inspire acts of vio­lence? Or show up “armed with trum­pets, bon­go drums and sax­o­phones” and play right in his face, or at least “loud­ly enough to drown out his voice or draw atten­tion away from him”?

The col­lec­tive “Free Jazz Against Palu­dan” takes the mag­i­cal weapon of Sit­u­a­tion­ist free jazz pub­lic and rad­i­cal­izes har­molod­ic democ­ra­cy (done very, very obnox­ious­ly bad­ly on pur­pose, we must empha­size) for street action. “We’re fight­ing noise with noise,” one sax­o­phon­ist and self-described “old man turned activist” says. “I’m of the opin­ion that rhetoric like his should not be ignored. You have to protest against it, but in a way that is not destruc­tive and vio­lent.” Except that it is destructive—to Paludan’s weaponized igno­rance. [Palu­dan was recent­ly sen­tenced to jail on racism and defama­tion.] The revolv­ing col­lec­tive of activist musi­cians makes this plain, stat­ing on their Face­book page, “Any­one can join, with the excep­tion of just him. He can­not.”

What gives them the right to exclude him! one might cry indig­nant­ly. That’s the game Palu­dan wants to play. “What he wants is to get beat­en up by some immi­grants, get some close-ups of a soap eye or a bro­ken arm—that’d be great for him,” says pro­tes­tor Jørn Tol­strup. “So this is great, because here we have an idiot who won’t shut up, and now we’ve found a way to take his foot off the ped­al.” It’s cre­ative de-esca­la­tion and redi­rec­tion. And, we might say, not so much a pub­lic “can­celling” as the free expres­sion of oppos­ing ideas.

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ornette Cole­man Freed Jazz with His The­o­ry of Har­molod­ics

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

William S. Bur­roughs’ Man­i­festo for Over­throw­ing a Cor­rupt Gov­ern­ment with Fake News and Oth­er Prophet­ic Meth­ods: It’s Now Pub­lished for the First Time

How Music Unites Us All: Her­bie Han­cock & Kamasi Wash­ing­ton in Con­ver­sa­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Watch Bob Dylan Perform “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” His Damning Song About the Murder of Medgar Evers, at the 1963 March on Washington

in History, Music, Politics | August 31st, 2020

Trau­ma is rep­e­ti­tion, and the Unit­ed States seems to inflict and suf­fer from the same deep wounds, repeat­ed­ly, unable to stop, like one of the ancient Bib­li­cal curs­es of which Bob Dylan was so fond. The Dylan of the ear­ly 1960s adopt­ed the voice of a prophet, in var­i­ous reg­is­ters, to tell sto­ries of judg­ment and gen­er­a­tional curs­es, sym­bol­ic and his­tor­i­cal, that have beset the coun­try from its begin­nings.

The vers­es of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” from 1963’s The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, enact this rep­e­ti­tion, both trau­mat­ic and hyp­not­ic. In its dual refrains—“how many times…?” and “the answer is blowin’ in the wind” (ephemer­al, impos­si­ble to grasp)—the song cycles between earnest Lamen­ta­tions and the acute, world-weary res­ig­na­tion of Eccle­si­astes. “This ambi­gu­i­ty is one rea­son for the song’s broad appeal,” as Peter Dreier writes at Dis­sent.

Just three months after its release, when Dylan per­formed at the March on Wash­ing­ton for Jobs and Free­dom on August 28, 1963, “Blowin’ in the Wind” had become a mas­sive civ­il rights anthem. But he had already ced­ed the song to Peter, Paul & Mary, who played their ver­sion that day. Dylan ignored his sopho­more album entire­ly to play songs from the upcom­ing The Times They Are a‑Changing—songs that stand out for their indict­ments of the U.S. in some very spe­cif­ic terms.

Dylan played three songs from the new album: “When the Ship Comes In” with Joan Baez, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “With God on Our Side.” (He also played the pop­u­lar folk song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.”) In con­trast to his vague­ly allu­sive pop­u­lar anthems, “Only a Pawn in Their Game”—about the mur­der of Medgar Evers—isn’t coy about the cul­prits and their crimes. We might say the song offers an astute analy­sis of insti­tu­tion­al racism, white suprema­cy, and sto­chas­tic ter­ror­ism.

A bul­let from the back of a bush
Took Medgar Evers’ blood
A fin­ger fired the trig­ger to his name
A han­dle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game

A South politi­cian preach­es to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t com­plain
You’re bet­ter than them, you been born with white skin, ” they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used, it is plain
For the politi­cian’s gain
As he ris­es to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

The deputy sher­iffs, the sol­diers, the gov­er­nors get paid
And the mar­shals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To pro­tect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he nev­er thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

From the pover­ty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof­beats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ‘neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bul­let he caught
They low­ered him down as a king
But when the shad­owy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epi­taph plain
Only a pawn in their game

These lyrics have far too much rel­e­vance to cur­rent events, and they’re indica­tive of the chang­ing tone of Dylan’s muse. His refrains drip with irony. The killer of Medgar Evers “can’t be blamed”—an eva­sion of respon­si­bil­i­ty that becomes a pow­er­ful force all its own.

Dylan revis­its the themes of gen­er­a­tional trau­ma and mur­der in “With God on Our Side” (hear him sing it with Baez at New­port, above). The song is a sharp satire of his his­tor­i­cal edu­ca­tion, with its inevitable rep­e­ti­tions of war and slaugh­ter. Here, Dylan presents the expo­nen­tial­ly gross, exis­ten­tial­ly dread­ful, con­se­quences of a nation­al abdi­ca­tion of blame for his­tor­i­cal vio­lence.

Oh my name it ain’t noth­in’
My age it means less
The coun­try I come from
Is called the Mid­west
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side

Oh, the his­to­ry books tell it
They tell it so well
The cav­al­ries charged
The Indi­ans fell
The cav­al­ries charged
The Indi­ans died
Oh, the coun­try was young
With God on its side

The Span­ish-Amer­i­can
War had its day
And the Civ­il War, too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I was made to mem­o­rize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side

The First World War, boys
It came and it went
The rea­son for fight­ing
I nev­er did get
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side

The Sec­ond World War
Came to an end
We for­gave the Ger­mans
And then we were friends
Though they mur­dered six mil­lion
In the ovens they fried
The Ger­mans now, too
Have God on their side

I’ve learned to hate the Rus­sians
All through my whole life
If anoth­er war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all brave­ly
With God on my side

But now we got weapons
Of chem­i­cal dust
If fire them, we’re forced to
Then fire, them we must
One push of the but­ton
And a shot the world wide
And you nev­er ask ques­tions
When God’s on your side

Through many a dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ was
Betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscar­i­ot
Had God on his side.

So now as I’m leav­in’
I’m weary as Hell
The con­fu­sion I’m feel­in’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
That if God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

Dylan’s race/class analy­sis in “Only a Pawn in the Game” and his suc­cinct People’s His­to­ry of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism in “With God on Our Side” stand out as inter­est­ing choic­es for the March for sev­er­al rea­sons. For one thing, it’s as though he had writ­ten these songs express­ly to take the polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and reli­gious mech­a­nisms and mytholo­gies of racism apart. This was rad­i­cal speech in an event that was policed by its orga­niz­ers to tone down inflam­ma­to­ry rhetoric for the cam­eras.

23-year-old John Lewis, for exam­ple, was forced to tem­per his speech, in which he meant to say, “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dix­ie, the way Sher­man did. We shall pur­sue our own scorched earth pol­i­cy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — non­vi­o­lent­ly.… the rev­o­lu­tion is at hand, and we must free our­selves of the chains of polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic slav­ery.” As a pop­u­lar white artist, rather than a poten­tial­ly sedi­tious Black orga­niz­er, Dylan had far more license and could “use his priv­i­lege,” as they say, to describe the sys­tems of polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic oppres­sion Lewis had want­ed to name.

Dylan’s per­for­mance was one of a hand­ful of mem­o­rable musi­cal appear­ances. Most of the singers made a far big­ger impres­sion, like Mahalia Jack­son, Mar­i­an Ander­son, and Baez her­self, whose “We Shall Over­come” cre­at­ed a leg­endary moment of har­mo­ny. No one sang along to Dylan’s new songs—they wouldn’t have known the words. But Dylan was nev­er care­less. He chose these words for the moment, hop­ing to have some impact in the only way he could.

The 1963 March’s pur­pose has been over­shad­owed by a few pas­sages in Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.‘s pow­er­ful “I Have a Dream” speech, co-opt­ed by every­one and reduced to meme-able quotes. But the protest “remains one of the most suc­cess­ful mobi­liza­tions ever cre­at­ed by the Amer­i­can Left,” his­to­ri­an William P. Jones writes. “Orga­nized by a coali­tion of trade union­ists, civ­il rights activists, and feminists–most of them African Amer­i­can and near­ly all of them social­ists.”

Dylan sang sto­ries of how the coun­try got to where it was, through a his­to­ry of vio­lence still play­ing out before the marchers’ eyes. What­ev­er polit­i­cal ten­sions there were among the var­i­ous orga­niz­ers and speak­ers did not dis­tract them from push­ing through the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act and the Fair Employ­ment Prac­tices clause ban­ning dis­crim­i­na­tion on the basis of race, reli­gion, nation­al ori­gin, or sex—protections that have been broad­ened since that time, and also chal­lenged, threat­ened, and stripped away.

Fifty-sev­en years lat­er, as the RNC con­ven­tion ends and anoth­er March on Wash­ing­ton hap­pens, we might reflect on Dylan’s small but pre­scient con­tri­bu­tions in 1963, in which he apt­ly char­ac­ter­ized the trau­mat­ic rep­e­ti­tions we’re still con­vul­sive­ly expe­ri­enc­ing over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Moment When Bob Dylan Went Elec­tric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

James Bald­win Talks About Racism in Amer­i­ca & Civ­il Rights Activism on The Dick Cavett Show (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A New Digital Archive Preserves Black Lives Matter & COVID-19 Street Art

in Art, Politics | August 25th, 2020

Image by Aman­da-Lee Har­ris Gibbs, “Floyd & Tay­lor Trib­ute” 

What hap­pens when anti-racist pro­test­ers gath­er in the streets and are not met with tear gas, rub­ber bul­lets, and batons? For one thing, they make art and graf­fi­ti. Lots of it, on walls, streets, side­walks, cour­t­house doors, the ply­wood of board­ed-up win­dows, wher­ev­er. Pub­lic activist art serves not only as a memo­r­i­al for vic­tims of state oppres­sion, but as a way to imag­ine what the future needs and visu­al­ly occu­py the space to make it hap­pen. In the inter­twin­ing “mutu­al rela­tions of the polit­i­cal and the aes­thet­ic,” sym­bols can begin to call real con­di­tions into exis­tence.

The streets of cities around the coun­try have become tem­po­rary gal­leries of art­works that remem­ber vic­tims of sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist police vio­lence and call for jus­tice, even as they imag­ine what a more just world might look like: one where peo­ple are not trapped in cycles of pover­ty by aus­ter­i­ty and state vio­lence. Such dis­plays have pro­lif­er­at­ed espe­cial­ly in Min­neapo­lis, where George Floyd was killed. There, the “memo­r­i­al… is con­stant­ly chang­ing. In the days fol­low­ing Floyd’s mur­der by the police, street art, flow­ers, hand­writ­ten notes, and more” appeared.

Now the site “has become a liv­ing space,” Todd Lawrence, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas, tells Leah Feiger at Hyper­al­ler­gic. “The state of flux char­ac­ter­izes much of Minneapolis’s street art scene in the wake of recent protests,” Feiger writes. “The own­er­ship of the phys­i­cal art is con­tentious,” and tem­po­rary instal­la­tions become sites of long-term debate. The Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas has decid­ed to pre­serve these ephemer­al state­ments in a data­base called Urban Art Map­ping: George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art. The project began with a focus on Min­neapo­lis and has “steadi­ly expand­ed with every new sub­mis­sion.”

The project includes in its wider scope a data­base of COVID-19 street art, with many an acknowl­edge­ment of how gov­ern­ment fail­ures in response to the pan­dem­ic con­nect to the will­ful dis­re­gard for human life the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment calls out. “Artists and writ­ers pro­duc­ing work in the streets—including tags, graf­fi­ti, murals, stick­ers, and oth­er instal­la­tions on walls, pave­ment, and signs—are in a unique posi­tion to respond quick­ly and effec­tive­ly in a moment of cri­sis,” notes the COVID-19 Street Art site. As we lim­it our move­ment through pub­lic space, that space itself trans­forms, respond­ing in direct ways to a mul­ti­tude of inter­sect­ing crises none of us can afford to ignore.

Make sub­mis­sions to the COVID-19 Street Art archive here and to the George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art archive here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pub­lic Ene­my Releas­es a Fiery Anti-Trump Protest Song (NSFW)

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civ­il Rights Move­ment

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Winston Churchill Praises the Virtue of “Brevity” in Memos to His Staff: Concise Writing Leads to Clearer Thinking

in Politics, Writing | August 10th, 2020

George Orwell and Win­ston Churchill didn’t agree on much. For exam­ple, while Orwell wrote with deep sym­pa­thy about coal min­ers in The Road to Wigan Pier, Churchill, as home sec­re­tary, bru­tal­ly crushed a miner’s strike in Wales. Orwell’s ear­ly years as “an appa­ratchik in the last days of the empire… left him with a hatred of author­i­ty and impe­ri­al­ism,” writes Richard Eil­ers. Churchill was a com­mit­ted impe­ri­al­ist all his life, instru­men­tal in pro­long­ing a famine in British India that killed “at least three mil­lion peo­ple.”

Impor­tant­ly for history’s sake, they agreed on the need to con­front, rather than appease, the Nazis, against both the British left and right of the 1930s. “At a time not unlike today,” says jour­nal­ist Tom Ricks, “when peo­ple were won­der­ing whether democ­ra­cy was sus­tain­able, when a lot of peo­ple thought you need­ed author­i­tar­i­an rule, either from the right or the left, Orwell and Churchill, from their very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, come togeth­er on a key point. We don’t have to have author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment.”

Maybe some­what less important—but stren­u­ous­ly agreed upon nonethe­less by these two figures—was the need for clear, con­cise prose that avoids obfus­ca­tion. In Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage—an essay rou­tine­ly taught in col­lege com­po­si­tion classes—Orwell describes polit­i­cal­ly mis­lead­ing writ­ing as over­stuffed with “pre­ten­tious dic­tion” and “mean­ing­less words.” These are, he writes, signs of a “deca­dent… civ­i­liza­tion.” Churchill has had at least as much influ­ence as Orwell on a cer­tain kind of polit­i­cal writ­ing, though not the kind most of us read often.

In 1940, Churchill issued a memo to his staff titled “Brevi­ty.” He did not express con­cerns about creep­ing fas­cism in bureau­crat­ic com­mu­niques, but decried the prob­lem of wast­ed time, “while ener­gy has to be spent in look­ing for the essen­tial points.” He ends up, how­ev­er, say­ing some of the same things as Orwell, in few­er words.

I ask my col­leagues and their staffs to see to it that their Reports are short­er.

  1. The aim should be Reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp para­graphs.
  2. If a Report relies on detailed analy­sis of some com­pli­cat­ed fac­tors, or on sta­tis­tics, these should be set out in an Appen­dix.
  3. Often the occa­sion is best met by sub­mit­ting not a full-dress Report, but an Aide-mem­oire con­sist­ing of head­ings only, which can be expand­ed oral­ly if need­ed.
  4. Let us have an end of such phras­es as these: “It is also of impor­tance to bear in mind the fol­low­ing con­sid­er­a­tions…,” or “Con­sid­er­a­tion should be giv­en to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of car­ry­ing into effect….” Most of these wool­ly phras­es are mere padding, which can be left out alto­geth­er, or replaced by a sin­gle word. Let us not shrink from using the short expres­sive phrase, even if it is con­ver­sa­tion­al.

Reports drawn up on the lines I pro­pose may at first seem rough as com­pared with the flat sur­face of offi­cialese jar­gon. But the sav­ing in time will be great, while the dis­ci­pline of set­ting out the real points con­cise­ly will prove an aid to clear­er think­ing.

The mes­sage “cas­cad­ed through the civ­il ser­vice,” writes Lau­ra Cowdry at the UK Nation­al Archives. A 1940 arti­cle in the Times picked up the sto­ry. But the prob­lem per­sist­ed, as it does today and maybe will till the end of time (or until machines start to do all our writ­ing for us). Frus­trat­ed, Churchill issued anoth­er admo­ni­tion, short­er even than the first, in 1951.

Offi­cial papers are too long and too dif­fuse. In 1940 I called for brevi­ty. Evi­dent­ly I must do so again. I ask my col­leagues to read what I wrote then… and to make my wish­es known to their staffs.

These mem­os, Cowdry notes, “may shed some light onto gov­ern­ment com­mu­ni­ca­tions work of the past,” and on the Churchillian style that may have tak­en hold for decades in gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, as well as—of course—far beyond them. His emphat­ic state­ments also artic­u­late “key ele­ments of good com­mu­ni­ca­tion that would res­onate with the think­ing of any mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tor,” whether Orwell, Kurt Von­negut, or Cor­mac McCarthy, who has become a sought-after sci­en­tif­ic edi­tor for his strict min­i­mal­ism.

Churchill did not seem over­ly con­cerned with wordi­ness as a polit­i­cal prob­lem. Orwell did not approach the prob­lem philo­soph­i­cal­ly. That task fell to the Log­i­cal Pos­i­tivists of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. In his attempt to explain the wordi­ness of both under­grad­u­ates and world-renowned thinkers, “neo-Pos­i­tivist” philoso­pher David Stove goes so far as to ascribe over­writ­ing to “defects of char­ac­ter… such things as an inabil­i­ty to shut up; deter­mi­na­tion to be thought deep; hunger for pow­er; fear, espe­cial­ly the fear of an indif­fer­ent uni­verse….”

Some­thing to con­sid­er, maybe, when you’re look­ing at your next draft email, Face­book com­ment, or Slack mes­sage, and won­der­ing whether it actu­al­ly needs to be an essay….

via Bob Rae

Relat­ed Com­ment:

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writ­ing Clear and Tight Prose

Nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy Gives Writ­ing Advice to Sci­en­tists … and Any­one Who Wants to Write Clear, Com­pelling Prose

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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James Baldwin Talks About Racism in America & Civil Rights Activism on The Dick Cavett Show (1969)

in History, Politics, Television | August 4th, 2020

There are many rea­sons, some quite lit­er­al, that it can be painful to talk about racism in the U.S. For one thing, it often seems that writ­ers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, or James Bald­win, have already con­front­ed ques­tions of racial vio­lence with­out hedg­ing or equiv­o­ca­tion. Yet each time racist vio­lence hap­pens, there seems to be a deco­rous need in pol­i­tics and media to pre­tend to be sur­prised by what’s right in front of us, to pre­tend to have dis­cov­ered the place for the first time, and yet to already have a sup­ply of ready­made plat­i­tudes and denun­ci­a­tions at hand.

For exam­ple, just recent­ly, a for­mer white U.S. Pres­i­dent just dis­missed an impor­tant civ­il rights leader at the funer­al of anoth­er civ­il rights leader, while the oppres­sive con­di­tions both lead­ers fought against are ampli­fied to mil­i­tary grade in cities around the coun­try. Sports fans demand that elite Black ath­letes shut up and enter­tain them. The fans will be the ones to say what ges­tures are accept­able, like stand­ing for the nation­al anthem at a tele­vised for-prof­it sport­ing event that has more to do with gam­bling than patri­o­tism.

Maybe stand­ing and kneel­ing are both spec­ta­cles, but they do not car­ry equal weight. When New Orleans Saints quar­ter­back Drew Brees refused to sup­port his team­mates’ mild protest against mur­der, he tried to make it right by post­ing on social media a stock pho­to of a black hand and a white hand clasped togeth­er. In his N+1 essay “Such Things Have Done Harm,” a wor­thy appli­ca­tion of Baldwin’s furi­ous log­ic to the present, Blair McClen­don writes:

The spec­ta­cle of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion is irre­sistible. There may be a war in the streets, but from time to time there is a Christ­mas truce and we are to take those as visions of a bet­ter, calmer future. Here is the com­ing peace with­out all the gris­ly details that pre­vent us from get­ting there…. Hold­ing up a pic­ture of black and white peo­ple togeth­er inti­mate­ly, in cama­raderie, or even just mutu­al recog­ni­tion and respect, as proof of some­thing “pos­si­ble” implies an oth­er­wise bru­tal vision of the world “as it is”… We should be will­ing to demand more than fel­low feel­ing.

The fore­clo­sure of con­flict, the bypass­ing of real­i­ty with sen­ti­men­tal fan­tasies of har­mo­ny, lies at the heart of the excep­tion­al­ism argu­ment that seems to make so many peo­ple irra­tional­ly angry with Black ath­letes. You are high­ly paid, suc­cess­ful enter­tain­ers, and we con­sid­er that a sign of progress, there­fore we judge this protest ille­git­i­mate. For Bald­win, as Ellen Gutoskey writes at Men­tal Floss, this stan­dard mea­sure­ment of progress “is only progress as defined by white peo­ple of priv­i­lege.”

When Dick Cavett voiced the ques­tion to Bald­win in 1969—citing those who point to the suc­cess of “the ris­ing num­ber of Black Amer­i­cans in sports, pol­i­tics, and entertainment”—Baldwin explained the real prob­lem: No one has asked for this opin­ion, and cer­tain­ly not at that time, as Gutoskey points out, “with the vio­lence of 1968—Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tions, a riotous Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, count­less civ­il rights protests, and so on—still very fresh in the pub­lic con­scious­ness.” Bald­win puts is plain­ly:

Inso­far as the Amer­i­can pub­lic wants to think there has been progress, they over­look one very sim­ple thing: I don’t want to be giv­en any­thing by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself. And it also over­looks anoth­er very impor­tant thing: Per­haps I don’t think that this repub­lic is the sum­mit of human civ­i­liza­tion. Per­haps I don’t want to become like Ronald Rea­gan or like the pres­i­dent of Gen­er­al Motors. Per­haps I have anoth­er sense of life… Per­haps I don’t want what you think I want.

Repeat­ed­ly, the hal­lowed demo­c­ra­t­ic notion of self-deter­mi­na­tion has been denied Black Americans—perhaps the sin­gle most endur­ing thread that runs through the country’s his­to­ry. The denial of agency is com­pli­cat­ed, how­ev­er, by the neces­si­ty of assign­ing blame to peo­ple deemed not ful­ly human: “I have noth­ing to say about the idea that peo­ple who are the descen­dants of prop­er­ty are bound to respect the prop­er­ty rights of Guc­ci or CVS beyond the desire to point out its obscen­i­ty,” Blair McClen­don writes. “What was called vio­lence and chaos in any oth­er cir­cum­stance would be read as some­thing much sim­pler: self-defense.”

Again and again, those who resist the most bru­tal conditions—including out­right mur­der in the streets, in qui­et homes at night, in cars, at play­grounds, by agents of the state—are called vil­lains and insur­rec­tion­ists. Cavett asks Bald­win to explain rad­i­cal lead­ers like H. Rap Brown and Stoke­ly Carmichael, “who fright­en us the most” (mak­ing the word “us” do a lot of work here). Bald­win responds, “[When] any white man in the world says ‘Give me lib­er­ty, or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exact­ly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a crim­i­nal and treat­ed like one….”

I doubt the irony of quot­ing Patrick Hen­ry (also known for say­ing “If this be trea­son, make the most of it!”) was in any way lost on Bald­win. As one recent biog­ra­ph­er puts it, Hen­ry was the first Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ary “to call for inde­pen­dence, for rev­o­lu­tion against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much free­dom as pos­si­ble from government—American as well as British.” Patrick Hen­ry was also a slave­own­er, some­thing he con­sid­ered, in his own words, a “lam­en­ta­ble evil.”

Hen­ry wrote, “I will not, I can­not jus­ti­fy [own­ing slaves],” but he was “not con­flict­ed enough to actu­al­ly set any­one free,” writes Michael Schaub at NPR. Dec­la­ra­tions of high moral prin­ci­ples, while one open­ly com­mits, or ignores, what one admits is “evil,” still fea­ture promi­nent­ly in offi­cial sto­ries of the moment. Bald­win, writes McClen­don, “knew what a sto­ry was, he knew what a film was, he knew what a rev­o­lu­tion was and he may have known for­give­ness, too.”

Bald­win did not know will­ful for­get­ting, how­ev­er, except to call it out when he saw it used as a weapon. Raoul Peck­’s excel­lent, apt­ly-titled film I Am Not Your Negro begins with the Cavett inter­view, then unrav­els a “rad­i­cal, up-to-the-minute exam­i­na­tion of race in Amer­i­ca,” writes YouTube Movies, who offers the film free to screen online, “using Bald­win’s orig­i­nal words and a flood of rich archival mate­r­i­al” to recon­struct his last unfin­ished book, Remem­ber This House.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Famous James Bald­win-William F. Buck­ley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

W.E.B. Du Bois Dev­as­tates Apol­o­gists for Con­fed­er­ate Mon­u­ments and Robert E. Lee (1931)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Dr. Fauci Reads an Undergrad’s Entire Thesis, Then Follows Up with an Encouraging Letter

in Current Affairs, Graduation Speech, Letters, Politics, Science | July 20th, 2020

Pho­to via the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases 

What are some qual­i­ties to look for in a leader?

  • A thirst for knowl­edge
  • A sense of duty
  • The scru­ples to give cred­it where cred­it is due
  • A calm, clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion style
  • Humil­i­ty

Dr. Antho­ny Fau­ci brings these qual­i­ties to bear as Direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases at the Nation­al Insti­tute of Health.

They’re also on dis­play in his mes­sage to then-under­grad Luke Mes­sac, now an emer­gency med­i­cine res­i­dent at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, whose research focus­es on the his­to­ries of health pol­i­cy in south­ern Africa and the US, and who recent­ly tweet­ed:

13 years ago, I emailed Dr. Fau­ci out of the blue to ask if I might inter­view him for my under­grad the­sis. He invit­ed me to his office, where he answered all my ques­tions. When I sent him the the­sis, HE READ THE WHOLE THING (see his over­ly effu­sive review below). Who does that?!

Here’s what Fau­ci had to say to the young sci­en­tist:

It cer­tain­ly reads like the work of a class act.

In addi­tion to serv­ing as one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most rec­og­niz­able faces, Dr. Fau­ci has acquired anoth­er duty—that of scape­goat for Don­ald Trump, the 6th pres­i­dent he has answered to in his long career.

He seems to be tak­ing the administration’s pot­shots with a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cool head, though com­pared to the furi­ous crit­i­cisms AIDS activists direct­ed his way in the 80s and 90s, he’s unlike­ly to find much of edu­ca­tion­al val­ue in them.

Last March, The Body Pro, a newslet­ter for work­ers on the front lines of HIV edu­ca­tion, pre­ven­tion, care, and ser­vices quot­ed ACT UP NY’s Jim Eigo on the doctor’s response to a let­ter demand­ing par­al­lel track­ing, a pol­i­cy revi­sion that would put poten­tial­ly life-sav­ing drugs in the hands of those who test­ed pos­i­tive far ear­li­er than the exist­ing clin­i­cal tri­al require­ments’ sched­ule would have allowed:

Lo and behold, he read the let­ter and liked it, and the fol­low­ing year he start­ed pro­mot­ing the idea of a par­al­lel track for AIDS drugs to the FDA. Had he not helped us push that through, we couldn’t have got­ten a lot of the cousin drugs to AZT, such as ddC and ddI, approved so fast. They were prob­lem­at­ic drugs, but with­out them, we couldn’t have kept so many peo­ple alive. 

Fau­ci, despite being straight and Catholic, was not only not homo­pho­bic, which much of med­ical prac­tice still was in the late 1980s, he also wouldn’t tol­er­ate homo­pho­bia among his col­leagues. He knew there was no place for that in a pub­lic-health cri­sis.

Speak­ing of cor­re­spon­dence, Dr Mes­sac seems to have tak­en the “per­pet­u­al stu­dent” con­cept Dr. Fau­ci impressed upon him back in 2007 to heart, as evi­denced by a recent tweet, regard­ing a les­son gleaned from Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger in Pump­ing Iron, a 1977 doc­u­men­tary about body­builders:

Schwarzeneg­ger explained how he would fig­ure out what to work out every day by look­ing in a mir­ror and find­ing his weak­est mus­cles. It’s pret­ty good advice for study­ing dur­ing res­i­den­cy. Every shift reveals a weak­ness, and greats nev­er stop look­ing for their own.

In writ­ing to Mes­sac, Dr. Fau­ci allud­ed to his com­mence­ment speech­es, so we thought it appro­pri­ate to leave you with one of his most recent ones, a vir­tu­al address to the grad­u­at­ing class of his alma mater, Col­lege of the Holy Cross:

“Now is the time, if ever there was one” he tells the Class of 2020, “to care self­less­ly about one anoth­er… Stay safe, and I look for­ward to the good work you will con­tribute in the years ahead.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Sci­ence

Richard Feynman’s Tech­nique for Learn­ing Some­thing New: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy Gives Writ­ing Advice to Sci­en­tists … and Any­one Who Wants to Write Clear, Com­pelling Prose

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch the Famous James Baldwin-William F. Buckley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | July 9th, 2020

When James Bald­win took the stage to debate William F. Buck­ley at Cam­bridge in 1965, it was to have “a debate we shouldn’t need,” writes Gabrielle Bel­lot at Lit­er­ary Hub, and yet it’s one that is still “as impor­tant as ever.” The propo­si­tion before the two men—famed prophet­ic nov­el­ist of the black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca and the con­ser­v­a­tive founder of the Nation­al Review—was this: “The Amer­i­can Dream is at the Expense of the Amer­i­ca Negro.”

The state­ment should not need defend­ing, Bald­win argued, because it is so obvi­ous­ly true. The wealth cre­at­ed by hun­dreds of years of slav­ery has passed down through gen­er­a­tions of fam­i­lies. So too has the pover­ty. These divi­sions have been stren­u­ous­ly main­tained by Jim Crow, redlin­ing, and racist polic­ing. “Prof­its from slav­ery,” write Stephen Smith and Kate Ellis at APM Reports, “helped fund some of the most pres­ti­gious schools in the North­east, includ­ing Har­vard, Colum­bia, Prince­ton and Yale,” which hap­pened to be Buckley’s alma mater and was found­ed by an actu­al slave trad­er.

Slave labor fund­ed, built, and main­tained near­ly every part of the for­ma­tive uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem in the ear­ly U.S., and built the wealth of many oth­er pow­er­ful insti­tu­tions. Bald­win says it is “awk­ward” to have to point out these facts. Rather than recite them, he per­son­al­izes, speak­ing, he says, as “a kind of Jere­mi­ah” in nam­ing crimes gone unre­dressed for too long: “I am stat­ing very seri­ous­ly, and this is not an over­state­ment. I picked the cot­ton, I car­ried it to the mar­ket, and I built the rail­roads under some­one else’s whip for noth­ing. For noth­ing…. The Amer­i­can soil is full of the corpses of my ances­tors. Why is my free­dom or my cit­i­zen­ship, or my right to live there, how is it con­ceiv­ably a ques­tion now?”

Buckley’s response drips with con­de­scen­sion and con­tempt. He begins with a stan­dard con­ser­v­a­tive line: deplor­ing the acts of a few “indi­vid­ual Amer­i­can cit­i­zens” who “per­pet­u­ate dis­crim­i­na­tion,” but deny­ing that his­toric, sys­temic racism still exists. He then cites “the fail­ure of the Negro com­mu­ni­ty itself to make cer­tain exer­tions, which were made by oth­er minor­i­ty groups dur­ing the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.” He damns an entire group of peo­ple with plat­i­tudes about hard work while also declar­ing loud­ly that race has noth­ing to do with it.

This contradiction—engaging in racist scape­goat­ing while claim­ing not to see race—was part of the strat­e­gy of “col­or­blind” con­ser­vatism the Nation­al Review adopt­ed after the pas­sage the Civ­il Rights Act. Pri­or to the ear­ly six­ties, how­ev­er, Buck­ley had been a stri­dent seg­re­ga­tion­ist who pub­licly defend­ed insti­tu­tion­al­ized white suprema­cy rather than claim­ing it had dis­ap­peared. In 1957, he wrote an edi­to­r­i­al titled “Why the South Must Pre­vail” and argued that white south­ern politi­cians must “take such mea­sures as are nec­es­sary to pre­vail, polit­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly” over black cit­i­zens.

Buck­ley had not fun­da­men­tal­ly changed in 1965, though he posi­tioned him­self as a mod­er­ate mid­dle ground between lib­er­als and seg­re­ga­tion­ists like Strom Thur­mond, whom he con­sid­ered crude. His posi­tion amounts to lit­tle more than a defense of dom­i­na­tion, couched in what his­to­ri­an Joshua Tait calls the “racial inno­cence of intel­lec­tu­al con­ser­vatism” that delib­er­ate­ly ignores or dis­torts his­tor­i­cal truths and present real­i­ties. “Bristling at Baldwin’s claim that the Amer­i­can econ­o­my was built by the unre­mu­ner­at­ed labour of Black peo­ple,” writes Joss Har­ri­son, “Buck­ley cries: ‘My great grand­par­ents worked too!’”

The debate “now stands as one of the arche­typ­al artic­u­la­tions of the divid­ing line between US pro­gres­sives and con­ser­v­a­tives on ques­tions of race, jus­tice and his­to­ry,” writes Aeon, who bring us the full ver­sion above with restored audio by Adam D’Arpino. Buck­ley responds to Baldwin’s pow­er­ful rhetoric with insults, out of con­text “facts and fig­ures – as well as an ad hominem shot at Baldwin’s speak­ing voice.” He pro­pos­es that one road to equal­i­ty lies in dis­en­fran­chis­ing poor South­ern whites as well as black cit­i­zens.

Buck­ley dis­plays a “com­plete igno­rance of the prob­lems faced by black Amer­i­cans in soci­ety,” writes Har­ri­son. Such igno­rance, “allied with pow­er,” Bald­win said else­where, con­sti­tutes “the most fero­cious ene­my jus­tice can have.” For Bald­win, Buck­ley’s atti­tude sim­ply con­firmed the “great shock,” that he mov­ing­ly describes in his debate state­ment, “around the age of five, or six, or sev­en, to dis­cov­er that the flag to which you have pledged alle­giance, along with every­body else, has not pledged alle­giance to you.”

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

Great Cul­tur­al Icons Talk Civ­il Rights: James Bald­win, Mar­lon Bran­do, Har­ry Bela­fonte & Sid­ney Poiti­er (1963)

James Bald­win: Wit­ty, Fiery in Berke­ley, 1979

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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