Tuesday, February 28, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt fourteen)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

During Reagan’s first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent, and the number of poor Americans in general increased by 2.2. million. In one year, the New York Times observed, “much of the progress that had been made against poverty in the 1960s and 1970s” had been “wiped out.”



Monday, February 27, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt thirteen)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Ironically, it was a former Hollywood star who came to embody Rocky Balboa in real life; and at the same time, to embody the racist blacklash to Black Power in politics. This real-life Rocky decided to challenge incumbent Gerald Ford for the presidential seat on the Republican ticket in 1976. Reagan fought down all those empowerment movements fomenting in his home state of California and across the nation. Hardly any other Republican politician could match his law-and-order credentials, and hardly any other Republican politician was more despised by antiracists. When Reagan had first campaigned for governor of California in 1966, he had pledged “to send the welfare bums back to work.” By 1976, he had advanced his fictional welfare problem enough to attract Nixon’s undercover racists to his candidacy, gaining their support in cutting the social programs that helped the poor. On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago’s Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. “Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000,” Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of $8,000, and exceptional amount for something that rarely happened. But truth did not matter to the Reagan campaign as much as feeding the White backlash to Black Power.



Sunday, February 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt twelve)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Weeks before Americans ran out to see Rocky, though, they ran out to buy Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family. And those who did not want to slog through the 704-page tome that claimed the No. 1 spot on the New York Times Best Seller List watched the even more popular television adaptation that started airing on ABC in January 1977, becoming the most watched show in US television history. Roots: The Saga of an American Family shared the thrilling, tragic, and tumultuous story of Kunta Kinte, from his kidnapping in Gambia to his brutal crippling, which ended his incessant runaway attempts in Virginia. Claiming Kinte as his actual ancestor, Haley followed his life and the life of his descendants in US history down to himself. For African American in the radiance of Black Power’s broadening turn to antiracist Pan-African ideas, and starved for knowledge about their life before and during slavery, Roots was a megahit, one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. Roots unearthed legions of racist ideas of backward Africa, of civilizing American slavery, of the contented slave, of stupid and imbruted slaves, of loose enslaved women, and of African American roots in slavery. The plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind.



Saturday, February 25, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt eleven)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by some of those enemies at a Harlem rally. When James Baldwin heard the news in London, he was beside himself. “It is because of you,” he shouted at London reporters, “the men that created this white supremacy, that this man is dead!” From his nationally watched voting registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. was reflectively restrained. “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.” On February 22, 1965, the New York Times banner headline read: “The Apostle of Hate Is Dead.”

Actor Ossie Davis christened Malcolm “our shining black prince” days later in his magnetic eulogy before the overflow crowd at Harlem’s Faith Temple of the Church of God in Christ. “Many will say . . . he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist,” Davis said. And the response would be, “Did you ever really listen to him? For if you did, you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.”



Friday, February 24, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt ten)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a spate of demonstrations in Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s ruggedly segregationist police chief, “Bull” Conner [sp]. Nine days later, on Good Friday, eight White anti-segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public statement requesting that these “unwise and untimely” street demonstrations cease and be “pressed in the courts.” Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same day, read the statement from his cell. Incited, he started doing something he rarely did. He responded to critics in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” published far and wide that summer. King attacked not only those Alabama preachers, but also the applauding audience of Beyond the Melting Pot. He confessed that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not the segregationist,” but the white moderate . . . who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”



Thursday, February 23, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt nine)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Hooton’s Up from the Ape received a complement when King Kong appeared on the big screen in 1933. The film shares the adventure tale of a colossal, primordial, island-dwelling ape who dies attempting to possess a young and beautiful White woman. Americans scraped their pennies together, took their minds off the Depression, and gave the film stunning box-office sales. Reviewers were captivated. “One of the most original, thrilling and mammoth novelties to emerge from a movie studio,” radiated the Chicago Tribune. Actually, King Kong was nothing but a remake of The Birth of a Nation, set in the island scenery of Tarzan, and then New York. But King Kong did not invite the controversy of The Birth of a Nation. The filmmakers had veiled the physically powerful Black man by casting him as the physically powerful ape. In both films, the Negro-Ape terrorizes White people, tries to destroy White civilization, and pursues a White woman before a dramatic climax—the lynching of the Negro-Ape. King Kong was stunningly original for showing images of racist ideas—without ever saying a word about Black people, like those southern grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and understanding clauses that had disenfranchised Black people.



Wednesday, February 22, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt eight)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Physical anthropology, a discipline studying biological racial distinctions, had split off from cultural anthropology, which studed cultural distinctions. Boas was at the helm of cultural anthropology; the anthropologists at the helm of physical anthropology were Earnest A. Hooton and Carleton S. Coon at Harvard. In 1931, Hooton authored Up from the Ape, which became a staple in physical anthropology courses over the next few decades. “Physical characteristics,” Hooton explained, “which determine race are associated, in the main, with specific intangible and non-measurable but nevertheless real and important, temperamental and mental variations.

Many of Hooton’s students entered the health-care sector, where segregationist ideas of biological races were rampant, and where workers were still treating diseases differently by race. Syphilis harmed Blacks much more than it did Whites, argued syphilis “expert” Thomas Murrell in Journal of the American Medical Association in 1910. But this theory had never been definitively proven. So in 1932, the US Public Health Service began its “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male.” Government researchers promised free medical care to six hundred syphilis-infected sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama. They secretly withheld treatment to these men and waited for their deaths, so they could perform autopsies. Researchers wanted to confirm their hypothesis that syphilis damaged the neurological systems of Whites, while bypassing Blacks “underdeveloped” brains and damaging their cardiovascular systems instead. The study was not halted until the press exposed it in 1972.



Tuesday, February 21, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt seven)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

South Carolina senator Matthew Butler and Alabama senator and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon John Tyler Morgan introduced a congressional bill on January 7, 1890, to fund Black emigration to Africa. It was an ingenious solution to the class and racial problems of big southern landowners. Withering under a southern agricultural depression, many White “dirt farmers” were raging against the Black farmers; others were joining with Blacks to rage against White landowners in the rising interracial, antiracist populist movement. The colonization bill was a deflective measure. It pointed White farmers to southern Blacks—and not rich White landowners—as the chief cause of the southern agrarian depression. White farmers could easily see how the mass ejection of southern Blacks would increase their own labor value.



Monday, February 20, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt six)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Six days after meeting with the Black delegation, Lincoln gained an opportunity to emphatically declare his views on war, emancipation, and Black people. The nation’s most powerful editor, Horace Greeley, inserted an open letter to the president in his leading New York Tribune on August 20, 1862. Greeley had been as responsible for Lincoln’s election as anyone. He urged Lincoln to enforce the “emancipation provisions” of the Second Confiscation Act.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied in Greeley’s rival paper, Washington’s National Intelligencer. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” In the New York Tribune, rising abolitionist Wendell Phillips hammered Lincoln’s remarks as “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.”



Sunday, February 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt five)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

On February 2, 1860, Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, presented the southern platform of unlimited states’ rights and enslavers rights to the US Senate. The South needed these resolutions to be passed if they were going to remain in the Stephen Douglas-led Democratic Party and in the Union. Davis could have easily added that southerners believed the federal government should not use its resources to assist Black people in any way. On April 12, 1860, Davis objected to appropriating funds for educating Blacks in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” he said, but “by white men for white men.” The bill was based on the false assertion of racial equality, he stated. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”

Adam had driven away the first White criminal, his son Cain, who was “no longer the fit associate of those who were created to exercise dominion over the earth,” Davis lectured the senators. Cain had found in the “land of Nod those to whom his crime had degraded him to an equality.” Apparently, Blacks had lived in the Land of Nod among the “living creatures” God had created before humans. Blacks were later taken on Noah’s ark with other animals. Their overseer: Ham.



Saturday, February 18, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt four)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Equating enslaved Blacks to three-fifths of all other (White) persons matched the ideology of racists on both sides of the aisle. Both assimilationists and segregationists argued, yet with different premises and conclusions, that Black people were simultaneously human and subhuman. Assimilationists stridently declared the capability of sub-White, sub-human Blacks to become whole, five-fifths, White, one day. For segregationists, three-fifths offered a mathematical approximation of inherent and permanent Black inferiority. They may have disagreed on the rationale and the question of permanence, but seemingly all embraced Black inferiority—and in the process enshrined the power of slaveholders and racist ideas in the nation’s founding document.



Friday, February 17, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt three)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

With Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual inferiority. This status would persist over the next fifty years. Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Africans who learned to be highly intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all of the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely self-sufficient. Jefferson had to ignore his own advertisements for skilled runaways and the many advertisements from other planters calling for the return of their valuable skilled captives, who were “remarkably smart and sensible,” and “very ingenious at any work.” One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?

Notes on the State of Virginia was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome” than Whites, because they lacked the forethought to see “danger till it be present,” Jefferson wrote. Africans felt love more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That is why they were disposed “to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” But on the previous page, Jefferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” In Jefferson’s vivid imagination, lazy Blacks desired to sleep more than Whites, but, as physical savants, they required less sleep.



Thursday, February 16, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt two)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Whether they chose to illuminate the stamp of Blackness through curse theory or climate theory, the travel writers and translators of the time had a larger common goal, and they accomplished it: they ushered in the British age of adventure. They were soon followed by another group: the playwrights. With the English literacy rate low, many more British imaginations were churned by playwrights than by travel writers. At the turn of the century, a respected London playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon was escorting English audiences back into the ancient world and around modern Europe, from Scotland (Macbeth), to Denmark (Hamlet), to inferior Blackness and superior Whiteness in Italy (The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice). The racial politics of William Shakespeare’s Othello did not surprise English audiences when it premiered in 1604. By the late 1500s, English dramatists were used to manufacturing Satan’s Black agents on earth. Shakespeare’s first Black character, the evil, oversexed Aaron in Titus Andronicus, first came to the stage in 1594. Down in Spain, dramatists frequently staged Black people as cruel idiots in the genre called comedias de negros.



Wednesday, February 15, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt one)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Almost from Columbus’s arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them negros da terra (Blacks from the land), transferring their racist constructions of African people onto Native Americans. Over the years that followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history. Thousands of Native Americans died resisting enslavement. More died from European diseases, from the conditions they suffered while forcibly tilling fields, and on death marches searching and mining for gold. Thousands of Native Americans were driven off their land by Spanish settlers dashing into the colonies after riches. Spanish merchant Pedro de Las Casas settled in Hispaniola in 1502, the year the first enslaved Africans disembarked from a Portuguese slave ship. He brought along his eighteen-year-old son Bartolomé, who would play an outsized role in the direction slavery took in the so-called New World.



Monday, February 13, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt eight)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

I said I needed to take a shower, shave, and change before I told them anything. I went into the bathroom. She called Deputy Commissioner Handal to tell him I’d come home, but he was away at the moment, extremely busy looking over the rubble of a scrapyard where Jacinto Bustillo, the snakes, and the yellow Chevrolet had been burned to ashes by flamethrowers and incendiary bombs.



Sunday, February 12, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt seven)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

I continued to wade through the ford until I found a path covered with enough vegetation for me to risk it.

The police were setting cars on fire indiscriminately. It was the only explanation for the thundering noise and the blaze. The helicopters were still in position, flying low and lighting up the scrapyard, the vacant lot, and the ravine.



Saturday, February 11, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt six)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

The old woman said she was sure the appearance of the snakes was an ominous sign, evidence that the end of days was near, just like it said in Revelations. There was no other way to explain such a disaster.

I told them I agreed.



Friday, February 10, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt five)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

I took another sip of rum, went back to the car and took out Valentina’s skin so it could dry in the sun. The soup was boiling now, but I wanted to wait for the meat to be ready. It had to be tender and delicious, worthy of a girl like her. And since I didn’t have any seasoning, I looked for the bags of marijuana I’d taken from Raúl Pineda’s table and emptied them into the soup.



Thursday, February 9, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt four)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

She explains that she’s here to ask Ms. Cuevas, the Assistant Press Secretary, some questions and shows him her press pass.

And then, when the guard opens the metal gate and Victor begins to inch the Volkswagen forward, she spots a flash of yellow out of the corner of her eye. She turns around and sees an old American car drive by the Presidential Palace gates.



Wednesday, February 8, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt three)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

“You two, in my office,” he ordered. He had a fierce look in his eyes and he was scowling. Right away, before they’d even closed the door, he laid into Handal. How could that madman still be out killing people all over the place without having been arrested? And he’d better have a good explanation for the murders of the DICA agents! Didn’t he realize they were the best agents trained by the gringos? And for what? To come back and be killed by a lunatic who was supposedly getting revenge over an affair he’d had with Agent Pineda’s ex-wife three years ago! Did he think anybody was going to buy a story like that?

“It’s the only story that makes sense, sir,” Handal murmured.



Tuesday, February 7, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt two)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

“I’ll try if you want, boss,” said Flores, who was known as the station’s smooth-talker—extremely useful for getting information from both witnesses and suspects. He was one of the brand-new detectives trained after the war; he looked like a nice guy and had good gringo manners.

The Deputy Commissioner stuck his little finger in his ear.



Monday, February 6, 2017

the last book I ever read (Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya, excerpt one)

from Dances with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya:

I got out of the car.

Surprised, they looked at me with a distrust that quickly turned to hostility. They ordered me to leave the parking lot immediately—this was private property, not a homeless shelter. I told them that I was just going to the supermarket to buy a bottle of water, but they said I was in no condition to walk down the aisles. What would decent people say? Hadn’t I noticed what I looked like? Couldn’t I smell the stink? They stood in front of me with their hands on their clubs, determined not to let me pass, to force me to leave. But I’d carelessly left the car door open. And the ladies couldn’t stand it. That was why Don Jacinto had always closed it so quickly when he got out of the car.



Friday, February 3, 2017

the last book I ever read (Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon, excerpt twelve)

from Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

I climbed the back steps and walked through the house, feeling a little less woozy with every step. When I got to the front porch the tuba was there waiting for me. I was almost glad to see it. I stood in the light spilling out through the open door behind me, rain on the lenses of my eyeglasses, rain running down the sides of my nose, trying to work up the nerve to walk back to the empty house on Denniston Street. I looked into the foyer to see if by any chance someone had left behind an umbrella, or if there was something I could use to cover my head. There was nothing. I turned, and took a deep breath, and heaved the tuba up over my head, to give me a little shelter. Then I started for home. The thing was too heavy to carry in this way for very long, however, and after a while I lowered it and just went ahead and got wet. My clothes grew heavy, and my shoes squeaked, and the pockets of my jacket filled with rain. Finally I sat down on top of the tuba and waited there, like a man clinging to an empty barrel, for the flood to carry me off.



Thursday, February 2, 2017

the last book I ever read (Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon, excerpt eleven)

from Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

“I was swinging one of his bats. A big one, thirty-six ounces, all yellow and stained. Like a kind of an old tusk. It used to belong to Joe DiMaggio.” His lined face softened a little as he remembered. “A beautiful thing.”

“I know the one,” I said.



Wednesday, February 1, 2017

the last book I ever read (Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon, excerpt ten)

from Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

The storefronts along Centre Avenue were barred and shuttered, the door handles chained, the broken sidewalks deserted except for a party of girls in starchy pink and yellow and ladies in broad hats who were coming down the steps of the A.M.E. church on the corner of the Hi-Hat’s block. Crabtree guided us into the parking lot of the Hat, where on Friday night that flickering Shadow had danced its corrida with the Galaxie. It was empty of everything but a stiff breeze and a broad whirling fairy circle of paper cups, losing numbers, the want ads, a hair net, fluttering sheets of waxed paper stained with barbecue sauce. The black steel doors of the club were closed tight, a corrugated shutter covered the kitchen window, and the place had the usual forlorn appearance of a nightclub in the daytime, unplugged, unmagical, closed up like a frozen custard stand on a deserted stretch of boardwalk in the winter.