Thursday, October 06, 2005
Darkness in the Hearts and Minds of America
I recently posted about white privilege and how it mimics racism, and even feeds on it. This is more on that dynamic. But it’s more rooted in racist stereotyping. New Orleans, in its own tourist-hype way, has brought that up, too: Congo Square, Voodoo, Zombies—evil magic. The folks from Peoria love it: wow, just like Africa, sort of. Safer.
Underneath is the assumption that non-white people are just not as together. They’re wired differently—they’re superstitious, more susceptible to mob thinking, more emotional, less rational, easier led—all those things the dominant Euro-American culture isn’t. Isn’t supposed to be. The Noble Savage lives on in the imagination.
Well, let’s take a look. Superstitious? How many white people believe in the Immaculate Conception? The bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary? That God does love Americans more than any other people on earth? Mob thinking? Check out the aftermath of a Big Ten college football game or a soccer match. Whites are more rational not non-whites? They can’t be easily led? What ever happened to those WMDs?
Savagery. After World War II, nobody should have preserved any doubts that Europeans were not savage.
But that thinking doesn’t go away. It just lies in the dark parts of our hearts and minds, waiting for the opportunities to erupt. The reportage on New Orleans, in many instances, was a ready-made funnel for that twisted thinking to bubble up.
PopPolitics.com
Where Popular and Political Cultures Meet
10.04.05
Heart of Darkness Still Beating: Race, Quatrain and American Blindness
I've been reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with my students over the past few weeks. I cannot help but see how it speaks to the latest news out of New Orleans.
Conrad's story is a tale of a European man, Marlow, making a trip up the Congo River during the height of Belgium's imperialist project in the late 19th century. He sees himself as entering the "heart of darkness" -- a place of savagery that has degraded and ruined at least one other European man, Kurtz.
While the novel is certainly a damning critique of King Leopold's genocidal methods and a more universal exploration into the "darkness" that is part of every human soul, it is also a tale of entrenched prejudice and blindness.
Marlow, despite his often enlightened introspection, represents the native Africans as little more than savages, at home only in the "wild and passionate" jungle and out of place in the "civilized" world. Although he admits repeatedly and obsessively that he cannot "see" into the jungle and, presumably, into the individuals lives and societies that populate it, he never questions the "truth" of his representation.
It appears as if the 21st-century American media works from the same imaginary premise and has been infected, even more inexcusably, with the same systemic blindness.
Almost all of those reports -- about the rapes, murders, shootings and riots in the Superdome, the Convention Center, and on the streets of New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina -- well, uh, how do I say it?
They weren't true.
Yep -- no kidding -- they were made up. They were lies to feed the media frenzy.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune has done amazing work in cataloging and contextualizing all that it and others got wrong.
What is most remarkable as you read through the list is the massive distance between the truth and reality
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
And to say race didn't play a role in the coverage would be perpetuating another kind of blindness.
The Los Angeles Times offered a shorter report on the latest revelations, but it includes a revealing interview with Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss:
Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.
"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."
David Carr's piece in The New York Times, "More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports," doesn't make such a pointed critique, but the stories speak for themselves:
''I talked to a friend and, after the flood, they heard on the radio that a gang of 400 armed black looters were coming over the bridge to Hanrahan, where he lived,'' said Ken Bode, a professor of journalism at DePauw University and a former correspondent for NBC. ''He and his neighbors were sitting in the street with guns and they decided to load up all they could and caravan out. He said the looters never got there because the National Guard turned them back.''
There was no band of looters coming their way.
"There is a timeless primordial appeal of the story of a city in chaos and people running loose," Carl Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Northwestern University and the author of Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, tells the NYT. Urban chaos narratives, he adds, offer "the fulfillment of some timely ideas and prejudices about the current social order."
The best antidote for this disturbing media mea culpa might be taking refuge in honesty -- an admission of our own prejudice and how it shapes our behavior. In the Times-Picayune report, for example, a National Guardsman experiences a productive cognitive dissonance about those "thugs" he had heard about:
As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. [Maj. David] Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.
If only more of us could step through the mediated jungle we live in and emerge on the other side -- in the light of day.
Posted by Bernie at October 4, 2005 10:23 PM
Underneath is the assumption that non-white people are just not as together. They’re wired differently—they’re superstitious, more susceptible to mob thinking, more emotional, less rational, easier led—all those things the dominant Euro-American culture isn’t. Isn’t supposed to be. The Noble Savage lives on in the imagination.
Well, let’s take a look. Superstitious? How many white people believe in the Immaculate Conception? The bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary? That God does love Americans more than any other people on earth? Mob thinking? Check out the aftermath of a Big Ten college football game or a soccer match. Whites are more rational not non-whites? They can’t be easily led? What ever happened to those WMDs?
Savagery. After World War II, nobody should have preserved any doubts that Europeans were not savage.
But that thinking doesn’t go away. It just lies in the dark parts of our hearts and minds, waiting for the opportunities to erupt. The reportage on New Orleans, in many instances, was a ready-made funnel for that twisted thinking to bubble up.
PopPolitics.com
Where Popular and Political Cultures Meet
10.04.05
Heart of Darkness Still Beating: Race, Quatrain and American Blindness
I've been reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with my students over the past few weeks. I cannot help but see how it speaks to the latest news out of New Orleans.
Conrad's story is a tale of a European man, Marlow, making a trip up the Congo River during the height of Belgium's imperialist project in the late 19th century. He sees himself as entering the "heart of darkness" -- a place of savagery that has degraded and ruined at least one other European man, Kurtz.
While the novel is certainly a damning critique of King Leopold's genocidal methods and a more universal exploration into the "darkness" that is part of every human soul, it is also a tale of entrenched prejudice and blindness.
Marlow, despite his often enlightened introspection, represents the native Africans as little more than savages, at home only in the "wild and passionate" jungle and out of place in the "civilized" world. Although he admits repeatedly and obsessively that he cannot "see" into the jungle and, presumably, into the individuals lives and societies that populate it, he never questions the "truth" of his representation.
It appears as if the 21st-century American media works from the same imaginary premise and has been infected, even more inexcusably, with the same systemic blindness.
Almost all of those reports -- about the rapes, murders, shootings and riots in the Superdome, the Convention Center, and on the streets of New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina -- well, uh, how do I say it?
They weren't true.
Yep -- no kidding -- they were made up. They were lies to feed the media frenzy.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune has done amazing work in cataloging and contextualizing all that it and others got wrong.
What is most remarkable as you read through the list is the massive distance between the truth and reality
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
And to say race didn't play a role in the coverage would be perpetuating another kind of blindness.
The Los Angeles Times offered a shorter report on the latest revelations, but it includes a revealing interview with Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss:
Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.
"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."
David Carr's piece in The New York Times, "More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports," doesn't make such a pointed critique, but the stories speak for themselves:
''I talked to a friend and, after the flood, they heard on the radio that a gang of 400 armed black looters were coming over the bridge to Hanrahan, where he lived,'' said Ken Bode, a professor of journalism at DePauw University and a former correspondent for NBC. ''He and his neighbors were sitting in the street with guns and they decided to load up all they could and caravan out. He said the looters never got there because the National Guard turned them back.''
There was no band of looters coming their way.
"There is a timeless primordial appeal of the story of a city in chaos and people running loose," Carl Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Northwestern University and the author of Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, tells the NYT. Urban chaos narratives, he adds, offer "the fulfillment of some timely ideas and prejudices about the current social order."
The best antidote for this disturbing media mea culpa might be taking refuge in honesty -- an admission of our own prejudice and how it shapes our behavior. In the Times-Picayune report, for example, a National Guardsman experiences a productive cognitive dissonance about those "thugs" he had heard about:
As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. [Maj. David] Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.
If only more of us could step through the mediated jungle we live in and emerge on the other side -- in the light of day.
Posted by Bernie at October 4, 2005 10:23 PM
