#5: A New Story for Black Americans

Welcome to SmartyPants, the podcast of the American Scholar. I'm your host, Stephanie Basteck, and for this week's episode, we talk to Charles Johnson, who writes about the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about black America in the 21st century. Also, the inimitable poet and scholar blogger David Lehman explains what crowdsourcing and poetry have in common and teaches us what a huzzle is and how on earth to pronounce it.

But first, let's go back in time to the sweltering heat of mid-July, when the Republican and Democratic National Conventions took over Cleveland and Philadelphia, and it sounded a little like Oh my gosh, the energy is just uh intoxicating. I mean the air is a buzz with a sense that we are making history right here in Cleveland, Ohio. It's time for change, it's time for leadership, it's time to put pride back in America. Just preposterous, outrageous, unacceptable.

They don't wanna think about politics. Like you don't wanna think about where your garbage goes. But you gotta think of those things. We sent photojournalist Barry Goldstein to the conventions to take formal portraits of the attendees. Who goes to political conventions and why? What do they care about? And are there any surprising similarities between these wildly different groups of people that show up?

Barry sat down with us to talk a little bit more about his process and reveal the unique perspective he has after spending hours and hours on the ground in these two cities. So Barry, you've been back for about a week now. How was it? Well, um, it was many things. It was uh exhilarating, interesting, uh exhausting and to some degree uh unique and historic because of the particular nature of this uh election cycle.

So the Republicans gave us press credentials, but the Democratic Party, for whatever reason, didn't. So you were photographing delegates at the RNC along with some protesters, but only protesters at the DNC. So I can't really ask you what's the difference between delegates at either, but I can ask you what it was like to photograph two different crowds of protesters. Was there a difference in the atmosphere there? Uh, I would say very much so. Surprisingly, uh I think to many people

Uh the protests at the Republican convention turned out to be, I would say, relatively uh tame. The protesters were usually uh far outnumbered by the police. Whereas in Philadelphia the number of protesters uh far outnumbered those that one saw in Cleveland. There were uh certainly hundreds, uh many hundreds of of protesters

So it was a very uh diverse uh diverse group and a very active group with major uh events every day. Emotions were running very high, probably more so from my interviews, uh than I heard in Cleveland. Were any of the protesters unwilling to talk to you during those interviews? I would say not. I think virtually everyone, as far as I can recall,

uh spoke with me. There were several people, as one often hears when does this kind of work, or who initially said, No, I really, um you don't want to listen to me. I don't have anything interesting to say. and so forth, but of course that never turned out to be the case. Uh they always had interesting things to say. Uh protesters were in general very approachable. Was everybody pretty eager to have their portrait taken?

Uh I would say eager Um it varied from uh hesitant uh to um perhaps uh if not eager uh showing some interest. certainly more so among the protesters than among uh delegates, alternate delegates and guests uh in Cleveland. Um and I'm sure this would have been the case in uh Philadelphia as well. People tended to be more guarded. That said, uh I think out of maybe thirty roughly people that I photographed and interviewed uh inside, maybe one turned me down flat.

most people uh eventually um ag agreed to do this after I explained uh what I had done in the past and what the intent was. which of course was to show that even though everyone in that arena, by and large, um adopted the label of Republican, that there was a very, very wide variety of views. So let's hear some of those views that you captured on tape. Some people are rather idolatry.

but I guess I sort of expect Don't need anybody out there telling us what we gotta do until you're like me, you're now an anarchist working within the Republican Party. They say consent to the governed, but if you don't consent you get governed anyway. And yeah, they will govern your butt right into jail. He wants to make things right with the VA for the veterans. And I said, well that's something that appeals to me very, very much.

Uh I mean I'm a millennial, so of course it's the affordability of college. The Republican Party, I think, sometimes feel, well, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Well if you don't have any straps in your boots, you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Sometimes it can seem silly protesting, you know, but it really matters this election. To normalize what's going on is is crazy. I wanted to show up and represent for Bernie. Make sure that his message wasn't going to go away. Democrats and Republicans are all corrupt, bought off, corporate warmongers, and I don't think the American people should support. You can get the names and some further insights from various subjects on our website, where you can also see their stunning portraits.

So Barry, did you get a sense of who is most eager to talk to you and if so, why? Yeah, there w uh I I would say, um uh as I often do with these projects, I try to convey again the idea that um even though we give people labels, uh military, um students, protesters, delegates, Republicans, Democrats, uh those labels tend to be very broad and compass a a great diversity of views.

So for example, in Cleveland among the Republican uh delegates, uh guests and so on, there were a lot of young people, which um surprised me to some degree. And I would say in general their concerns were quite different from, say, um uh well off people closer to my age, late middle age. So there were definitely a wide variety of views. And by no means were everybody enthusiastic Trump supporters. I heard a lot of, well, um, you know, he's not perfect buttons.

Did you encounter the same kind of diversity of views among the protesters outside the DNC? I would say less so because of course they tended to be protesting um fairly limited uh number of issues. You also heard a lot of people saying, you know, I never got involved in politics at all until uh I heard uh Bernie talk. And so uh there was a really uh overriding sense of um disappointment. Um and um an anger about the nomination process.

Some of the younger people though actually had very similar concerns um as their colleagues at the uh Republican convention. They were concerned about the amount of money they'd spent on their education, about student debt. and how they were gonna dig themselves uh out of these holes. So what was the most unexpected portrait that you took or conversation that you had at either convention?

Well, gee, I should have prepared for that. Um I think what surprised me most was the level of anger that one had, more so than at in Cleveland. Uh one of course hears, you know, uh stories about Trump supporters and so on. And um course I spoke with them individually. uh but there was not, by and large, this undercurrent of anger mostly directed towards Hillary. Yeah. Well thanks for covering these two historic events for us, Barry. Well i it was my pleasure. Thanks for uh sending me.

Check out portraits from the conventions and the protests on our website at the American Scholar dot org slash convention.

And now for something completely different and more eternal than our news cycle. Poetry. David Lehman is a world class poet, editor, and literary critic, and he's here to tell us a little bit about a crazy idea that the scholar staff had one fateful day two years ago. Which David has been kind enough and devoted enough to mastermind on a weekly basis every day. Hello everyone, I'm David Lehman. And series editor of the annual anthology. Robert Wilson, the

Very fine editor of the American Scholar and I have worked together on a number of things. One day he had this wonderful idea. To do a column called Next Line Please, and he asked me to run it, and uh the only instruction. Why don't we try a crowd sourced poem? A sonnet. We could build it one line at a time. And that seemed to me to be a good idea. I love challenges. I love teaching. I love working with people to generate inspiration rather than wait for it to descend on.

So we launched next line please. First case, I explained something about the sonnet, its history, why it was the most venerable of all English verse forms. And I supplied the first line, uh, as I remember, because I ended that line with the word cubicle. It's not an easy word to rhyme with But we got lots and lots of candidates for line two, and I believe Leo Brody won the competition for the best.

And then we had the best third line and the best fourth. And we had rank amateurs send in brilliant lines, and we had very famous poets participate. Frank Bedart was one of our first such contributors, and by golly, after fifteen weeks we wound up with a sonnet and a good title for it too, provided by the poet Laura Cron. It was called Monday, and it was published in the American Scholar Print Edition as well as online. And then we just continued with the project of Next Line, please.

If you come to the American Scholar website or you visit the best American poetry website and blog. You'll find links to next line, please. Every week we have a competition. It's a good-natured competition where the people feel more like collaborators than competitors. We've written a Sistina that I think is awfully good. Uh we've written a bunch of two-line poems. We've written several haiku. Haiku bring out the biggest

Everybody likes the form of a haiku. It's only 17 syllables divided among three lines. And we sometimes get 200 candidates. The the remarkable thing about this is that you can make poetry happen in real time. I'd like to give you a uh an example of what we came up with. Uh this was uh in the fall of twenty fourteen, I believe. I remember giving a prom. Asking people to write two lines in which the season fall provided the N-word for one of the lines.

Well, we wound up with seven couplets of such quality that I put them together and we had willy-nilly fulfilled the requirements of both a sonnet And a uh verse form known as the Guzzle, G-H-A-Z-A-L. Let me read it to you and then tell you the authors of the individual line. The better the book, the longer the farewell, the leaves in amber as their shadows fall. With a red gold fire raining down we fall in love, the lonely branches sprawling tall.

We lug the red leaf laden tarp like paw bearers to curbs for trucks to haul away our fall. Of all sad leaves that curl and fall, the red are those I must. My austral spring belies your boreal fall, You burn brown leaves, and dismiss my call. On the yellow brick road to Damascus, Saint Paul took a fall, as did Bogart in to have and have not upon meeting the Popeye chuckled and scratched his balls. On the wall, he spoke. Explore them all in the reddening fog.

Well that was the poem, The Guzzle Sonnet, that we wrote in the fall of twenty fourteen. The authors were Bruce Bond, Katie Naum, Leonard Cress, Lawrence Epstein, Diana, no last name given, Terrance Wynch. And the Australian poet John Tranter, who is also lifting a quote from John. So you see from that list that there are several professional poets who have been anthologized in the best American poetry, and then several poets of uh no fame, but considerable ability.

So I recommend, if you are interested in poetry, Tune in to next line, please. Participate in one of our competitions. Well, this is David Lehman. Thank you so much for listening. Read poetry. It will improve your day.

Charles Johnson made his name with novels about black life in America, like Dreamer and Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award. But in two thousand eight, he wrote an essay in the scholar called The End of the Black American Narrative, which argued that a new century called for new stories that go beyond the painful history of slavery and its consequences.

But this was two thousand eight, before President Obama won the election, and before the increasing attention paid to police brutality and systemic racism by organizations like Black Lives Matter. doctor Johnson joins us from Seattle to talk about what's changed in the years since he originally wrote the episode. So doctor Johnson, thanks for joining us. Would you mind summarizing for us the original argument?

Oh yes, I'll summarize the origin of the piece for you too. It wasn't originally written for the American scholar. In January of 2008, I delivered at Washington and Lee University their Martin Luther King Day um, you know, address.

And I decided I've done quite a few of those and I decided to do something different with this one, something that was on my And what was on my mind since I'm a storyteller and I've been publishing for fifty one years, you know, stories and novels and so forth, um, I decided that what I wanted to talk about would be the way we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves.

And what the consequences for that might be. Um one of the stories that we tell ourselves about black America is the story of group victim victimization that does not change. that does not change in the minds of some people from the era of slavery, not since the uh and hasn't changed um since the era of segregation.

And I know that that isn't true empirically, and my father, uh my late father would have uh supported me in that claim because he grew up in the twenties in the South. And I once asked him in the sixties, Well, Dad, are are things different? And he says, Of course they're But sometimes when we tell ourselves stories about ourselves to ourselves, we're very selective in the information that we put forward. We might be constructing an argument that is all negative.

um that uh ignores the positive dimensions of a subject or a phenomenon. So in this essay, the end of the black American narrative, I wanted to remind us um of the complexity of black American life. Um how it isn't one dimensional, and how it you know, how it outstrips most of the time, our conceptions and our perceptions. A lot of people in America are invested in a victimization narrative of black America. They're professionally invested in that. Their livelihood.

comes from that. They teach that. Um but I think that things are can be a little bit more complex. Now, a lot has happened since I published this article eight years ago. You know, this was just before um Barack Obama was elected president. He is now concluding his second term, very tumultuous uh two terms. Um and and we've had things happen with the economy.

uh that are very things that are very important. Uh we now have a global knowledge based uh economy. We we have the Great Recession um beginning just about the year this essay was published in two thousand eight. And that wiped out about twenty percent of black wealth. Uh we're we're looking at a different world in some ways, um, today in twenty sixteen than we were than I was writing about in t uh two thousand and eight. So while I might have to do that.

differently about some of the details and specifics in the article. I think the general argument of the article is still sound eight years later. So how do you think the way we deal as a society with racism against African Americans has changed since then? I don't think that we've seen the end of racism. I would never make a claim that we're in some kind of uh post racial period. That isn't true. America is a very racialized country and particularly today.

it seems to me that we have become even more tribal. Um we we've divided ourselves uh up as p as a as Americans into different groups. Um and and very much uh uh uh fighting with each other, um in terms of the culture wars, um in in terms of racial misunderstanding. So I I don't downplay the importance of race. I tend to say that race is a lived illusion. Scientifically it's a lived illusion, but it's one that causes massive suffering. For for others.

And do you think that translates into how we talk about stories and narratives? Yeah, absolutely. I do. I think one of the things that has been going on since since the nineteen eighties is uh what people call identity politics. um uh where we identify ourselves with a particular race or class or gender, right? Um and set up a kind of them versus us.

um equation. And and you know this is divisive. This does not really help us. I think we need to think deeper and we think need to think harder. I think one of the things that you know in this article I said it eight years ago, I think we needed some new story. uh about black America and America right now. And we need a new grammar and we need a new vocabulary. And we don't have it yet for the kind of this discussion that needs to go on.

My way of feeling about this, looking back across 68 years of my own life, is that we're in a v a sea change here in America. And it's not just, you know, for black Americans, it's for all Americans. And we're in a sea change if you look across the water. Um sea change around the world. Uh with the EU, for example. You know, change is inevitable.

And we're caught up in a moment right now of tremendous changes. And it's very hard to predict how where some of these things are going to come to rest. It does seem like a lot of the changes in Europe and in the United States though are based more explicitly than they used to be on an ideology of hate. And xenophobia and racism. So do you think we need to focus less on racism or more? Well, you know, I think we need to acknowledge what happens when someone

thinks in terms of identity politics or or thinks racially. Um what they're doing is is they're setting up, like I said, a them versus us.

kind of relationship with others. My starting point as a Buddhist is that with everybody that I meet, there's two things we all have in common. There's two things we all want. A. We want happiness, however we define that, and we want freedom from suffering. I believe that can be stated as a universal, you know, kind of description of our species. Um we should start there.

And one of the things that I have argued over the years and articles and lectures and so forth is that we need to be careful about the w way we talk to each other. I think there's two things we should focus on. One is, I call it, epistemological humility, and the other one is egoless listening. rather than making assumptions about the other person, reg you know, regardless of what their race is or th or their gender or

their class, we should moment by moment listen deeply to how they appear before we pass judgment. I think that's very important. And one of the other things we have to keep in mind is that we are all mysteries to each other. Um, the problem with making assumptions about people based on their race, class, or gender

is is just that. You've made an assumption. And this person sitting in front of you, standing in front of you, is unique and ha and there's never been anyone like this individual in the history of the world. Right? So I think a certain kind of epistemological humility is necessary. I don't know you. We're just talking today. I'm learning about.

And so I need to shut up and be quiet for a while. Um you know, and and listen and hear what you have to say. And never ever feel that I understand you totally. I can't. There's there's no way, nor can you understand me totally. Um, but we can understand each other better if we're more civil, you know, uh towards each other and watch how we talk to each other and understand that we're here for the blink of an eye, for a flicker flash moment.

We could die at any moment. So we should be aware that the arguments that we're having with each other constantly seem kind of small and kind of petty given the fact that we're not gonna be here very long.

It's true. The a lot of arguments are petty, but sometimes as Black Lives Matter protests have pointed out, you know, the prevalence of police brutality and assumptions on the part of certain people doesn't just end up with you know, racist thoughts or judgments, but actual homicide and and death. That's correct. Well, you know, I think that one of the things that the Black Lives Movement has done in a positive sense is it's called attention um to the need for police reform.

I wrote um oh gosh uh some time ago uh a piece on Treyvon Martin. It's in a book I published two years ago called uh Taming the Eye. It's called The Case of Travon Martin, and I look real hard at the things that George Zimmerman said uh before he confronted Trevon. He'd already judged him.

You know, he said these these guys get away with, you know, all kinds of crimes, you know, and stealing and all of that, uh, and and are never punished. Well, he didn't know anything about Trayvon Martin. He was projecting his desires, his fears um and his ideas onto this young man. And it turned out badly. And he Zimmerman was not even a police officer, right? Um now you look at some of these police cases that w are so egregious.

you know, two or three or four or five times it's perfectly clear that this was an execution, a police execution of a black person. And it breaks my heart. Um, you know, when I when I look at uh that that tape of Philando, I think it is, right? He's dying. He's dying right there in the front seat of that car and there's a four year old girl in the back seat when the officer fires four bullets. Boy.

in into Philando. Um these cases h need to be investigated and the police officers, you know, need to um probably stand trial. and um and and face the consequences of their actions. They're human too. They make mistakes. Uh and some make mistakes that that lead to the death of of others. This is very bad. One of the things we have to not forget is that black males in America have been demonized for about two hundred and forty four years.

You know, there's nothing new about this. The i the negative images in the public um consciousness, um the popular consciousness, about b young black males in particular, uh those images are toxic. And for some people who do not know a black person, have never interacted with one, didn't grow up with one, didn't go to school of one, all they know are those negative images in media, in in uh newspapers, you know.

that feature stories about black crime and so forth. And and so when they meet a black male, what they feel is uncertainty and fear. Most white Americans, I think it's about 80%, live in communities that are all white. And so in terms of knowing another person, even in the most minimal way, um, they don't bring that to the encounter. Uh what they have instead are a lot of negative images in their minds that they project on a black American male.

one of the core pieces of your argument in the essay and and now too is that things are really different since the era of your father and the civil rights movement. There have been enormous changes. with the Voting Rights Act. There've been decades of affirmative action. But In the past couple of years we've seen the Voting Rights Act gutted. We've seen affirmative action struck down in states like Michigan and Texas.

How do you feel about that? I mean it it it's true that we've had decades and decades of progress since the civil rights movement and these enormous changes have happened, but they've they've now being dismantled. Mm-hmm. How do I feel? I feel that this is a very dangerous moment, um for America in general and for black Americans in particular. Um, I as I said, we're going through a kind of a sea change. Um, and I don't like to rush to judgment, but in this article.

One of the things I think that I say is that The new narratives that we're talking about, perhaps, that might emerge, will be narratives of individuals and not of groups. And this is what Martin Luther King dreamed of when he helped a day would come, when men and women were judged not by the color of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions and the content of their character. I I don't think that ideal has changed.

I do think that we do have to take things back to the to individuals at some point. Um we cannot directly experience groups. Okay, groups. Um but we can experience individuals. If you look at Black America in two thousand eight, you see black Americans in every walk of life in this country. And this was just before the election of the first black president.

Um so yes, there have been positive changes. But again, you know, it's sort of two steps forward sometimes and one step back. Um The way Coretta King put it, um, towards the end of her life, she said, you know, we taught young people that they have to fight uh they have to fight for change.

But what we didn't tell them is that they will have to continually fight for change. You know, it's not over once and for all. You know, you can go back in the twentieth century and find some truly Horrible treatment of black Americans by official members of police force. Um and unofficial ones too, like the Klan. Um so yeah, you have to revisit these issues every generation. And a generation is about twenty years. Slavery is not over, for example.

Right? Legal slavery ended in the nineteenth century. But we have d what's the equivalent of slavery with child labor, right? Um child children being forced um into work situations, um We we have women who who are forced into prostitution uh around the planet. No, slavery is not over, and the Islamic State has even reinstated the slavery of women. Legal slavery of women. So no, they don't go away. And that's why I don't say that we're in a post racial landscape.

It's all based on the human ego. This is why I'm I don't think racism is going to end. You know, the ego is this fragile entity that is always comparing itself to others. You know, saying, Am I equal to this person, superior to this person, inferior to this person? In other words, is mine bigger than yours? Right? Um you know, it's uh it's a very toxic, illusory entity.

But it's a lived illusory, you know, entity. But for most people the ego is like a bump in a rug. You push it down at one point, it's gonna pop up somewhere else. So you're gonna find that over and over throughout human history, I'm afraid. You'll find it between Hutus and Tutsis. You'll find it between different Europeans. You'll find it, you know, you you're gonna find it's part of the human condition. And it means that we're not enlightened yet, you know, seven billion of us on the planet.

So do you think that this egotistical formulation of racism on an individual level gets baked into our system? I I think that's baked it's baked into our political parties in some ways. Um, you know, I like I said it's me versus them, you know. And we are very divided as a people, um, between blacks and whites, unfortunately, between men and women, um, and a lot of it's based on the ego and what its it its needs are.

Um, one of the things like I said we have to we have to do is we have to step back and and give up some of that egotism. Um and the desire for power over others. And we have to listen deeply to others. In our neighborhoods, uh in our workplaces, in our classrooms, um, and then I think we'll discover that we have more in common than we sometimes believe. So basically you think that the best approach to systemic racism is to deal with it on an individual level?

N I think you know, if it's a structural uh level, unjust laws, um, things of that kind, then I think you have to deal with it um in those terms. But I do think You know, if you want to go to ground zero, which is where we live every moment of every day in our relationships with others, I think that's where you have to begin. I really do.

Um, you know, we can talk abstractly about a lot of things, we can talk in generalized terms, but I think we have to get down to specifics, and that means talking about specific individuals and specific situations. Well thank you so much for chatting with me today, Doctor Johnson. Thank you for allowing me to chat. You can read Dr. Johnson's essay on our website, along with dozens of poems from David Lehman's Nextline Please blog, and, of course, Barry Goldstein's portraits in the confusion.

That's all for this week. I'm your host, Stephanie Bastec, and I hope that you'll join us again in two weeks for the next episode. Till then, take care and stay sharp.