Remember seeing the picture
of two profiles that could morph into a picture of a vase if you just looked a little
differently? Or the one of the old woman and young woman, merged into one ... until you identify each of them individually? If you've run into these, maybe in Intro Psych, you may have heard them described as examples of reversible figure-ground relationships—what you see, what is figure and what is ground, can shift when you change your focus to
a different bit of the picture or change your orientation relative to it.
The picture doesn’t change. Your perspective does. You do.
So, here's my own recent encounter with a
reversible figure/ground moment:
Walking happily along a favorite trail I spotted this stump with a huge hole straight through it, so
cleanly through that you could see the contours of the field behind it. I saw it from a distance, and was stopped in my tracks by the improbable
perfection of this hole.
So I moved closer, wanting to
see how it was done, this huge, precise hole …
and then closer yet ...
Not a hole at all, but the blunt
end of a sawed-off branch, pointing straight at me. I've
seen this stump a few times since. Each time, I'm first struck by the surprising
hole, clean through. Only when I get closer, shift my perspective, do I remember
that it's something else entirely.
Recently, I’ve had some of
these moments on a totally different plane—not so much perceptual as conceptual
and emotional shifts, in my experiences related to difference, oppression,
diversity, and privilege.
A couple of weeks ago, we
went to see the movie "I Am not Your Negro." The movie traces the
experience of James Baldwin, the noted
African American author, speaker, and sometimes activist, as he decides to
re-enter the fray—the Civil Rights movement—abandoning for a time his
self-exile/ex-pat status in Paris (and sometime Turkey), where he went to
escape the racism of his birth nation. I knew of Baldwin's work before, both because of its significance as
literature and because of its meaning to the African American and LGBT
communities. But to be honest, I've
never read his work, not even the novel that
I know gave voice to many queer folks' experience, Giovanni's Room.
Joshua Dysart, in an IMDb review, writes of this movie, “a large part of this film consists of clips from Hollywood's rough
history of reducing or falsifying the black American experience, often with
Baldwin's own criticisms laid on top of them, weighing the clips down,
eviscerating them. There are hard juxtapositions here as well, such as the
innocence of Doris Day pressed up against the reality of lynched black men and
women swaying in trees. By contextualizing these images in new and fresh ways
the film is able to paint an impressionistic portrait of American denial.”
American denial. The shoe fits. I used to love Doris Day (and Sidney Poitier, the “good” Black whose acceptance
proved we weren’t racist). I used to not think about—not even know about—lynchings.
The film, Dysart continues, “also
ties itself to the moment. Images of Ferguson, photographs of unarmed black
children left dead in the streets by police, video of Rodney King being
brutalized beyond any justification, all of it means that Baldwin's words ring
timeless, his call to action not remotely diffused by our distance from him and
his time.”
If you have seen the film,
you’re likely with me at this point, recalling those scenes and the awful
discomfort they stirred. The self-righteous outrage, of course, but also the
memory of when these things happened, and how I, personally, watched from afar,
horrified in principle, but not moving. American denial.
Among the most compelling
moments in the film came during interviews by then-famous talk-show host Dick Cavett.
At one point, Cavett invites Baldwin to sort of absolve the US of the continuing
sins of racism, appealing to a common argument: Sure there's still work to be
done, but we've come a long way, right? Baldwin refuses the bait, noting
instead how far we have not come, how
much American society/culture continues to use Black people as an object of
projection: whatever is bad among us, we attribute to Black people. Cavett
is caught noticeably off guard by this
response, frozen except for his eyes, which glance nervously around like he's
looking for help—or an exit. It's here that Baldwin utters the line that rang
in my head as the credits rolled: “What white people have to do, is try and
find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n****r in the first
place. Because I'm not a n****er. I'm a man, but if you think I'm a n****r, it
means you need it. . . . If I'm not a n****r here and you invented him — you,
the white people, invented him — then you've got to find out why…"
When I heard it, my breathing stopped the way my steps did when I saw the sawed-off branch that had seemed so
clearly a hole, clean through. Racism isn’t just an absence—of understanding,
of empathy—It’s not just a hole. It’s the sawed-off stump of our own need for
something, someone to contain all of the things we fear, all of the things we
hate in ourselves. And I’m talking here not just about individuals—those other “others”
whom I can dislike and disown because they have bigoted ideas. I’m talking
about each of us, and all of us as a collective. A society that has invented, in Baldwin’s
words, others to hold our own disowned shadows—the Red heathens, the Yellow demons, the
Black n****rs, the Brown “rapists and murderers.”
Heavy, huh? No wonder Cavett
was stunned into (at least temporary) silence. So was I. As we were driving home,
talking about the film, my partner said that Baldwin was her first anti-racism
teacher. I can see why. I've added Giovanni’s
Room to my iPad library so I can catch up with the 1950s on my next trip,
just 60 years late.
Shortly after that, we attended an event
at History Colorado, organized by the Japanese American Citizens League. The occasion
was the 75th annual Day of Remembrance commemorating Executive Order #9066, issued on February 19, 1942, just weeks
after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, launching the US into WWII. Order 9066 opened the way for a program of mass eviction that would eventually see
about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—at least 70,000 of them US citizens—moved from their homes, their jobs and
businesses, and their lives along the west coast and imprisoned in
concentration camps elsewhere in the US. The ostensible rationale was, of
course, that they might prove a danger to the war effort, since any Japanese
attack would likely come from the west. Disregarded in this rationale was the
fact that only a small proportion of Japanese residents of Hawaii—fewer than 2000 of the 150,000+ living there at the time—were similarly
incarcerated, despite Pearl Harbor. Not to mention that infants and people with
1/16 Japanese ancestry were included (remember the “one drop” rule for who was
considered Black?). In reality, no person of Japanese ancestry was ever
convicted of espionage, treason, or sabotage during the war.
The camps were scattered
around the West, mostly in desert or cold mountainous regions. One, called
Amache, was in Colorado, in the south eastern plains, near the town of Granada.
Not far from Sand Creek, the site of one of post-Civil War America's most horrific
massacres of indigenous people (about which I’ve written here before). The Colorado connection tugs at me. It reminds me of this state’s
checkered past in matters of racism—the Indian Wars and Sand Creek in the late
1800s, the dominance of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado politics during the 1920s, Amache in the mid-1940s. It belies
my idyllic image of this gorgeous, complicated state, seen in my early years through the eyes of
a child born and raised here, sheltered and privileged, oblivious to it all.
The Day of Remembrance, like “I’m
not your Negro,” was full of moments of insight and disarming new awareness.
A few of these stand out in retrospect. One was when the organizers were making introductions. After recognizing a few dignitaries, they
asked, “If anyone here is a survivor of the camps, would you please raise your
hand?” Maybe 20 hands went up—I can’t be sure, because my
eyes filled with tears. Here, right here in this room, I thought, are people who were forced to leave everything behind—everything, that is, but one suitcase—and climb
on buses to nowhere. They survived, and here they are, sitting scattered among
us. Still here, still in America. After all that. Later, after the keynote speaker (who was very interesting in a detached, academic
sort of way; not exactly what I was wanting at that point), they opened the floor to people’s stories.
Not surprisingly, I guess, there were many stories of
the racism that preceded the war—taunting, harassment, overt discrimination in
employment and housing, inability to own land, limitations on educational
opportunities and professions open to people of Asian descent. So reminiscent
of more familiar tales of racism in my own lifetime—especially directed at
African Americans—recently 'managed’ by
non-discrimination laws and increased social censure for such attitudes and
behaviors. Until, that is, the presidential campaign that made it all OK again.
Then there was the story of a
man whose family had lived in Peru. The US government went to Peru to pick
them up, and transferred them to a camp in Texas (where, incidentally, there
were also German and Italian detainees). And the now-90-year-old woman who
recalled the kindness of friends and allies who had made it possible for her to
go to college. And the woman, an ally, who helped her friend, a Japanese
American, whose recently deceased mother had been in the camps, to take care of
her mom’s possessions after mom’s death. They found money hidden all around the
house and multiple bank accounts, each with a substantial amount of money. Breadcrumbs
pointing to lingering fear of being taken away. Again. Though it had been 70
years.
There was no dearth of
explicit parallels drawn between those years and today—particularly for people
of color, especially immigrants. The threat of profiling, the possibility
(however remote it may seem) of similar Executive Orders, similar restrictions,
evictions, even camps. The fear of the police, who are helpers to the
privileged, but sources of danger to the targeted. And American denial writ
large.
The museum has an excellent online exhibit about Order 9066 and the
Japanese Internment. I recommend the whole thing, but especially check out the
propaganda video on “Japanese relocation,” obviously designed to convince Americans (non-Japanese, non-German,
non-Italian, non-Jewish, etc. Americans) that not only were these camps a good
idea, but the people being moved to them were delighted to go. It’s chilling.
American denial.
But importantly, another, very different part of this
experience was my awareness that this huge room was full to overflowing, and
some large proportion of people there were not apparently of Japanese descent.
Allies. The room was not sprinkled, but splotched with allies. One of the best
moments in the Women’s March—and, by the way, one of the most empowering
moments in my partner’s video about responding to this political moment—was the recognition that many, many people really do believe we’re all in
this together.
This morning, I heard a radio show in which one of the guests,
who is Jewish, pointed to the oft-repeated caution in the Jewish community:
never again. And that means, he said, never again. We must stand up right from
the beginning so that what happened in Germany can never happen again, to
anyone. I saw a sign in photos from one of the Women’s Marches—in D.C., I think. It
evoked the famous Martin Niemoller quote, written after the Holocaust:
First they came for the Socialists, and
I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they
came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they
came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they
came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
but this sign had a contemporary twist:
First
they came for the Muslims
and
we said, not this time,
f***ers!
That, my friends, fills me with hope. Which is hugely different from the emptiness I would feel, the despair at history repeating itself, if I didn’t notice this joyful part.
©
Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a
link to the post.
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