Books In Conversation: Volume 3 (Russia, Russia, Russia)

I didn’t appreciate the value of sociology until I started reading about modern Russian history. Now I wish I’d studied it more in college.

I started college in June of 1990. I started a little bit early—Northeastern University was on the quarter system, and there was no one to say that I couldn’t. (It was in college that I learned to start asking for forgiveness instead of permission.) I knew I wanted to study history, but for whatever reason, it was easiest for me to take two sociology classes (101 and Environment and Society) that summer. I very much enjoyed those classes, but they weren’t part of the The Plan, and even then I was dogged in my adherence to such things.

The Berlin Wall had fallen just a few months before, and like clockwork, the world was about to pivot attention to the Middle East (or, as I now prefer to think of it, the Middle World). I wasn’t quite eighteen, but I was already ignoring statements about the end of history, or however they phrased it back then. I knew there would be things to keep me busy...I just hadn’t figured on us returning to such a similar point as where I, in some ways, began.

I did take a Russian history class a few quarters later, but it was a lot of Peter the Great, plus Catherine, and thus relatively insulated from contemporary developments. I wonder what a sociology of Russia/The USSR would have looked like in 1991.

Russia, Russia, Russia...or so said the progressive activists on Twitter in 2017, annoyed that people were talking about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That’s okay, though, because I loathed those people already, since they had shown how subjective their commitment to human rights was during the Syrian Civil War. (That, or their organizations had been bought co-opted by Russian interests—you decide.)

The Syrian Civil War will get its own volume when we talk about Assad or We Burn The Country. Suffice to say that when I saw Russia starting to play a big, public role, my breath hitched. That wasn’t going to be good. Obama’s obsession with the Iranian Nuclear Deal coupled with everyone’s insistence that we couldn’t repeat Iraq (even though the civil war in Syria was night and day from Iraq), meant that Russia was able to give full cover to Assad while he terrorized his own country with, among other things, chemical weapons and barrel bombs. And, from the perspective of people who didn’t care, wouldn’t that have been just too bad except that the United States and Europe saw a completely predictable influx of refugees...perhaps you remember what the consequences were?

I considered that Russia’s first shove at the United States to see what it could get away with, but that was wrong. They may arguably have been publicly testing their limits since the 2004 poisoning of then presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko of Ukraine, and the shocking invasion of Georgia in 2008. (But why leave out what they did to Chechnya in the late 1990s/early 2000s?) I do submit that there was something of a different flavor to all of that, if only because it was done when the US was embroiled in our own presidential cycles, and the rest of the world is lucky we remember they exist at that point. But they were all unbelievable, and more still because who would have thought in 1988 that we would let a newly diminished Russia get away with any of that?

Right—and then remember that time in the 2000s they were righteously indignant because Poland was going to be a site of US missiles? How dare we!

But all of that was just a test. The real action started in 2014, when they not only shoved the world community, but did it with a smirk as they invaded Crimea. But, while the Obama administration was shocked, shocked, we were also assured that this was a bloodless coup, because essentially it mostly affected predominantly Russian speaking regions, and really, who were we to start pointing fingers at anyone over anything? (Yes, that hurt to write as much as you think it would.)

(I’m sorry, did you say “diplomatic agreements”? You mean Ukraine agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees? But that was in 1994, and things changed—don’t you know anything about realpolitik?)

Even if it was difficult for people to sort through what Russia was up to by 2016, it should have been clear that, of all countries, this was the very last one we would want interfering in our election. But bringing up the possibility of espionage was just not as captivating, ultimately, as...Her Emails. (Note to my fellow Americans: next time, go for the candidate Russia *doesn’t* support.)

I had picked up Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebestyen back in the halcyon days of Obama’s second election campaign, and while I had lived through the years that saw the end of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of their bloc, I hadn’t been following the developments preceding it that closely. It wasn’t until this book that I began to understand how corrupt a totalitarian regime is, and in every way.

Lofty historians point out how draining it is to spend so much money on the military, and that is true; however, while many of us may question the amount of money the United States spends on our military, we are *still* the strongest economy in the world. It’s not just a lot of money spent in dictatorships, it’s money badly spent, as generals and officials frequently take a portion of their own budget through a variety of convoluted means. (Would that that were a totalitarian government’s only sin: they famously spend a lot on their internal surveillance—more on that later.) How inefficient were the Communist Bloc governments? So much so that the only way many of them remained solvent was through loans from Western banks. Without them, those governments would have been insolvent by the 1970s. (Ah, why does it always come back to the banks?)

In fairness, the Soviet Union itself wasn’t as financially stressed, but whatever advantage that gave them was effectively frittered away by the early 1980s, thanks to the ill-advised entry into Afghanistan and the agitations in Poland. It should be noted that the war in Afghanistan was *not* the Soviet Union’s idea; to read Sebestyen’s account, the Communist Party in Afghanistan made the decision, and the Soviet officials were pretty desperate to pull them back as it was apparent how it would turn out. Of course, not desperate enough, because once they went in, they stayed in for years, never mind the extremely high cost to their troops. The Polish, in many ways, can be said to have benefited from the USSR’s preoccupation in Afghanistan, because that is arguably why they didn’t commit more troops to put down the Solidarity movement, or terrorize them into not submitting Karol Wojtyla, later known as Pope John Paul II, to the Catholic Church.

Revolution 1989 gave me the first insights as to the nature of the damage totalitarian regimes can do to people. At the time I thought of it as the guilt of the collaborator, but a decade after reading this, it might be better to say it’s the sublimated shame of the victim. A collaborator wants to succeed, while a victim wants to survive. The caprice of the dictator allows for the facade that the victim has any control over their fate, but in all too many instances, what survivors had was luck. (Is this what the Modern Person is really trying to court?)

It was Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History that showed the long-term consequences of that damage, and it was the first time I appreciated that a country can be sociologically damaged in the same way that a person can be psychologically damaged. Are there other countries that might be suffering from the same phenomenon? Possibly—probably—but few were as thoroughly terrorized as the inhabitants of the Soviet Union for so long.

In the United States, we take it for granted that we have the right to say what we want, however offensive our words might be. And if we don’t always get to exercise that right—the Constitution is going to do only so much for us when we’re outnumbered in a dangerous environment—we *know* when we’re being deprived of it, and we bitterly resent it. Maybe that explains why some of us can be so hyperbolic about our own opinions (or maybe some people could do a better job tempering themselves).

I’m writing this as our freedom to speak and write is under explicit threat. Just this month, a young PhD candidate at a nearby university was kidnapped by ICE off of her street while she was on her way to break her Ramadan fast. Her crime was co-authoring an op-ed criticizing her university for not divesting from Israel—in other words, she didn’t commit a crime of any kind. This is a dangerous time, and people may find themselves curtailing their statements. They shouldn’t, but even if that is the case, that still won’t be as much constant terror as living in the Soviet Union, because there you weren’t even allowed to have *thoughts* people found objectionable.

But how do I know what someone else is thinking? I don’t, of course, but I don’t have to *know*; you have to prove my suspicions are incorrect, and how are you going to do that? There is no right answer—such is the way of a totalitarian state—but there are myriad ways to ensure that you deliver a wrong answer, right down to the look on your face. Are your pupils widening? Are you trying to look away? Is your face twitching just so? Any of that can condemn you to punishment, up to and including torture and death.

I can get you for anything in a totalitarian state, but you just might be able to buy yourself a little bit of luck with a credible demonstration of belief in the prevailing doxa. And on the plus side, most of us are going to have a pretty good idea of what that demonstration—that performance—is supposed to look like. You just need to pretend that you believe whatever it is you’re supposed to for the amount of time that you are being interrogated and observed.

But when aren’t you being watched? The panopticon that Jeremy Bentham so cleverly designed is best tested out in the totalitarian state, and it works. Of course no one can watch anyone else all of the time, but the trick is that you don’t have to. Make it known that you could be watched at any time, and make the consequences of being “caught” dire enough, and you have effectively created a condition that encourages people to police themselves. And the most effective way to do that is to police your own thoughts. If your thoughts don’t betray you, then it’s almost impossible for your actions to step out of line. Congratulations—you (probably) get to live.

Just one thing: who do you become once you make sure you’re thinking what the state wants you to? Answer: the perfect organelle of the state, and one that has the capacity to reproduce the state.

Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth explored the consequences of being a fascist in a revolutionary milieu. Yes, it makes people brutal monsters, but one who still has a mirror and can see what they are doing. More importantly, the face looking back at you resembles the person you used to be. In a totalitarian state, that face is the first thing that needs to go.

What happens to someone who has to live that way, and among other people in the same circumstance? What happens to the place they live in? We are called Homo sapiens because we use our minds constantly, and we don’t like to be told to use them in limited ways. I believe in the capacity of human beings to heal, but when they’ve been terrorized for two or three generations, it’s unrealistic to expect that such healing will happen overnight. It requires space and time. Unfortunately, those resources were in low quantities when the Soviet Empire finally collapsed.

Carl Sagan caught it in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World. The totalitarianism and terror had been the lid on a cauldron, and when it was lifted seventy-five years later, that cauldron was seen to have been bubbling a toxic combination of superstition and prejudice. The Soviets needed science and technology desperately, but they would not tolerate science that contradicted their state-sanctioned beliefs, facts be damned. (I submit that it is a characteristic of a totalitarian regime: facts are always subject to approval.) They did not foster an ethos of inquiry but dogma. Suffice to say, that wasn’t an environment conducive to working out maladaptive habits of mind.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Russia went so retrogressive, so quickly. Gessen’s book outlined the rise of threats to Russian feminists, the LGBTQ community, Jews, and activists in general. It was—is—the classic totalitarian, fascist playbook of values: the state is under constant attack, and the only way it can survive is by the return to the strong, god-fearing nuclear family. Feminists and anyone who isn’t straight push on this because they undermine the concept of the traditional family, Jews undermine the mythology of a unitary Christian state, and activists *are* the attacks on the state.

This is obviously nonsense if you are concerned with facts. The Russian people *are* under attack, but those attacks come from a political leadership aligned with a class of oligarchs that they created with access to fossil-fuel resources. This is to say nothing of the state violence they were frequently subjected to, whether that was car bombs or the murder of journalists. The reason that Russians have a shocking low life expectancy is because the state doesn’t meet their needs, not because people are agitating for human rights.

But when you’ve been living in a civilization as damaged as Russia, it’s difficult to establish that facts should matter in the first place. And that is deadly. Eight years after reading this, I’m still chilled by the description of the murder of a young, gay man by an alleged friend in the 2000s. Evidently, they had had no disagreement, and the victim had no reason to feel unsafe with his attacker. For his part, the murderer did not express any animus toward the victim, other than that he was gay and everyone knew how dangerous gay people were.

That was not an isolated incident, and as state television continued to broadcast messages of hatred toward the LGBTQ community, Jews, and feminists in increasingly hysterical tones—one is reminded of Fahrenheit 451, but that itself reminds us of much of cable news—the danger to those groups increased. When we examine what Russia looks like on the inside, the surprise isn’t that there is so little meaningful Russian opposition, but that there is any at all.

Even if I no longer identify as a liberal or progressive (I seem to value human rights too much), I had for a long time a lingering instinct to pull back from criticisms of Russia or the Soviet Union, because, in my lifetime at least, the majority of the people making those criticisms were people I would never identify with. (And yet, I am nostalgic for them now.) One of the reasons I loved Scott Anderson’s The Quiet Americans was because he described this tension so well. Once you know what the communist totalitarian regimes of Russia, China, North Korea, et al looked like, *of course* you should be anti-communist. (Please, let us save the discussions of whether Leninism/Stalinism was ever truly Marxist/Socialist/Communist for another day.) But, as Anderson put it, claiming to be so was not far removed from being opposed to fluoride. American adherents of communism could be alternatively ruthless and naive, but many anti-communists sounded like crackpots within two minutes of conversation. Contemplating this cognitive divide was one of the reasons Anderson set out to explore the history of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first place.

This book is relevant to a discussion of Russia because the CIA was defined by the Soviet Union. Yes, there was an Office of Strategic Services during World War II, but the CIA was particularly devoted to prosecuting the Cold War. Anderson does not equivocate when he talks about the Soviet Union—as seen through the eyes of early administrators Frank Wisner and Peter Sichel, the Soviets did evil things in Romania and Germany, respectively, in the run up to their victory, and eviler still once they had won. My first two volumes touch on how toxic and genocidal European and American culture is, so if we’re going to credibly censure another polity, they’ve got to hit a high bar. The Soviets did that, and maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a bad idea to have an organization essentially dedicated to eradicating them.

How horrible was the Soviet Union? Anderson gets at some of Stalin’s depravity. One episode that comes to mind is laughing about the execution of a Jewish henchman Genrikh Yagoda with his replacement, Nikolai Yezhov—whom, you could have guessed, was going to be executed in short order himself. And of course there was the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 which saw the murders of hundreds of thousands who had increasingly tenuous connections to Trotsky. And that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the estimates of 20-30 million killed during Stalin’s rule, including the Holodomor, and including not only the Soviet Union but also the bloc countries. There are, as noted above, other ways to suffer; when you include those, the numbers are much higher.

Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War goes into greater detail about what Stalin was willing to do. I don’t give content warnings generally, but this is an exception. I have rarely been nauseated while reading, but the descriptions of the prisons in Ukraine were horrifying. Please pick up the book because it is a very good read, but if you’re bothered by true gore, you might want to sit this one out.

McMeekin’s title is a reflection of the thesis: Stalin was the only one who endured World War II from beginning to end. Hitler, Tojo, Roosevelt, and Churchill were all either dead or compromised when everything was over. He also marched out with control over more territory than Hitler had dreamed of. 

In The Origins of the Second World War, A. J. P. Taylor describes Hitler as an excellent poker player but a lousy chess player. By the end of the war, Stalin played both at a master level: he read Roosevelt and Churchill well enough to know how far he could push them, but with an eye toward the medium-term, if not long-term, he also seeded both the US and British governments with assets who could help him establish the logistical framework needed to achieve his goals.

Please do not think that McMeekin or I are praising Stalin’s brilliance. On the contrary, Stalin needed to be clever about getting at the resources of the American and British empires because he squandered the resources of the Soviet empire, including soldiers, before the dissolution of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Had Stalin utilized his resources better, many more countries could have fallen behind the Iron Curtain.

While some of the gory details aren’t common knowledge, much of what McMeekin discusses is known to history, but more importantly were known at the time. Certainly, they would have been known by Roosevelt and Churchill, and yet Churchill championed Stalin as an ally, and Roosevelt gave the Soviet Union an aid package that was stunning in its generosity. While the arrangement could be categorized, roughly, as American money for Russian soldiers (or casualties), that doesn’t hold completely. The Soviet Union defended against Germany, but did nothing to help American defenses against Japan until the very end. It also can’t be emphasized enough that Germany would not have been in as strong a position were it not for their initial pact with the Soviets.

Pretend that the Soviet Union were perfect allies who kept Americans and Western Europeans safe from harm (suspend your disbelief for a moment). That justifies a generous aid package, but even by those standards, the Soviets still made out extremely well. They not only received billions of dollars from the Lend Lease Act, including state of the art vehicles and war materiel that our own troops could have used, but also almost prefabricated factories which transferred an astonishing amount of technical knowledge. And this is to say nothing of butter and crab meat, which the Soviets themselves fished in American waters. At a certain point, you have to question the judgment of the people Stalin was negotiating with. Better said is that Churchill and Roosevelt shouldn’t have been such easy marks.

McMeekin holds Churchill in greater disdain than Roosevelt, who by comparison comes off as something of a rube. Churchill had been at this longer and should have known better, but then again why would anyone have heightened expectations of an admirer of Mussolini? Access to news and intelligence didn’t deter Churchill’s admiration for Stalin, either, who was willing to bet on Stalin’s “personality” as a counter force to Hitler’s, even before their alliance was broken. While much has been made of Churchill’s foresight and nobility, McMeekin suggests that if Churchill had really wanted to protect Poland, he should have declared was against Germany *and* the Soviet Union after the invasion—but he did not. It seems Churchill understood how badly he’d judged everything by Tehran in 1943, but by then there wasn’t much the British empire was able to do.

If Churchill should have known better, Roosevelt’s concessions to Stalin come off as shocking naivete that betray, perhaps, callousness. It might be one thing to give away American resources to an ally one could only call untrustworthy, but it’s another thing to sign off on war crimes and human rights violations. For as much as some want to blame the terms of the Treaty of Versailles for the advent of World War II, Roosevelt did not agree, and demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender. He also insisted that there was no such thing as a German Resistance and agreed to allow Stalin to shoot 49,000 German soldiers without a trial. But probably the worst of all was essentially donating Poland to the Soviets.

It’s fair to say that the Soviet Union as we knew it from 1945 to 1991 wouldn’t have existed without the US’s initial acquiescence, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer from a case of buyer’s remorse ourselves. What we were willing to tolerate and even abet to stop a “greater evil” we saw as a threat in peacetime. And they were a genuine threat. Again, maybe the CIA as an organization dedicated to stopping the Soviet Communists wasn’t such a bad idea initially. There was just one problem: they didn’t know how.

It is worth repeating that the problems were the Soviets and the Iron Curtain countries. It just so happened that those countries were the scenes of horrific fighting before and during (and in some cases after) World War II. There were areas that saw German Nazis come in a wave to the east, followed by the Soviets pushing west, then once again by the Nazi coming east. (And in many cases, the Soviets were by far the most brutal.) By 1946, the uncompromised good guys in these places were almost all dead. If anyone was left to work with the CIA, they had to hold their noses and work with people who had Nazi bonafides.

In the early years, the CIA did try to work with resistance movements when they could find them. Unfortunately, intelligence around these movements was difficult to find at best. When missions were proposed based on this intelligence, they immediately aroused the concerns of field supervisors because, in many cases, they seemed too good to be true. It took a few years—and a handful of deaths—for the CIA to realize that they were being baited by the target governments, particularly in Poland.

MI6 agent Kim Philby pops into The Quiet Americans to demonstrate the shocking lack of operational security that plagued the CIA initially (surprisingly relevant in April of 2025). However, while that weakened the CIA, they were already in a compromised position: we had not done what the Soviets did and seeded our people in their governments, period. Given Stalin’s capricious purges, it may not have mattered.

Let’s say Churchill and Roosevelt suffered from a little bit of hero worship. However, Eisenhower doesn’t have that excuse, because eventually Stalin did what all dictators eventually do.

By March of 1953, Stalin was dead, and his successor Nikita Kruschev was the most obvious of the celebrants. Anderson opens a chapter with an anecdote about the first general meeting Kruschev chaired. When someone questioned out loud why no one stopped Stalin, particularly in his later years, Kruschev demanded to know who asked the question. After everyone in the room remained silent, Kruschev grinned. “That is why.” He—and many in his generation—understood exactly what Stalin had cost them, and he wanted to remedy that.

If I’m spending a lot of time on this particular book, it’s because Anderson did a fantastic job of underlining how Stalinism’s effects on the world endured beyond his death. The CIA couldn’t do anything to the Soviet Union, so it concentrated on where it could get something done. Whether it was worth doing is the question.

In fairness, the 1950 civil war in Korea *did* feature not only Communist actors but also Soviet influence and support. To their credit, the CIA did in fact warn about the Truman administration about an upcoming operation. However, that intelligence was ignored, and thus the United States was caught off guard when the fighting did break out. I’ll leave it to others to dissect the missteps on all sides of the Korean War; suffice to say that our failures there were further inspiration to get something done in other theaters. Thus, Guatemala, Iran, and of course Vietnam, among others. Shame that most of them had precious little Communist movements before the United States interfered with them. But at least people could see that we were busy!

Kruschev may have been sincere about wanting to improve relations with the United States, but decades of dealing with the machinations of Stalin’s Soviet Union left us suspicious at best, paranoid at worst. While it isn’t fair to blame Stalin entirely for the control J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were able to exert on American life, it is difficult to imagine that said control would have been as total or remotely justifiable without Stalin. Anderson cheekily invokes the old saying, “Just because I’m paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me” when referring to Stalin; similarly, the same can be said of the United States, but perhaps the emphasis should be reversed. The United States government did have multiple people in positions of power who were more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than they should have been, but those people tended to operate in the open (see Lend Lease Act arrangements above). And if there were “assets” that needed to be rooted out, that didn’t justify the persecutions of homosexuals, civil rights leaders, and anyone else Hoover felt was “subversive”. But when Anti-Communism was a tenet of American religion, all you had to do was invoke the word “communist”, and, like a magic spell, anything was allowed. And just like magic, the rules of logic seldom applied.

The penalties for stepping out of bounds in the United States weren’t as severe as they were in the Soviet Union, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that they could be just as arbitrary and damning. The fear of dissent chilled the sciences in the Soviet Union; here, they stifled or ended the careers of multiple people in the arts. Much as we like to joke about East German films that featured someone sitting in a darkened room with a candle, possibly uttering gibberish, as the safest meta-statement they could get away with under a repressive regime, it’s hard to look at the arts of the United States in the 1950s and not see at least a partial retreat to infantilization and absurdity, and a haven in speculative fiction. Once again, Everything Was Awesome, and you’d better make sure people knew you believed that. Perfect your performance of Happiness, but now throw in a special flavor of Goodness that smelled like motherhood and apple pie. The Medieval met the Modern in the strangest place.

Strategies from a non-existent fourth dimensional chess game is the paradigm we invoke when we see or hear something that doesn’t make sense from an actor that we trust. Merrick Garland didn’t immediately go after Trump for the January 6 insurrection because he had secret information and had to make considerations that the rest of us haven’t thought through. Trump didn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton for her alleged crimes during the 2016 election because he wanted to use her to snare the Pizza Gate operation and ultimately the entire conspiracy reported on by QAnon. Perversely, those explanations made more sense to many than Garland running out the clock on an investigation because he did not, for whatever reason, want to have to prosecute Trump, or than Trump wanting to use misinformation to egg on and build up his supporter base.

Seeing a 4D chess game requires you to believe what people say, not what they do. It’s convoluted and comes up all too often in twenty-first century discourse, but it was invented in the twentieth. It made it possible for people to live in the world they believed they should, in spite of events transpiring around them that contradicted the values they were supposed to live by. Cynical as I am about Eisenhower, I think he was genuinely caught up in the game himself.

Hungary in 1956 was legitimately ready and able to take the United States up on its implied offer of assistance if it overthrew its government. The protests were enough that Kruschev believed the game was up...but Eisenhower didn’t. So bereft of meaningful intelligence for so long, we couldn’t believe our luck, and then created facts on the ground to justify not acting on it. (While the United States may be excused for wanting to avoid heavy combat after World War II at all costs, that excuse wears thin when the alternative was nuclear weapons.) Kruschev evidently couldn’t believe his own good fortune at first, but when he finally realized the United States was, indeed, not going to move, the repression in Hungary was swift, brutal, and long-lasting. The same may be said for the consequences in the rest of the world.

It’s not the fault of the Soviet Union/Russia that the United States has taken a totalitarian turn (and it wasn’t their fault in the 1930s and 1940s, either). For all of the influence both empires had in the twentieth century, it was never just us. It might be fairer to say that we were all influenced by similar philosophies. But that is not innocuous: certain strains of thought, if given credibility, can be deadly.

When I finished The Future Is History, I made the impolitic statement to my family that Russians were homophobic, antisemitic, and misogynists. You will be happy to know that my children have *never* let me live that down, and I regret my statement because, of course, no group of people can be defined by the actions of some of its members (regardless of opinion polls). I regret it even more because I was *not* trying to say that too many Russians have been murderously homophobic, antisemitic (and Islamophobic), and misogynistic because of some essential characteristic. A Russian identity is not any more toxic than, say, a Navajo one, and there are as many elements in Russian history to move them away from prejudice as there are to move them toward it.

Sociology does an excellent job of explaining complex social interactions and even cultures, but it is not prophecy. Russia is not mindless, and it was never, even in the early 1990s, a plaything of the Western world. Its leadership and people made choices, even if admittedly they didn’t always have good options. They didn’t have to become fascists and, more importantly, they don’t have to stay that way.

And, I should add, neither do we.

Books In Conversation: Volume 2 (Native Nations, The Definition of Genocide, and Survivance)

I opened this series exploring the reality of the exploitation of Africa, African people, and the African diaspora as central to myth of modernity. I’m an American, and at this point it’s impossible to miss that this country as it stands was built by enslaved and exploited bodies.

But another part of being an American is that we have to acknowledge that this country was also built on the exploitation of indigenous people—Native Nations—that had been in the “Americas” for eons, and on Native land.

(Hope everyone takes a deep breath, because I am going to stumble over terminology a lot. I hate using “the Americas”, but Turtle Island seems kind of regionally specific. And while I’m going to avoid “Indian” because we’re all about accuracy here, I struggled to figure out when “indigenous” worked better than “Native”. I understand why the latter is generally preferred, but there is also a history of Euro-Americans using “native” to describe *themselves*, hence the word “nativist”. Yeah...thank you for your patience with me.) 

One of our comfortable national mythologies is that we improved on what we found. This is the story all colonizers tell themselves, and it’s not true. As we fall into continuing ecological degradation, we’re forced to acknowledge that there is deep wisdom in the cultures and practices of the people we committed genocide on.

Genocide. That is a concept that we need to explore when we think about the people we exploited to build our country. I can probably only speak for Gen X, but the way genocide was presented to us, it was Hitler’s Final Solution: it was the extermination of everyone from a marginalized group. It did not succeed with the Jews of Europe, so it was always an “attempt”, and the prevention of it was a victory of enlightened civilization.

The truth about genocide is much messier. You can successfully commit genocide without completely destroying an entire group of people. One of the most devastating statements I had to sit through as an adult was hearing someone at a Shoah commemoration noting that there were so many communities that were so thoroughly decimated in Europe that there was no one to remember many of the victims. We light candles to remember those who died that we are connected to, but more importantly we light candles to commemorate those we never knew because no one else is left to do it.

That is a successful genocide.

Genocide isn’t simply the death of a community or a people. It is also the eradication of a culture. My father is a South Korean national, but he was born when the country was occupied by the Japanese. By the time he was born in 1943, my grandparents were not allowed to give him a Korean name. Japanese was being taught in schools, and the use of the Korean language was discouraged. This is why I look at Ukraine now and shudder as I see children kidnapped and forced to speak Russian; moreover, they are told that they are not Ukrainian but are now, in fact, Russian. When Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants say that Ukraine and its culture do not exist, that is laying the groundwork for genocide.

Putin and the Russian leadership are no less monstrous if they are ultimately unsuccessful. And the same can be said about my country.

I have seen the term “erasure” used repeatedly when I read about indigenous history in the United States, and this is another facet of genocide. The indigenous people of this country from their hundreds of nations are not gone. Many were killed, many polities consolidated, and there have been acts of horrific violence committed against them, but they continue to exist not just as a people but as many different peoples, with different cultures, histories, and customs. Talking about Indigenous Americans as if they met a tragic demise is to deny their continued existence. They are still here, and they’re not giving up.

I can’t tell you the title of the first book I read about Indigenous American history, but it was in 1994, and it was a title I found, of course, in the Boston Public Library. It was the first time I had realized that we shouldn’t use the word “tribe” but “nation” to describe the polities of the First Peoples of the “Americas”, and it drove home for me how mistaken it was to lump together these diverse people as simply “native”. (Which, maybe, was an overdue realization: the family lore is that my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was indigenous, and we are very specific that, if so, she was from the Creek Nation.) But I had a very young child at the time, and I was about to begin a career, so it wasn’t until much later that I could read more.

I also can’t tell you what drew me to Charles Mann’s 1491 and 1493 other than that they were talked about in circles I paid attention to, but I remember sitting in the Prudential Center food court (back when they had one) on a Saturday night after the library had closed, devouring chapters of both books. Mann opened up literally a whole new world of history, and in doing so exploded many of our comfortable mythologies about the “pre-Columbian” world.

The one that sticks out the most is the fairy tale that the indigenous peoples somehow lucked—stumbled—into an agricultural and horticultural paradise. They were people alternatively more peaceful or more violent than the European settlers who later arrived, but they were always simpler—you know, because they hadn’t had the benefit of Christianity or the Enlightenment, or they were genetically inferior, take your pick—and the only way they could survive for as long as they did was because they were in such a “blessed” land. That played into the narrative of the tragic, lost peoples, and because it played to our pathos, that in and of itself made most of us feel better.

And of course, it wasn’t true. If the Amazon looks like a permaculture paradise in which you can be both nourished as well as cured of many ailments, it is because it was *designed* that way. Don’t look at it only as an example of a rain forest, look at it also as one of the largest and most well-managed orchards in history.

Like Africa, the Americas were a net contributor to the world’s resources. Mann points out that Thomas Malthus’ theory about population and resources in Europe really *was* accurate: a small population could grow only so much before there was too much competition for resources, which would lead to war, disease, famine, or all of the above. There was a natural ceiling to population because there was a limit to resources.

The crops of the Americas solved the Malthusian problem. Corn (maize), potatoes, and sweet potatoes, among others, made possible levels of nutrition for the European and Asian populations that had been unattainable before. He tells the story of a prisoner who had been incarcerated for over a year and had been fed nothing but a soup made with potatoes. Shockingly, this prisoner emerged healthier than he had been before.

Potatoes and corn in all of their diversity were not accidents of nature but the results of continuous experiments with breeding and cultivation methods. Corn, in particular, is not found “in the wild” at all; it’s closest relatives are a group of plant species known as teosintes (and no, I don’t think they are a genus on their own). To look at the plant, which resembles cattails as much as anything else, it’s very difficult to imagine that it could yield something nutritious and filling, but, after centuries of careful cultivation, here we are.

(This is to say nothing of the other foods of the Americas—vanilla, chocolate, tomatoes, peppers, squashes—that make the modern cuisines of so many cultures delicious. But we’ll delve into that when we get to Indian Givers and In The Shadow of Slavery.)

I’ve read enough history to know that it’s a mistake to paint all indigenous peoples, even in North America, with the broad brush of environmental conservationism. Cahokia, discussed in many of these titles, was an example of a centralized civilization that went big and practiced agriculture with a capital A. (I have no clue what those mounds were for, but then again I can’t tell you exactly what Stonehenge is for, either.) As was the case all over the world, they thrived during the Medieval Warming Period and then declined during the Little Ice Age. Unlike European polities, the lessons many in the Americas learned was to decentralize, both as a political organizing principle, and as a strategy for sustenance.

Among other things, Cahokia demonstrates that the Native Nations of the Americas were—are—as susceptible to abusing their resources as anyone else, and the fact that many nations instead adapted to their environments and practiced sophisticated land management techniques should drive home not that they were some deity’s chosen people but really good students of history. Both Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations and Colin Calloway’s New Worlds For All pointed out ways these nations dramatically changed their environments in order to accommodate new trade relationships. Importantly, this was while they held the numerical advantage and the significant agency that came with it.

It has occurred to me that many of the First Nations of North America learned the lesson of living in balance with their environments even earlier than Cahokia, particularly after reading Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism. If this classic has not aged perfectly, it has still aged well, and I would recommend it to anyone who considers themselves a student of history. It was from this book that I learned how European sailors figured out how to use the winds in the circles of latitude to navigate further and further west, using the Fortunate Isles (The Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores) as their first destinations. While Crosby explains the saga of European navigational developments in detail, he also takes pains to note that the Chinese made the earliest global voyages, and both China and the Islamic world contributed the naval technology that made later European voyages possible. Europe got out ahead of others because of political choices, not because of innate cultural resilience or aptitude.

The bulk of Crosby’s book is about the ways in which the flora and fauna of Eurasia were the foot soldiers of European settler colonialism, and this is one of the primary reason that “Neo-European” colonies have been successful in certain places and not others. My eyes popped as I read his accounts of wild horses, cattle (!), and pigs in the colonies, particularly North America. (Fun fact: it takes one generation for a domesticated pig to revert to form as a “razorback” hog. As much as I am a vegan, I would definitely think twice about setting pigs free into the wild.) But it cannot be overlooked that part of why those animals were so successful in the Americas is because the plants they fed on were even more successful. Some of those plants were intentionally carried, some were “opportunistic” travelers on the voyages, and some were on the animals themselves. Regardless, Eurasian flora took so well and quickly to the soil of North and South America that they preceded European colonists and animals into areas, sometimes by several years.

Crosby’s argument about why the Americas as well as New Zealand were so much easier to colonize comes down to the relatively late introduction of human beings to those areas. While human beings had been present for millennia—Patty Krawec’s Becoming Kin cites indigenous oral histories that give credible evidence of possibly one-hundred thousand years—as evolution goes, even an eon is a relatively short period of time. Human beings who traveled away from the land mass groupings of Eurasia and Africa were going to encounter other creatures they had not evolved with. Importantly, those creatures, particularly the megafauna, hadn’t evolved with *them*, and thus lacked the defensive instincts when they encountered Homo sapiens. Thus, by the time Europeans arrived, those megafauna were gone, and the balance of the ecosystems indigenous people lived within was inherently more delicate. Might that be another reason indigenous Americans were such impressive land managers?

Maybe. But maybe that’s also part of the trend toward romanticizing what’s presented to be a tragic story with an inevitable end.

As with Jared Diamond after him, Crosby’s primary concern is about the role of disease in shaping the fate of the continents. Of course the First Peoples were destined to lose, because their very immune systems were so...naive (I did not come up with that terminology). And it’s true, there were a shocking number of people who died in the Americas from European diseases. But it is also true that there were many who didn’t, and simply being introduced to a disease wasn’t in and of itself a death sentence.

Norman Naimark’s Genocide: A World History was the first book I read to affirmatively call BS on the narrative that indigenous people died primarily of diseases and not brutality. Yes, exposure to novel diseases wasn’t something that induced health, but far more important were the conditions that people lived in when they were exposed. Those who have inadequate shelter, food, and clothing while they are forced to perform heavy labor for long hours are, not surprisingly, more vulnerable to diseases—novel or not—than those who have better living conditions (and this is to say nothing of having access to medical care). Both Native Nations and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States note that many nations lived through their initial encounters with Europeans who were disease carriers, and hundreds lived through voyages to Europe, a place that would be teeming with novel pathogens. Native Nations points out that the numbers of fatalities didn’t begin to spike until European colonists settled and raised families (as anyone who has ever been a parent knows, young children are not only specially susceptible to disease, they can also be hazardous vectors of those illnesses). Regardless, the initial European estimates of indigenous populations were frequently unscientific at best, and using those as a baseline to establish population losses isn’t going to give a clear picture of how many people actually succumbed.

I would also point out here that populations by and large survive even plagues. The Black Death might have killed as many as fifty percent of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. That had long-lasting repercussions, and it’s something we should work very hard to avoid, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that fifty percent of the population survived. We need to believe that indigenous Americans were extra-special vulnerable—”naive”—for it to be possible that disease *alone* killed, by some estimates, ninety percent of the population.

Really?

Dunbar-Ortiz isn’t having any of that for a second. While there were other scholars of indigenous American history before her, she is the one that, in my opinion, has focused attention on justice more than other popular authors (or should that be “popular”, since we are talking about historians?). The title of her book made my eyes widen as I imagined it would explore the history of Native Americans during colonization. While it’s still a book worth reading, that wasn’t exactly right. It is still a history of the United States, but from the point of view of the Native Nations. (The fact that the book is under 250 pages should maybe have been a give away.) Dunbar-Ortiz is powerful but blunt: she will lay out horrific history, but you never get the impression that she’s wiping any tears, or that she would have much patience for yours. And for what it’s worth, I didn’t cry while reading this, but I was filled with outrage going over the numerous times European and then American governments made bad faith agreements with their native counterparts as part of a slow-rolling campaign of genocide. (And I will never hear the term “red skins” again without wanting to vomit.)

Dunbar-Ortiz makes it clear that the history of exploitation of Indigenous American lands and erasure of Indigenous American human beings was—is—part of a toxic class-based system that reaches back to pre-colonizing Europe. As Sabrina Strings outlined in Fearing the Black Body, it is a system so racist it excluded the Irish (and when we get to Erika Lee’s America for Americans, we’ll get the chance to see what the venerable Ben Franklin had to say about Germans). Dunbar-Ortiz explores how the newly arrived Scots-Irish were used as the foot soldiers in the long running war against the Native Americans. Whatever benefits they and other waves of arrivals realized for their efforts—and those benefits almost always included stolen Native land—they were ultimately acting in the service of a larger nexus of power which they had no hope of breaking into for generations.

Native Nations was the book I had thought Dunbar-Ortiz’s was going to be, though maybe it’s fairer to say that it was one-percent of the book I had envisioned, since DuVal explores about a dozen Native Nations, and there are many more. While she doesn’t reach as far back as Mann or Crosby in tracing the origins of indigenous arrival in North America, she does trace their history back millennia. While DuVal is primarily concerned with residents of what is now the United States, she does note the similarities between the legendary Cahokia and the empires of Mesoamerica (though, to pick up on her point about “lessons learned”, I’ll note here that the Aztec empire Cortes encountered wasn’t even a century old, and given their infamous brutality, one wonders how long they would have lasted even without European interference).

DuVal moves forward in time, but around the continent. Because I’ve lived in Massachusetts most of my life, I note that she doesn’t spend time on “New England”, in large part because this area was such an outlier (Boston exceptionalism, for the win). This was one of the few places where Europeans had the numbers to overwhelm the indigenous inhabitants early on, and thus were less dependent on their social and economic goodwill. This was not the case in the rest of the country, where Native Nations had the power and the agency that came with it. This was *not* something that they were unaware of, either. If they might not have been at all times privy to the genuinely genocidal policies of European governments, they did get glimpses of maps that showed the vast holdings claimed by those kingdoms. To read DuVal’s account, it’s hard to imagine that they’re not snickering.

Native Nations’ central thesis is that it is not until almost the middle of the nineteenth century that the European-American population has the ability to make good on its ambitions to control the continent, and it was Native Nations who were in control of the relationships up until that time. To that end, European and later American powers had to make themselves useful to their indigenous hosts. DuVal relentlessly emphasizes that the nations of the Americas were deeply sophisticated, not only in their management of their natural resources, but in trade. While many made the decision after Cahokia to live in decentralized polities, they did not choose to live in isolation from others, and they saw trade not only as the exchange of goods, but as the establishment of a bond with another party. This goes some way toward explaining why many have gone down in American history as generous to people they might have been better to be wary of, but for the most part, it was a strategy that not only created a strong network among the nations, but also set the terms for what was a successful collaboration strategy with Europeans for two centuries.

This is not to imply that trade always smoothed over political differences to the point that all lived in peace. The very mention of the word “Mohawk” drove fear into European imaginations, and while many of the stories about them were exaggerated, they earned their reputation as fearsome and efficient warriors, particularly against the Huron and other nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. But it is overlooked how powerful they were as traders, or how long they had been trading with Europeans.

I was shocked to read that the Mohawks had traded goods with the Norse as far back as possibly the tenth century. While the Norse settlements famously didn’t endure in North America, trade relationships did, and the Mohawk were using glass beads and iron and brass from Europe, both via trade networks and from the residue of shipwrecks. While most did not have contact with Europeans but rather went through intermediaries, the Mohawk were beginning to integrate into the global trade networks even before “conquest”.

In that light, it should not be surprising that the Mohawk were an early ally of the Dutch. While it’s impressive that they traded with Europe before Columbus’ arrival, it’s even more so that Dutch industry was tailoring products just for them, whether that was kettles with Mohawk markings, lighter guns, or wool blankets of different colors. By the seventeenth century, the majority of Mohawk towns used iron nails, imported wood, iron hinges, and linen shirts. By the end of that century, all Haudenosaunee warriors had a musket if not a pistol.

The Dutch are not known for their kind treatment of anyone who was subservient to them in their colonial systems, and we might almost be able to judge the lack of exploitation during this period as evidence of the dynamics of their relationship with the Mohawk. Fortunately, we can settle on firmer stuff by looking at the prices the Mohawk commanded. While willing to trade hides and pelts, they set a high enough price that the only way for the Dutch to profit from it was through the sale of the metal weapons mentioned above. Similar stories are to be found in, of all things, baked goods: the economics of the sale of cakes and breads in the towns the Dutch established evolved to the point that the only people who could afford to buy the fine cakes and breads made with refined flour were the Mohawk; the Dutch, it seems, had to settle for whole-grain loaves.

The above demonstrates the extent to which the Mohawk were in control of the trade with the Dutch, and it’s fair to say that they had a good idea of the costs of that trade. To wit, the capture of beavers for the pelts the Dutch wanted had an environmental cost that Calloway alludes to in New Worlds for All (and not just for the Mohawk—recall that the continent already had well-established trade networks). Sharply reducing the beaver population had an effect on the physical environment, in some cases changing the course of rivers. I bring this up because it’s yet another counterpoint to the narrative that Native Nations are mystically in tune with the needs of the land and would never compromise environmental integrity. Indigenous people made these choices, and not because they were somehow corrupted by European coins—or guns. They were sophisticated actors exercising their agency, and for a long time they got the better end of the bargain.

I promise, DuVal wrote about many more people than the Mohawk, but there’s one more important facet to their relationship with the Dutch. The Mohawk and Dutch lived in close quarters, and both communities had men and women. Close company eventually resulted in mixed heritage offspring. (As was the case in many similar cases, children were presumed to have their mother’s cultural identity.) None of this is surprising, except that it’s part of the nuance of the early relationships between Europeans and Native Nations that is glossed over.

DuVal’s point throughout the book is that while Europeans and then Americans did harbor, indeed, genocidal, colonial intentions, they couldn’t act on them until the influx of European immigrants gave them the numbers they needed by the middle of the nineteenth century. As she says, it’s difficult to call many of the relationships “colonial” since the European powers were doing a relatively lousy job of “extraction”. For a long time, what happened in the continent would be better classified as “trade”. I think this is an important distinction, not to be an apologist for the later brutal actions that followed, but as a reminder that organized Native resistance wasn’t invented in the twentieth century. For all of the propaganda, Native Nations were never as naive or innocent as they were said to be.

None of this is to say that Native Americans haven’t been harmed by interactions with European and American settler-colonialism, because once we had the numbers, we used them. We have encroached on land from the beginning, and we have broken treaty after treaty. Becoming Kin and Kyle Mays’ An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States explore some of that damage and what, possibly, is needed to begin addressing it.

Perhaps it’s because I’m married to an attorney, but out of all that I’ve read of Native history, the 2005 City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York SCOTUS decision authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the most galling. (Another person you’re advised not to invoke as a moral authority to me.) That someone in the twentieth century would invoke the Doctrine of Discovery is outrageous, and maybe it should have been a clue as to the limitations of RBG’s advocacy. That the Pope eventually got out in front of this before the United States’ judiciary did is an embarrassment.

Becoming Kin cites this case in a calm, measured, powerful way as part of the evidence of Krawec’s argument that settler-colonialism has been lethal to Native bodies and culture as soon as it was able to be. The laws are illogical and in some cases just bad, but that’s irrelevant when the aim has been to lay claim to Native land. Krawec draws a distinction between the treatment of Native and Black Americans, the former of whom had to prove their ancestry to be considered Native by the state, regardless of their acceptance into a culture, and the latter of whom were presumed to be Black even if their last ancestor was a great-grandparent. Why? Because when you want Native land, you need to eradicate—erase—Native people, but when you want Black labor, you need to *create* Black people. But both strategies are to the same end: to increase the power of the settler-colonial state.

Denial of identity goes beyond not getting recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. One of the most horrific things to read about is the legacy of residential schools in North America: children removed from their homes, family, and community at heartbreakingly young ages, being ordered to change their appearance to conform to the Euro-American standard, being forced to change their names, not being able to speak in their languages, and being told how deficient they were in every way. There are generations of people who were disconnected from their cultures as adults because of what they suffered as children. It shouldn’t be overlooked that their ordeals included watching their peers—their friends—be murdered, sometimes at ages that can only make you weep. The discoveries in 2020 and 2021 of suspected mass graves at former residential schools in Canada confirmed the horror stories “graduates” reported that too many were loath to credit. While residential schools have been closed, Native children are still twice as likely as white children to be placed in foster care, and that is the average for the United States. A Native child in South Dakota is *eleven* times more likely to be in foster care than a white child, and Native children are over half of the children in care (fifty-three percent, to be exact—which is just a little bit more than the national average for Canada).

Krawec’s book is a call for the Natives of the Americas to reconnect with their traditions as a way of healing the present and forging a stronger future, but it also offers a way for everyone, whether Native or not, to connect to each other. Indeed, much of the cultural toxicity she describes is not confined to Native communities, but affects everyone who might stand out from the European-Christian “ideal”. Laws and policies make it all too easy for authorities to disrupt families who organize themselves differently than the norm, and Krawec notes that vagrancy laws have always been a way to weaponize normal human behavior against the poor, who are more likely to do in public what people with greater means can do in the privacy of their homes. She highlights, in ways similar to Gikandi, Strings, and McCormack, that a civilization that sanctions inhumane treatment of one group has a rot at its core.

Krawec discusses yet another scourge on the Native community, and this one is indeed something they suffer disproportionately with: Missing, Exploited, and Murdered Native Women and Children. While it is generally true that if a woman is killed or assaulted it will be by someone in her ethnicity or community, that is not true for Native women. They are more likely to be in sexual relationships with white men, to be sexually exploited by white men, and to be murdered by white men. In general, they are an incredible six times more likely to be murdered than non-Native women. These are shocking statistics, and they should be inspiring all of us to protect Native women. Instead, they are largely unknown or, at least, unremarked upon.

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States is messier than the other books because Mays is talking about the intersected histories of two groups in the United States that are generally seen to be in contest if not conflict with each other. And it’s true that there have been instances and periods of both, but there have also been significant periods of collaboration and solidarity. Civil rights luminaries such as Angela Davis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and Martin Luther King, Jr. saw more common cause than not.

The conflicts are difficult to look at if we’re hoping to construct a clean narrative. While Mays, who is himself Black and Saginaw Chippewa, would agree, as I do, that Black people have a right to reparations, where it can get uncomfortable is when the demand includes land, all of which was stolen from Native Nations. On the flip side, Black people are more than entitled to their share of bitterness at certain nations—looking at you, Cherokee—for enslaving African captives.

There is the capacity of both parties to minimize the other, whether that’s Natives who use the n-word a little too freely, or the denial that it is actually Native people who are killed by the police more than anyone else (the hair-raising statistics just keep on coming). But Mays, perhaps more than any of the other authors, is future-focused, and he sees opportunities for continued collaboration. Agreed.

In this country, at least when I was growing up, we liked to tell ourselves a comfortable story about World War II, the Holocaust, fascism, and genocide. We, the United States, were the good guys, and we were so horrified by what happened in Europe because we couldn’t imagine doing such horrible things. The truth is that we did many of them first (read, for example, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste for a discussion of how Nazi leaders drew on our race laws to come up with their own). If you had any doubts, any of these books will dispel them for you.

I started by taking about modernity as an illusion—delusion—of a strictly rational and just existence that wills into being material prosperity. It was dependent on enslaved Black labor, and that could not be negotiated. But the American version also literally resided in the land of Native Nations. The land, and the numerous resources it contains, is also an essential component...but Native peoples and their cultures were not. They were, in fact, an uncomfortable reminder of what the project of modernity really was. Hence, the drive to erase.

Kathleen DuVal cites the term coined by Ojibwe professor Gerald Vizenor to sum up what the actual history of Native Nations encompasses: survivance, a combination of survival and resistance. You live to fight another day, and what you’re fighting for isn’t merely physical survival, but also the preservation of your history. It is based on recognizing truth and facts, even when they make you squirm, but it is the only way to build a truly durable future.

Perhaps this is a good time for all of us to start paying attention.

Deb in the City

One to go

This has been an incredibly busy month--and I feel as slapped around as anyone else by our current events. There have been far more days than I wanted where I didn't get to transcribe, and I'm not of the school of thought any more that says to push hard until you reach your goal.

But tonight, since I'm alone, I pushed hard, and now installment fifteen is done. 24,585 words, which brings the total of the series thus far to 387,996 words. Yeah.

My work and this moment are not unrelated, by the way. The whole series up until this point has been dancing around a historical genocide, and this is the installment where I let the readers see what it looks like. Spoiler alert: it's gradually, and then all at once, and it's never total, no matter what conquerors like to say.  

I think it's fair to say that writing about these things has been painful, but it's also probably saved my sanity. Talk about what you see--we need all the stories right now.

Deb in the City

Books In Conversation: Volume 1 (Slavery and The Rot of Modernity)

What is Modernity? You can’t answer that question without talking about the Black American experience.

As a not-Black American, it’s hard to escape myths about what the Black American experience is. I say this even after reading history, even feeling safer in Black spaces than White spaces. But even if you can’t escape the myths—and the beliefs that frequently follow—that doesn’t mean that you don’t intuit that something doesn’t add up.

Which is why I open my Books In Conversation with this collection. Yes, please, read Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent Stamped From The Beginning, among others. That will help explode much of what we’ve been taught. But I wanted to explore these lesser known titles because they tell different aspects of the story. Other volumes will touch on it later in the series as well.

Born in Blackness by Howard French traces the origins of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from a starting point that’s been hiding in plain sight: Portugal. That country used to be seen as the loser of losers in the global rush for power, but given their massive and productive holdings in South America (Brazil) and Africa (Angola) into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that’s nonsense. And certainly, they broke through many technological barriers to initiate sea travel on a scale not seen before. More sinister is their early pilot of the infamous transatlantic triangle, which I think is more fitting to see as a transfer of wealth from one continent (Africa) to three others (Europe and North and South America), which enabled the latter three to continue trading and building wealth among themselves.

Do not let the propaganda fool you: Africa is a continent of abundance, and that’s why it is so attractive. (The immense display of wealth by Mansa Musa of Mali during his pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century might have been an inspiration for initial voyages there from Portugal.) And while no one should pity the Portuguese during this time, they came to West Africa to establish trade relations, not to conquer. They took enslaved people, but they were hoping to trade primarily in gold.

Anyone reading this already knows that, of course, enslaved human beings were ultimately more profitable, and there’s an irony to this that French underscores at the end of his book. Africa, large as it is, punched below its weight in population even before Europeans and Asians began plundering it, in no small part due to microorganisms more readily found in the tropics. (In The Shadow of Slavery discusses the means by which West Africa in particular adjusted for the consequent agricultural conditions.) The sparseness of the population was exacerbated by the slave raids, which were conducted more by other Africans than by Europeans, at least at first. That this was weakening polities, even as they traded human beings for commodities, wasn’t lost on African leaders, who recognized that they, as a consequence, would have fewer future allies as they weakened other nations. French does not excuse the choices these people made to continue, but he does give the sense that by the time this realization settled, they were enmeshed in an economic system that was going to be brutal to get out of.

Even before the conquest of the Americas began in earnest, Africa was the fulcrum of two other, early “trade triangles”. The spice trade, particularly for melegueta pepper from the area that is now Liberia, drove the exchange for metal and textiles produced in northern Europe. This trade, surprisingly, integrated northern and southern Europe economically in ways that hadn’t been seen before.

The trade in textiles drove a triangle of a more “global” character. While Africans were able to produce fine textiles, those were more readily available in what is now known as India, and they featured cotton, which was more comfortable in the tropics than the cloth produced in Europe. Portugal was again the intermediary for this trade, and what they took for cloth was people.

I bring this up to highlight that African leaders were making economic choices, even if we find them repugnant—they were not being pillaged (at least not initially). They were a source of both direct and indirect wealth, and when they could leverage for advantage, they did. That they were a source of significant wealth is something else that is also hiding in plain sight. Without the wealth generated by African resources and African bodies, it’s hard to conceive of the possibilities of the silver mines or tobacco, cotton, and sugar plantations which powered the European colonies in the Americas.

I think it should be clear to anyone that Africa and Africans suffered losses for their interactions with Europeans. This shouldn’t be a matter of debate, and yet there are those who had argued for decades that Africa somehow benefited from enlightened European systems. French slams this at the end of his book with statistics showing that while Africa’s population may have been below the mean for its size before European “trade”, even after the slave trade had ended and most of Africa was colonized by European powers, the continent *still* hadn’t recovered its population losses, in spite of allegedly superior public health systems. It wasn’t until after decolonization and independence in the middle of the twentieth century that Africa began to make up for its population losses in earnest—this in spite of the narrative that Africa is poor and starving.

Born in Blackness proved, to me, the case that Africa was a net contributor to our global economic history (and that they deserve reparations, even if nothing will ever be enough). One narrative exploded. There were times that I felt outraged and shook my head, but it was an understandable story because it dealt with history and economics. Much more difficult was Slavery and The Culture of Taste. That is a book about psychology and sociology—and a level of sadism I both can’t comprehend and see everyday.

Slavery and The Culture of Taste by Simon Gikandi was the most difficult book I have ever read, no contest. (More difficult to read than Orientalism by Edward Said, and I don’t speak French.) The concepts were easy to understand, and that made it more painful.

I came to the book because I finally noticed how much I had been hearing the word “taste”. What, exactly, did that mean? Why were people like Austin Kleon and Ira Glass talking about how their tastes “improved” even as their art didn’t while they were in the formative stages of figuring out what their artistic orientation was? We judge people by it all the time—but why? What is taste, and what does it signal?

I finally did a search for it in my fantastic library system, and as soon as I saw this title, I knew I had to read it. While the title may seem a mashup, it’s not.

Gikandi starts with the problem of modernity, and this is something French gets at, too: for all of our enlightened associations with modernity, it doesn’t begin in earnest until the explosion of enslavement. The Modern Person is an independent contributor to a society that values, among other things, humanity and the values of The Enlightenment (rationality and independent judgment being chief among them) and sees themself in opposition to the hidebound traditions that characterized, roughly, the medieval era, particularly religious deference and socially proscribed conduct. It is the original era of optimism, an OG Everything Is Awesome.

Whereas the Middle Ages might have demanded, through its deference to God and Church, the presentation and internal embodiment of Goodness so that we could be seen to Heaven, the Age of Modernity demanded the performance of Happiness, which spoke to our Success, so that we could be trusted with future Opportunity. The Modern Era is the Age of Possibility and more than a little Awe over how far we have come.

But what these early modern specimens knew in a way that they could not deny was that all of the Progress was underwritten by the enslavement of people who were not invited into the benefits of modernity in any way. The modern subject saw the slave and knew that their age was built on a foundation of clouds.

So what is taste in this context? It’s the set of aesthetic practices and habits of mind that is supposed to limn the difference between what is supposed to be the idealistic magic of modernity and the root of slavery beneath it. The Culture of Taste flowers in eighteenth century England, and it’s possibly where the British first learn to sublimate what they can’t make peace with (or control).

(Is this a successful strategy? That tastes change so frequently would tend to indicate that it’s not.) 

It can’t be overlooked that the practices include politeness, and here it’s hard not to think of the rule to avoid discussions of religion, politics, and sex. It is also, at its deeper root, an admonition to make sure everyone is comfortable by making sure everyone has a pleasant experience in which they can all experience—wait for it—Happiness.

It’s when you contemplate politeness that you start to realize Marx had it wrong: the opiate of the modern masses is Happiness, and like all addictive drugs, we chase it most especially when we don’t have it. I would argue that our quest to always live in a state of perpetual happiness is the cause of much of our sociological, if not psychological, ills. As Ryder Carroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal, pointed out, being in one emotional or psychological state all of the time is generally considered a sign of mental illness. I would argue that it also retards our growth as a civilization—and that just might be the point.

Gikandi is not the first to note that the presence of enslaved people and their importance to the economy built up around them is not an ironic but a logical cause of the heightened calls for “liberty” among the people who aren’t enslaved. (We’ll talk about that more when we get to Sunny Auyang's The Dragon and the The Eagle.)

It was difficult reading about performance, for reasons that I’m sure many people will understand. I grew up with a parent who frequently didn’t seem to have emotions but performed them. I might not be putting that the best way, but it’s something that left me having trouble trying to distinguish between genuine displays of emotion and emotional manipulation. Part of why I’m having trouble putting it into words is that it’s an extreme version of an accepted phenomenon, which has led me to question the validity of the practice. Gikandi’s analysis doesn’t do anything to affirm confidence.

It is harder still to read about the twisted psychic underpinnings of our civilization. To the extent you suspected something was wrong, his explanation proves you’re correct. It should no longer be a question of what replaces this abusive system, but why haven’t we stopped it already? Because even if you deny the humanity of the exploited people who make the system, it’s difficult to deny the toll that living with the contradictions of it has done to even those who aren’t exploited by it—or, perhaps better to say, are exploited differently. (I think now of the psychological case studies at the end of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; a subject for another day, but for now it’s clear after reading that the culture of violence does its own damage to those who perpetrate it.)

These questions are at the heart of the first part of the book. They’re the easy part. The second half is devastating. As much as people have pretzeled their arguments to deny that enslaved, captured people were just that, their captors understood perfectly that they were dealing with fellow human beings. And they proceeded with that informed understanding to break and destroy their captives’ previous identities.

This is part of what makes this particular flavor of slavery extra-special cruel and evil. Yes, slavery and captivity existed before the Portuguese dropped down into West Africa, but the system that was exported to the European colonies took on far more degradation than what had been seen before. The people who were enslaved were now intended to exist only for their service to someone else.

The recognition of the humanity of these people is implicit in the cruelty of the methods that were employed, and yes, dear reader, this is where I cried. Imagining the psychological disruption of being removed from family, friends, community, and home, and being taken to a strange environment by people who were known to be brutal and violent was terrifying. The fact that many of them did not speak the language of their captors was even more disorienting.

I can’t stress enough that this was known and obvious, if only through the continued resistance to capture, captivity, and enslavement at every step of the way. And even if we look at the middle-men of slavery and excuse them for not having power, they made choices within that system. They did not learn the names of their captives; they renamed them. While some artifacts of their former lives miraculously made the journey, for the most part, everything that had bound them to their previous identity was taken from them. Please imagine what it must have been like to have had their identities stripped from them, particularly as adults, but even for children. It made not only for loss but a certain kind of madness.

The barbaric cruelty of slave owners and their overseers is infamous. What may be less appreciated is that it was intentional. It wasn’t just sadism—although that can’t be discounted—but a calculated strategy to keep enslaved people from asserting their humanity. When we consider the elaborate means of torture many households with enslaved people employed, it’s clear that the violence was planned and strategic. Gikandi makes the point that the tools, preparation, and execution of the violence borders on sexual fetishism, and it’s hard to look at the pictures of the idealized violence and not see sexual undertones. I would argue that this is a continuing, perverse, and unwilling recognition that the people who are being subjugated and dehumanized are still people.

This part was painful to read, but it’s not all about dehumanization. Perhaps you’ve noticed—Black Americans are real people, and their ancestors fought for their humanity every step of the way, and in every way. They went beyond mere survival. For as much as enslavers tried to deny the humanity of their captives, in many places they had to make concessions to them. (I would argue that the combination of these concessions and the inconsistently applied violence actually made conditions in some ways more terrifying.)

Enslaved people got precious little time off, but during those times many communities gathered to remember and reconstruct their identities from their original communities, including songs, music, and dancing, as well as sharing their original language. (Even this sometimes proved to be too much for their captors, some of whom reported feeling haunted by the sounds of that music.) In some places, they also had the “right” to grow their own food on small parcels of land adjacent to their homes. While this might stretch the definition of a concession—the arrangement was frequently an alternative to a captor providing food—many enslaved people used these plots to assert their identities, growing a mix of subsistence items from their nation of origin and their new settings. (If you’re wondering how they had seeds from their homes, In The Shadow of Slavery touches on that as well.)

This control over their spaces, social as well as physical, is one way enslaved people subverted their captors’ admonition that “there shall be a place for everything and everything shall have a place.” (Boy, does housekeeping take on a significantly more sinister tone in that light.) These are just some of the ways that African slaves were able to not only maintain their humanity but forge an identity in the face of psychological oppression.

Gikandi cites Freud to highlight the importance of play as a psychological device to limit the damage of oppression—but notes that is not a substitute for freedom itself. Still, at times, it must have been briefly satisfying, especially in the festivals popular in the West Indies, in which slaves openly copied the culture of taste in order to ridicule it. Surprisingly, some of these, particularly the “John Canoe” festivals, actually included their aristocratizing captors. (Perhaps a contemporary comparison would be a mashup of a drag ball and a roast.)

Both French and Gikandi make clear that Africa—and African enslavement—are the basis for modernity, in all its ugliness. But let’s admit that economic and psychological repercussions may require some thought and analysis, because they aren’t all immediately obvious. That’s alright—Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body covers territory that everyone will immediately, viscerally understand.

I came across Strings’ book first when I heard Brooke Gladstone’s On The Media episode about the moral panic around body size. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the study mentioned in that episode—and briefly in Strings’ book—paints a different picture when smokers and people who have been diagnosed with serious illnesses—people who are thin for reasons that no one wants to emulate—are removed. Being in the BMI category considered healthy weight is, in fact, healthier and encourages greater longevity. However, even though a lower BMI is healthier, that doesn’t excuse, condone, or license bullying of people with higher BMIs.

But what does all of this have to do with modernity?

Kidnapped Africans were beginning to be seen in European cities in the seventeenth centuries, and the ambivalence people felt about the benefits versus the material origins of modernity is reflected in the way they perceived those people. While European artistic standards did not consider stereotypical African faces to fit with the conventions of the time (pointed noses and “fine” lips were held to be more attractive), their bodies fit with the European ideal of a “well-formed, proportionate figure”. Initially, there was even artistic admiration for these bodies.

This does not last, though sexual objectification and exploitation of Black bodies endures to this day. Strings makes clear that it is in perceptions of the Black body that we can see the twisted and ugly ways Europeans tried to justify the contradictions of modernity: If an enslaved person is being treated as a beast by someone else known to be rational, it must be because they are, in fact, a beast. Like all other animals, they don’t control their desires for food or sex, which both explains and is explained by the differences in the average body types of Europeans and Africans. (One is tempted here to remind early and contemporary observers that members of both groups have never had a unified body type, but I suspect this would fall on deaf ears.)

Now the special, modern twist: Make sure you prove your ability to control your baser impulses, particularly around food, lest you be revealed as a beast. Ludicrous as this sounds, it seems a number of Europeans were in danger of being revealed to be just that.

The slave trade made the sugar trade possible, as French discusses in Born in Blackness. While Europeans had used sweeteners before, the explosion of the availability of sugar in the eighteenth century was a new paradigm. What came right along with it was the availability of coffee (and tea—but we’ll let Raj Patel talk about that in Stuffed and Starved). There’s some debate about whether sugar is addictive, but there is no debate about coffee, tea, and caffeine in general. Even more importantly, coffee had a prestige we in the twenty-first century have trouble appreciating. Consuming it, at least initially, was a signal of sophistication and even erudition, and in the beginning of the Age of Performance, coffee was the perfect prop. And if consumed in the new cafes that were popping up all over European cities that became a stage for intellectual activity, so much the better.

I don’t think I need to explain why sugar consumption made coffee drinking more palatable (confession: I hate coffee), and I probably don’t need to explain that consuming large amounts of sweetened drinks—many times with milk—in combination with the sedentary lifestyle of the cafe dweller led not only to health problems like gout but also weight gain. This phenomenon was a subject of deep, almost existential concern, and part of their response was the development of the “standards of taste” Gikandi refers to. Polite individuals are also admonished to practice table etiquette and show restraint when dining.

It’s during this period that we begin to see women being encouraged to be the smallest people they can be, as well as the beginnings of the diet craze (or is that crazy diets?). Once colonization of the Americas begins in earnest, new women’s magazines begin to encourage their readers to take responsibility for their own diets and the diets of their families to make sure that they are the healthiest specimens possible. This projection of a perfect body is a crucial part of the performance of morality as well as an assertion of their Anglo-Saxon superiority.

As ideals of European and then White American bodies developed, Black bodies continued to be denigrated. But while the definition of “Black” has contracted and expanded—how people feel about mixed race children has changed repeatedly—the definition of “White” is even more amorphous. One of the things that perked my ears up about this book was during Strings’ interview with Gladstone, when she saw how frequently *Irish* bodies were denigrated in similar, at times identical language as that used for Black people.

I continue to take exception to comparisons between the indentured servitude of White Europeans and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants—one was not permanent, nor was it passed down to children—but when Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism points out that the English took their first stab at colonialism in Ireland, it’s difficult to deny that the Irish were treated as little better than property. (And not just the Irish: per Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, African enslavement didn’t take off in earnest until the Slavs of Eastern Europe built fortifications to protect themselves from slave raids.) As bizarre as it may seem to us today, the Irish were not seen as White, and in fact many tried to argue that they must have had “Asiatic” or African roots because they were darker skinned and smaller in stature. English writers and philosophers like Thomas Carlyle went so far as to use the Irish Famine, which brought so many of the Irish to the United States, as proof of their animal nature, because surely it was their “gluttony and poor self-control” that led to them not being able to control their food sources.

It was, of course, not only the English who held a poor view of the Irish. Proud American Anglo-Saxons like Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed that the Irish were deficient specimens, as well as being short, dark, and of Asian origin. However, Emerson didn’t confine his critiques to the Irish. He, like many other Americans, held that the “Anglo-Saxon” combined the best of Western and Northern European populations and were the “Ultra-Caucasians”. Not surprisingly, part of the proof of this superiority was in the (ideally) taller and thinner bodies of these Anglo-Saxons. Heaviness was a sign that maybe you—and the rest of your “race”—really weren’t ultra anything, so the pressure increased to be thin. (Please don’t name check Emerson to me again.)

It should go without saying that the penalties were stiffer for Anglo-Saxon/White/European/Whatever women who were heavy. And yet...don’t be too thin. Per Harper’s Bazaar in the late nineteenth century:

 “...a woman must have some fat to avoid the scrawniness of the Reform years, and...beauty [is] to be found only in women whose delicacy and littleness cause emotions of tenderness and protection taking them to be admiration of beauty.”

There’s a discussion to be had about how the Victorian abhorrence of adult sexuality led to institutionalized pedophilia, but that’s another subject for another day. For our purposes now, it’s self-evident that most adult women are going to have a very hard time fitting into an ideal of “delicacy and littleness” that’s more appropriate to a child. As the majority of American women (and men) know, it’s akin to being thrust into a game with rules stacked against almost everyone forced to play. That, in part, goes some way toward explaining the rise of Diet Culture in the late nineteenth century. 

One thing we can say about the likes of Graham, Kellogg, and the Seventh Day Adventists is that they begin to emphasize the consumption of “good” foods over the prohibition of “bad” foods. We might also thank Kellogg for his emphasis on “hydrotherapy” and vegetarianism, which may have had genuine public health benefits (even if you’re a committed omnivore, you probably wouldn’t have felt safe eating the mass-produced meat of that age). But that is all.

Kellogg, perhaps surprisingly, didn’t want to see (White) women too thin—because that might make it difficult for them to bear children, and that was abhorrent to a eugenicist like him. (Also, he was not alone in the belief that Black people were so constitutionally inferior that they were eventually going to die out as a “race”. We can only assume that it didn’t occur to him that health problems Black Americans experienced could be ameliorated by not having to live in a racist system.) This should sound familiar to anyone who has had to listen to any fascist rhetoric—please think of that next time you buy breakfast cereal.

What Strings showed is that much as we try to run away from the contradictions and hypocrisies of our modern system, there is no escape, because they are baked into the systems that govern—literally and figuratively—our very bodies. Of all of the books in this group, I saw hers as the one with the strongest, if unstated, call to action to dismantle the systems that are destroying our health and psyches. It just works out, as far as I’m concerned, that doing so will dismantle the rot of modernity as well.

The books above explain the economic, social, psychological, moral, and even physical origins and consequences of our pervasive systems of modernity. While these are paradigms that we should be actively changing, they are total. There is no one who lives in this civilization who isn’t in some way a party to these modes of existing. So it is always, but we should be forgiven if we’re left unable to *see* it for what it is even if we *know* it for what it is. It is here, perhaps, that we can use our visual media as a clue, or at least a partial glimpse in the mirror.

Catherine McCormack’s Women in the Picture is light reading compared to the other three titles. But her subject matter—systemic sexism as reflected in our media—is just as serious as the systematized racism that makes modernity possible. And if the other three titles made me cringe in horror, this one made me wince in recognition.

McCormack is concerned with European and American art, and she opens with an acknowledgment of how privileged and rarefied the world of art history and criticism is. As with so many other professions, it’s self-selecting: you must already come into the field with deep knowledge of history, Greco-Roman mythology, and religious imagery, as well as familiarity with classical works. If art history is its own language, you need to be privy to the syntax before you start, at the very least so you can get all of the in-jokes. In and of itself, these prerequisites limit participation to those who come from means, and until a few generations ago, to men. 

Which is all to say that a critical feminist perspective of art was lacking until relatively recently. While McCormack isn’t the first to attack the problem, she’s still going into relatively uncharted ground.

Women in the Picture divides its subjects into four categories: Venus, The Mother, Maidens and Dead Damsels, and The Monstrous Woman. They are all classical archetypes, but we see reflections of them to this day.

Part of my admiration for McCormack stems from her analysis of the myth of Venus (Aphrodite). Proud myth nerd though I am, I had never heard the goddess’ origin story in quite this way. My understanding was that Cronus colluded with his mother Gaea to take down his father Uranus. (Gaea, you may recall, was outraged because Uranus had imprisoned their younger, uglier children within the bowels of the earth after they were born. He couldn’t stand to see them walking on their mother, the earth—so he kept her pregnant with them.) Cronus, youngest of the Titans, was the only one willing to take on his all-powerful father, and he did it when he was at his most vulnerable: coupling with Gaea. Cronus emasculated Uranus with his famous sickle. Uranus fled, and from the drops of his wound’s blood sprung up the Furies. His genitals were tossed into the sea, and from that foam arose Venus/Aphrodite.

Only maybe it wasn’t the foam, but the genitals themselves that the goddess formed from. Maybe she is in fact Uranus’ genitals—his penis, in particular—reborn as an object of desire...to stimulate other male genitals. She is, in this interpretation, male sexuality, re-presented to itself in female form. Perhaps this might explain why representations of Aphrodite/Venus are so unrelatable for so many women, because she was never intended to be a woman but a proxy for male desires—the perfect object of the Male Gaze. (We’ll pick this up when we talk about Narcissus, Echo, and the rest of the gang in Roberto Calassso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.)

In many ways, the archetype of The Mother is just as limiting as the unattainable goddess because it was created to be. McCormack takes pains to make clear that this is not the same as the maternal figures of older religions and mythologies which were so closely intertwined with nature, in all its glory and terror. This mother is a walled garden, her fertility channeled in the most contrived ways, to serve the ends of the civilization that stands in opposition to nature. The “virgin mother” is perhaps the perfect starting point for our understanding: she is production that isn’t preceded by personal sexuality or even desire. She ultimately exists to serve.

“Cringe” doesn’t appropriately describe my reaction to McCormack’s descriptions of the aspirational Dutch paintings of the perfect wife and mother, cuddling her children in a chair or managing their studies while getting on with her own work. These paintings were made for the husbands who were making their fortunes overseas, an assurance that everything was as it should be and would be waiting for him in a perfect state when he returned. The aesthetic of those paintings is surprisingly similar to modern Instagram and magazine spreads, wherein The Mother is presented in an open but luxurious space, using the latest technology, and surrounded by her always clean, happy, and beautiful children. And it reminds of nothing so much as how we imagine Marie Kondo’s advice come to life, right down to “everything being in its place”. Here is where I wished I could sink into my chair, as I uncritically love Kondo’s advice and genuinely feel better following it, but it’s impossible to deny what it legitimizes. (More, I promise, when we discuss Marie Kondo and The Cultures of Collecting.)

There is another side to the modern archetype of the perfect mother, and that is one who is noble in her loss, particularly of her child. This trope is repeated and venerated ad infinitum in our modern media—how we love to watch a Black mother in particular mourn the loss of her child, usually her son, to violence, addiction, or other wickedness of our civilization. Someone could mount a collection of photos of the Mourning Mother—whether in the initial throes of grief or the numbed shock of the aftermath—and fill a museum. 

It goes without saying that people have been calling BS on these narratives for centuries. McCormack highlights the struggle to recognize mothers’ (and women’s) unpaid work as exactly that. Modern capitalism has demanded divisions of labor, necessitated by the site of work, and that translated for centuries into a sexual division of labor. The rise of capitalism is arguably intertwined with the rise of sexism, and because of the extreme violence against women during the centuries’ long persecution of witches (though, as Carl Sagan notes in The Demon Haunted World, not all of the victims were women), women lost much of the power they needed to challenge their confinement to domesticity and the devaluation of their work. 

The artist Mirele Laderman Ukeles created a photography project in 1969 that highlighted women’s work, documenting her everyday tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, as well as participation in religious ceremonies. She saw that work in solidarity with other “maintenance” work, particularly of public structures, that was only slightly more valued and compensated. Ukeles’ work is of interest to McCormack because this was, in one way, an answer to the question of how a woman could exist as an artist—or vice versa—and still fulfill her “roles”. Work as an artistic statement was part of Ukeles’ answer.

It isn’t lost on historians of work and feminist activists that women who function as homemakers have better tools to do their jobs. However, they turn the marketing narrative on its head: instead of seeing vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers as devices to make their work easier, those machines have made work harder because they have raised the standard of expectation of cleanliness. I would argue that they have also worsened the class-divide, as those standards apply even to those households that can’t afford to make those purchases. Further, they make women’s work even more devalued, after a fashion, as expensive gadgets are now seen as something essential to work that isn’t compensated.

All of the archetypes McCormack discusses suffer from a form of violence, but violence is baked into the definition of the Maiden and the Damsel in Distress. The violence, or at least the threat of it, *is* the distress. The Maiden or Damsel is frequently raped or about to be, and if she isn’t, likely dead. (If the reader immediately thought “...a fate worse than death” after the word “rape”, that might be the best demonstration of the archetype.)

The Rape of Europa by Titian is perhaps the most famous example of this archetype. In the myth, Europa is a princess in Asia Minor, little more than a child, when she’s kidnapped by Zeus as a bull. One of the first things I noticed when I saw the painting was how *womanly*, how adult, Titian’s Europa was. However, she is just as helpless as a child, and in fact the painting features on-lookers who don’t seem motivated to protect the princess from what must look to them like a wild animal. They are bystanders, as casually observing a kidnapping as many do acts of violence now.

I’ll take a brief detour to Calasso’s Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony because he does a very good job explaining some of the tension in this myth, which I’m sure McCormack would nod along to. Before there was Europa in Asia Minor, there was Io in Greece, the nymph who was the daughter of a powerful river god who did not want his daughter consorting with Zeus. He as well was married to Hera, who was famously jealous (as one might expect the goddess of marriage to be when monogamous marriage was being dishonored). His solution was to turn Io into a cow, whom he then let Hera torment, first with the giant Argus, then with a gadfly that chased Io all the way to Egypt, where she finally found relief.

There, Io became a queen and then a goddess, and had Zeus’ son Ephaphus. He and Memphis, another daughter of a river god, had a daughter named Libya, and from her relationship with Poseidon (which we can only imagine was slightly less dramatic than one would have been with Zeus), she became the mother of, among others, Agenor, who was the father of...Europa.

That is the myth, and while we may have much to say about what it means to be the daughter of a river god, the symmetry of the story was enough to make me raise my eyebrows even at the age of ten. Calasso’s theory is that both myths are a record of tit-for-tat kidnapping, or perhaps a trade in human bounty. It is also impossible to ignore the imperialism and nativism of the story. Io and her descendant/mirror Europa are the transmissions of empire, but they are also hapless victims whose only solace are their children. The best hope for the Damsel in Distress is to survive long enough to become the mother of someone who might avenge them. By my reckoning, that is cold comfort.

McCormack’s final archetype is The Monstrous Woman, and part of her monstrosity is that at times she embodies or rejects the other three archetypes all at once. She is the ultimate “mess” of a woman because she is her own person. She is Lilith, who refuses to allow Adam the privileges in marriage he assumes should be his. She is the Sphinx, the woman who not only talks back to men, but tests their comprehension. (And, boy, would Oedipus have been well-served to figure out what her presence in front of him was warning him of.) She is Medusa, the snake-headed monster who freezes men in fear...But before that, she was the Libyan serpent goddess Anatha, and before that the triple goddess Neith, who combined the attributes of Medusa, her foe Athena, and Athena’s mother, Metis. She is, of course, The Witch, so threatening to the patriarchy that she embodies the temptress and the crone. 

If a monster is a creature that combines characteristics in ways that don’t hew to an easy performance of gender roles, maybe we are all monsters. Patriarchy’s answer is to divide us up into the other three archetypes and, because they are so artificial, demand that we stick to those proscribed roles, or else.

The most chilling thing McCormack points out about art criticism and criticism in general is that it is the culmination of the attempt to understand, know, and own. It is common to discuss analysis of a work of art—or a person—as a “dissection” of its meaning, and especially if we find it worthy, to “absorb” it. There is an inherent violence in that language, and McCormack questions whether the act of knowing can itself be a violation at times. This would especially be the case when that act is extended to people. As a woman who isn’t white, I have many memories of people peering too closely to try to “understand” what I am; as much as I and others like me want to be “seen”, we don’t want to be taken apart, and many of us have had the same instinctive defensive mechanism to pull back when someone tries to push too far in.

We come full circle back to the contradictions of modernity and the special madness of those who live in it, particularly those first generations. Perhaps it wasn’t just that they couldn’t escape the cognitive disconnect of the hypocrisies of Enlightenment alongside the material advantages only slave labor could provide; perhaps it was because they were regularly confronted with the exercises of violence on the Other, something that artists’ consciences in particular were unable to ignore.

The madness persists until it is confronted and the source of it is destroyed. I write this as my country is in the middle of a slow-rolling coup, and people who learned about the Holocaust and agreed it was wrong are justifying why Trump and his lieutenants are different from the dictators who came before. We see what we want to see, we ignore or disregard facts that are inconvenient, and we employ a laser-focus on what we want to see to avoid being uncomfortable.

To answer the question I posed in the beginning, Modernity is a comfortable lie that those of us who deserve material comforts can have them without the suffering of anyone who doesn’t deserve it. It is a magic wand that makes possible the belief that our ideals alone can make possible our prosperity. It is a fairy tale for adults. It is a special kind of madness, and it is in a constant state of unraveling.

Deb in the City