Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  That most of these escapes are doomed reflects a system that enforced a white monopoly over reading, writing, and education. Because slaves should no more learn to read or write than should horses and cows, one of the villains of Beloved is Schoolteacher, who enlists science, literature, and religion in the service of white supremacy. Not only the nomenclature of kinship but also all the other languages available to the slaves have been perverted by their entrapment in dehumanizing laws. Beloved sets against the treacherous printed word the visual, physical, and oral modes of communication devised by people who had been ripped from their homelands and deposited on foreign soil: work songs, chants, rope-tug codes, brands on the body, bits of quilting, sermons, a scrap of ribbon, the remnant of an African place-name, a phrase from a spiritual.

  The formal complexity of Beloved—its shifting points of view and time frames and fractured soliloquies—attests to the trauma of slavery and specifically the repercussions of the traumatized maternity symbolized by stolen breast milk. When after eighteen years Beloved enters 124 as a ghost-girl, she embodies the return of the repressed horror of Sethe’s loving murder. Despite Sethe’s efforts to “[keep] the past at bay,” Beloved’s presence triggers flashbacks or “rememories” even as it inaugurates mother–daughter bonding: Beloved’s urgency to get the nurturance she was denied and in the process suck dry the mother who killed her; Sethe’s piteous efforts to provide limitless recompense as atonement for having put her precious daughter in a “safe” place.63 The word “mine” echoes throughout their epic struggle as Morrison meditates on love “too thick.”64 For the dispossessed mother and daughter, love—turning possessive—cannot be disentangled from rage.

  After a community exorcism of the ghost, Beloved concludes by repeating the phrase “It was not a story to pass on.”65 With an emphasis on the last word, the sentence suggests that the horrors of this story should not be perpetuated. With an emphasis on the next-to-the-last word, it means that we must not take a pass on this story. Its miseries cannot be ignored. As a justification of the novel’s form, the repeated phrase emphasizes many incongruent stories jostling within Beloved that remain mysterious fragments, for most of the experiences of the slaves stolen from Africa would remain untold. As a summation of the trauma of slavery, the book underscores the muteness triggered by a calamity that inaugurated innumerable “unspeakable things unspoken,” the title of a lecture Morrison gave at the University of Michigan in 1988.

  But Morrison did pass it on, as did such scholars as Nellie Y. McKay, Paula Giddings, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, all of whom used their scholarship to examine the psychosexual, political, and economic repercussions of the American slave trade and some of whom worked with Morrison on the anthologies in which she analyzed racial and sexual injustice. Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” 66—the need to address multiple structures of oppression—became crucial to their endeavor. It fostered discussions of conflicting allegiances, just as Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness did.

  In the nineties, two widely covered events galvanized Morrison to deplore ongoing inequality: the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 and then the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. In the essays Morrison collected about the Hill/Thomas extravaganza, Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power (1992), she lambasted short-sighted racial solidarity that blinded the Black community to sexual injustice. In the book on the Simpson circus, Birth of a Nation’hood (1997), she concluded that deeply rooted sexuality scripts blinded the white community to racial injustice. Between these two publications, Morrison produced a study of the American literary imagination that helped found the emerging field of whiteness studies.67

  When Anita Hill, a 35-year-old University of Oklahoma law professor, faced a Senate Judiciary Committee consisting entirely of white men, she testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked for him—ironically, at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although Hill rebuffed his overtures, she alleged, he continued to talk about bestiality, group sex, and rape; he asked her, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” and mentioned the porn actor Long Dong Silver, apparently to tout his own sexual prowess.68 Before and after Thomas stood up to decry what he called a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” television audiences were riveted.69 Republicans on the committee weirdly invoked The Exorcist against Hill or referenced her “erotomania” to insinuate that she must have fantasized the innuendos she ascribed to Thomas.70

  Confirmed by a slim vote, Thomas (married to a right-wing white woman) went on to become one of the most conservative jurists on the Supreme Court, but the next year a raft of women—including Dianne Feinstein and Carol Moseley Braun—won political races and made 1992 the Year of Women. Because Hill wasn’t connected to the Washington elite, she believed, she was “characterized as . . . a vindictive pawn of radical feminists, a victim of erotomania, someone to be viewed at best with pity, at worst with disdain.”71 Yet her testimony illuminated sexual harassment in the workplace.72 Rebecca Walker, tapping “the rage the televised character assassination had brewed” in her, took up the mantle of her mother, Alice Walker, to conclude: “I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.”73

  In the introduction to Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power, Toni Morrison argued that Thomas had to be “bleached, race-free,” in order to be seated on a “stain-free” Court. He therefore raced Anita Hill. Denying her accusations, Thomas and his supporters ascribed them to her jealousy of lighter complexioned women—“meaning . . . his marriage to a white woman”—because, Morrison sardonically explains, interracial love, “as everyone knows, can drive a black woman insane.” Although Professor Hill looked like the epitome of propriety, she became the repository of “madness, anarchic sexuality, and explosive verbal violence.”74

  In Morrison’s view, Thomas finally emerges as a double of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday, who “moves from speaking with to thinking as” his master. Having internalized “the master’s tongue,” Friday and Thomas are condemned to “mimic” and “adore” their rescuers, “but never to utter one sentence understood to be beneficial to their original culture.” For this reason, she concludes that “the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed.”75 The Black community supporting Thomas under the aegis of racial solidarity unintentionally abetted the aims of reactionary groups.

  However, in Birth of a Nation’hood, a collection of essays about the Simpson trial that Morrison edited with Claudia Brodsky Lacour, she went on to accuse whites of recycling the Ku Klux Klan’s most toxic myth. Their title alludes to the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Klan; the book interprets the media spectacle of the O.J. Simpson case as a replay. Not fundamentally concerned with the crime itself, Morrison instead takes on the national obsession that presumed Simpson’s guilt. Why was an image of the light-skinned Simpson darkened on the cover of Time magazine?

  The popular former football player had been tried on two counts of murder for brutally stabbing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Pictures of the interracial couple and the evidence—a bloodied glove—circulated along with broadcasts from the courtroom. Acquitted on both counts in the criminal trial, Simpson was found guilty in a subsequent civil suit filed by the Brown and Goldman families. From the start, most whites presumed Simpson to be guilty, whereas most Blacks did not.

  Meditating on Simpson as a crossover figure, Morrison attributes the racial gap to a belief called “reversion to type.” Handsome and rich, Simpson had crossed over into the white world. Among whites, his case reflected a view that beneath the veneer of civilization lurked the irrational black beast intent on despoiling white maidenhood: precisely the rape narrative in Birth of a Nation that necessitates the purifying vengeance of the Klan. Presumed guilt leads Morrison to liken the “media pogrom” to a lynching: “The appetite for a live head on a stick is ravenous.”76

  One passage in this essay steers perilously close to blaming the victim, Nicole Brown Sim
pson, for the violence she suffered before her death. After stating that “the unpopular counterargument that concerns female responsibility” in the matters of domestic abuse “is a subversive, almost treasonable one,” Morrison concludes: “As long as the wildly irresponsible claim of ‘It doesn’t matter what she does’ is the answer to the helpless, hopeless idiocy of ‘She made me do it,’ the complicity in power/abuse relationships will be unaddressed.” With complicity unaddressed and with “sexual brutality . . . part of the package,” Simpson, according to Morrison, ended up an embodiment of “the whole race needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silencing.”77

  In making this “unpopular” argument, she surely anticipated the dismay of white feminists like Gloria Steinem who wanted to see more, not less, attention paid to Simpson’s abuse of Nicole Brown Simpson.78 Andrea Dworkin was not alone in pointing out that the jury in the criminal trial was not presented with the history of domestic violence that might have led them to link it to homicide.79 According to the legal thinker Patricia J. Williams, “black feminists started feeling a too-familiar squeeze: Were we against domestic violence or were we against racism?”80

  Given the gap between whites and Blacks, what does Morrison’s emphasis on “female responsibility” and “complicity” tell us? It illuminates, we suspect, her conviction that Black women, aware of the systemic indignities and violence inflicted on Black men in a racist society, have a critical role to play in the women’s movement, a role that not all white women will affirm. She was extending an insight of Frances Beal, whose 1970 essay “Double Jeopardy” argued that white feminists had to fight racism if they wanted to be joined by Black women, a point reiterated by bell hooks in her book Ain’t I a Woman? (1981).81 Morrison risks polarizing her readers to drive home her belief that Black rights cannot be subordinated to women’s rights.

  Morrison never shied away from depictions of indefensible male predation in her fiction; however, she filtered these representations through analyses of the injuries that racism inflicts on Black men along with portrayals of how those damages wreck the lives of Black girls and women. Patricia J. Williams brought a perspective comparable to Morrison’s into a conversation with Gloria Steinem about the Simpson trial. Black women who condemn domestic violence resist speaking out “too forcefully in the public arena,” because they are wary of playing into “the sort of excessive spectacle” of the “hypersexualized . . . glistening black body” that arises “any time black men are involved.” Both Williams and Steinem concur with Morrison that if Nicole Brown Simpson had been “a plain black woman,” as Williams put it, “nobody would have cared.”82

  In many of her novels, as in Beloved, Morrison balanced portraits of domestic abusers with male characters, like Paul D, whose experiences of servitude deepen their compassion for Black women. In doing so, she critiqued a large portion of the literary history she analyzed in Playing in the Dark (1992).83 Under her scrutiny, American literary history reveals an urgent white need to project onto African presences the horror of all that is “not-free” and “not-me.”84 The white entitlement that she locates in imaginative works by Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway depends on an unacknowledged but powerful conviction that Black people should be enslaved or at least subordinated.

  When in 1993 Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, supporters outraged over her not receiving the National Book Award for Beloved were mollified.85 While Oprah Winfrey’s book club boosted sales, as did her filming of the novel, Morrison became a muse for younger thinkers fashioning forms of feminism that could grapple with the racing of sexism and the engendering of racism. All of her work suggests that the historical circumstances of Black women have produced problems notably different from those faced by white women and that feminism must become suppler. As Audre Lorde declared in a 1986 interview, “Black feminism is not white feminism in Black face.”86

  In a 1989 lecture exhibiting her commitment to intersectionality, Morrison argued that the “self-sabotage” that “seems to be crippling the [women’s] movement as a whole” will cease only when feminists address the formation of American sexism in “racism and the hierarchy of class”: “When both are severed, male supremacy collapses and the sea of contention among women will dry up.” She glimpses the possibility of “being viewed and respected as human beings without being male-like or male dominated” in the artists and scholars of her day, for they are traveling toward a place “where the worship of masculinity as a concept dies; where intelligent compassion for women unlike ourselves can surface.”87

  9

  Inside and Outside the Ivory Closet

  IN THE NAME OF “FAMILY VALUES,” the Reagan administration targeted the women’s movement, shrank social welfare programs, and disregarded the AIDS epidemic. In 1992, when African Americans rioted in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King, Vice President Dan Quayle ascribed the violence to a “poverty of values” fostered by the decision of the sitcom character Murphy Brown to bear and raise a child on her own.1 He too was invoking the “family values” that President Reagan and the religious Right promoted. In response to this overemphasis on the sanctity of the family, and on behalf of lesbians and gay men who could not yet marry, some feminists set out to expand the women’s movement.

  While Toni Morrison sought to instruct feminists that Black rights are women’s rights, a number of her contemporaries—outraged at public apathy about widespread suffering from AIDS in the gay community—argued that gay men’s rights are women’s rights. Inside the academy, a new breed of theorists deployed the poststructuralist approaches of Continental thinkers to examine what Adrienne Rich had called “compulsory heterosexuality.” Like Rich, they sought to undermine the idea that heterosexuality is the normal form of eroticism. Throughout the nineties, two gender theorists, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, became influential on college campuses.

  As we traveled to feminist meetings, we were energized by colleagues reevaluating groundbreaking poets, novelists, and dramatists whose contributions had been forgotten or dismissed. Within a decade, the imperatives of the seventies led to significant revisions in humanities curricula. Conferences that might in the past have seemed obligatory but boring events were now exciting chances to exchange innovative ideas. Poststructuralist theorists such as Sedgwick and Butler contributed to the sense of intellectual excitement, for the scope of their speculations held out the promise of reimagining gender, sex, and sexual orientation.

  Helping to reclaim the word queer and found the field of queer studies, such thinkers inspired postmodernist artists and invigorated movements on behalf of nonbinary and trans people. Yet their publications bristled with difficult-to-understand formulations rarely found in the crossover prose of a predecessor like Adrienne Rich. A shift occurred in feminist publications: from literary writing to philosophical discourse. Thus, the emergence of queer theory signaled a growing divide between feminists within the academy and those outside it, even while the new theorists undermined the social categories that advocates of identity politics espoused.

  What should we make of the fact that feminists’ vying claims of radicalism emerged as the society at large—influenced by the so-called Moral Majority—turned ever more retrograde? In the same year that Anita Hill was treated dismissively by white male senators, Susan Faludi published Backlash (1991), which documented widespread masculinist hostility toward women’s gains; the heroines of Thelma and Louise took a nihilistic leap into the Grand Canyon on their feminist road trip; and quite a few anti-feminist screeds were produced by women like Atwood’s Serena Joy.

  Amid the intensity of the growing backlash, was feminism in danger of being splintered and ghettoized within an academic niche—an ivory closet—and thus marginalized? Yet while the internet took over our lives, calls for “post-feminism” were countered by proposals for a “third-wave agenda.”2 Were the members of an emerging generation
advancing into a utopian future, or retreating into a dystopian past?

  THE CULTURE WARS

  All the scapegoats of the increasingly powerful Christian Right—women in the workforce, homosexuality, abortion—suggested that a principal target in the culture wars was feminism. But war was also being waged against gay men, who were stigmatized as AIDS took its toll. While televangelists blamed feminists for encouraging women “to leave their husbands, kill their children, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians,”3 President Reagan delayed effective responses to what was called “the gay plague.” His foot-dragging was consonant with his aide Patrick Buchanan’s pronouncement on HIV/AIDS: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”4

  The reactionary fervor is reflected in the Supreme Court decision in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s law criminalizing oral and anal sex between consenting adults even in the privacy of their homes. Chief Justice Warren Burger quoted the eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone as he deemed sodomy “a crime not fit to be named” and “the infamous crime against nature.”5 The Supreme Court’s ruling affected the plaintiff, Michael Hardwick, “strongly” because “the basic human right the court denied—the right of sexual intimacy with one’s chosen adult partner—seems undeniable in any but a totalitarian vision of the legal order.” No less a crime or sin than sodomy, abortion, declared the Reverend Jerry Falwell, constituted “murder according to the Word of God.”6

  As “right to life” volunteers in Operation Rescue blockaded women’s health clinics across the country, neoconservative artists and intellectuals enlisted in the fight against progressive causes, adding people of color to the list of enemies. When Saul Bellow asked an interviewer, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?,” he was upholding the superiority of the Western canon of literature created by white men.7 With a foreword by Bellow, Alan Bloom’s best-selling The Closing of the American Mind (1987) associated the changes in Stanford University’s Western Civilization program—the inclusion of multicultural works by Blacks and women—with the barbarism that ensues when colleges open their doors to African Americans, feminists, and (worst, from Bloom’s point of view) acolytes of rock ’n’ roll.