To read Jairus Victor Grove’s interview with Rebecca Carroll, click here.

Following a series of uninspired presidential and vice presidential debates, award-winning narrative nonfiction writer, editor, and interviewer Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls reminds us that hope is not yet lost. The United States is still home to a few brave individuals with vision. Unlike many academic collections on W.E.B. Du Bois, Saving the Race brings together the inheritors of the civil rights movement and a number of artists and writers who represent a diverse array of defiant voices.

The inspiration of this collection was the 100 anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903, Du Bois’ most widely read text explicates his philosophical and political aspirations for the black race, situating himself in almost total opposition to the “separate but equal” and industrial education focus of Booker T. Washington.  As Du Bois argued in chapter 3 of The Souls of Black Folk, Washington’s compromise asked black people to give up:

First, political power. Second, insistence on civil rights. Third, higher education of Negro youth — and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

It was this hallmark unwavering disdain for compromise in the area of excellence and achievement for African Americans that alienated many of Washington’s followers and defined Du Bois as a visionary leader and thinker. Equally infamous was the air of elitism that frequently characterized Du Bois’ tone regarding the value of higher education. Most accounts of Du Bois describe a cold and introverted man, who, although well-mannered, was only conversant with those he considered his equals.

Du Bois’ stepson David G. Du Bois described him as “basically a shy person” who did not like to interact with those to whom he was not already close. When David Du Bois’ mother planned dinner parties, David recalls, “My mother did not invite people over with whom Du Bois did not feel relaxed and comfortable.” Cultural critic and author of Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk Stanley Crouch goes so far as to argue that eventually “white people drove Du Bois crazy” after a lifetime of fighting against narrow-mindedness, causing him to break with the mainstream efforts of the NAACP.

Despite his penchant for alienating those he met, Du Bois’ intellect and rigorous scholarship are unquestionable. As a student he pursued and completed a Ph.D. from Harvard University that included study at the prestigious University of Berlin. Despite an impressive academic career for any historical period, his intellectual pursuit was at times a refuge from the intolerable world of racial bias and violent exclusion. As Du Bois once remarked, “I was in Harvard but not of it.”

Today, 101 years later, New York University Law Professor Derrick Bell describes his own tenure at Harvard before he quit in protest over low minority employment, in terms starkly congruent with Du Bois’. As Professor Bell writes in his segment of Saving the Race, “Very few black folk are able to get totally beyond presumption of incompetence. The fact is that those who are even modestly welcome in certain academic circles are the most welcomed they will ever be.” This recognition of African American achievement, tempered by the reality of contemporary more and less subtle forms of post civil rights racism, typify Carroll’s collection.

Comprised of the reflections of African Americans ranging from civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan, Jr., to jazz musician and Grammy-nominated composer Terrance Blanchard, Carroll’s collection is tied together by the editor/author’s own compelling autobiography. Lacking the self-indulgence typical of many auto-narratives concerning identity, Carroll unflinchingly describes her intellectual and emotional movement from rural New Hampshire, where she was raised by white adopted parents, to an eyes-wide-open relationship with the complexities and uncertainties of her black history and identity. Carroll’s own struggle to forge an identity that could provide her with a site for empowerment while also ensuring her a sense of authenticity lies at the heart of what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”  

Although hybridity is a popular topic of academic discussion, these dialogues often disregard the traumatic and difficult growth experienced by real people who do not easily fit into the rigid categories of contemporary identity politics. What Du Bois and Carroll share and contribute to this discussion is a profound sense of what it means to be out of place. Like Du Bois, Carroll grew up in a mostly white, Northeastern town. Neither scholar describes overt racism in their childhood, instead describing a sense of loss and alienation that their privileged education provided no vocabulary for discussing. In the most common, yet telling, example, Carroll recalls how it felt to admired but never asked out on dates and how she was often complemented for only being cosmetically black.  

Carroll’s multifaceted story, then, foregrounds the disparate and even opposing accounts of W.E.B. Du Bois and his continuing relevance to a socio-political world that still cannot confront how profoundly the history of the United States of America is the history of “the race problem.” The taboo of discussing race in the United States not only impoverishes our understanding of where we come from; it also erases a rich history of hope and political commitment that has driven that history.

It is this connection between history and politics that demands that we read Saving the Race alongside Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. If we were to develop a cannon of American literature that was truly representative of our collective experience for high schools and universities, the absence of Du Bois’ still eminent work would do a grave injustice to the interests of democratic culture. Former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, for instance, conjures this spirit in her contribution writing:

Right now, we’re at a point of dissent — dissent about globalization, opposition to racism, opposition to forms of neocolonialism, opposition to war … And I have to have hope in that. What’s the alternative? I could say, “Oh, I give up. The pigs have the right way. There is no alternative.” But that’s totally insane. The world that is being presented to us right now is a world based on genocide, ecocide, and homicide; that’s unacceptable. To choose it is to choose your own destruction, and since I’m not self-destructive, I have to maintain hope in an alternative … Let’s clarify that you can rethink and transform how you view the world. Let’s clarify that the world could be entirely different.

A century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Cleaver and the others who join Du Bois’ legacy renew the intellectual and political pursuit of seemingly impossible demands for justice and equality, demonstrating that The Souls of Black Folk still testifies to an outspoken commitment to causes often derided as doomed or unrealistic. By reminding us of the lasting influence — and relevance — of Du Bois on social and racial justice, then, Carroll’s project provides a context for beginning to understand the indispensable role of The Souls of Black Folk in shaping modern America.  

To read Jairus Victor Grove’s interview with Rebecca Carroll concerning Saving the Race, click here.

STORY INDEX

INTERVIEWS >

National Public Radio’s compilation of interviews and responses to the 100th anniversary of The Souls of Black Folk
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1384569  

HISTORY >

The W.E.B. Du Bois Learning Center
URL: http://www.duboislc.org

MARKETPLACE >
(A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the link below is used.)

Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0767916190

The Souls of Black Folk
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Jairus

(Courtesy of Melville House Publishing)

There is, today, only one serious political problem:  the tragedy of the disappearance of the other.

Top billing in the competition for media attention has been a veritable blood bath for the past few months. A summer of election politics, Olympic scandal, and the potential loss of overtime pay for six million Americans have dominated “above-the-fold” coverage of most major American newspapers.

What is remarkable about this summer’s press coverage is how unremarkable the stories have been. The old journalistic adage “If it bleeds, it leads” found little place in the editorial decisions of mainstream newspapers. Or else the crisis in Sudan has been deemed unimpressive by media standards for death and destruction. Although most major newspapers offer regular updates about the situation unfolding in Sudan, these stories hardly reach the fever pitch of Paul Hamm’s “mistaken” gold medal or the veracity of the attacks on John Kerry’s war record.

Acts of naming

After the unforgivable inaction in Rwanda in 1994, both the media and U.S. government have been quick to utter the ‘G’ word — genocide — but even such a declaration has not compelled us to act in any significant way. The political malfeasance of the Clinton administration should not be forgotten. After the decision was made to classify the brutal slaying of Tutsi Rwandans as acts of genocide rather than genocide — a critical semantic distinction since use of the latter term obliges international intervention under the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,  the Clinton administration actively blocked international action both through the United States’ privileged position in the United Nations via the Security Council and through less formal diplomatic channels.

After the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis, the United Nations was left to apply ad–hoc peacekeeping efforts in the form of refugee assistance and humanitarian aid. Where this was possible, many of those helped were members of the Hutu power militias that orchestrated and carried out the genocide. Regrouping in the camps in Goma, Hutu power militias led killings and attacks using the camps and assistance in the aid of such atrocities. The horrors that continue in Burundi and the Congo today cannot be disentangled from the sordid past of purposeful ignorance that characterized the Clinton administration’s lackadaisical response.

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce

The Bush administration’s version of willful ignorance in the case of Sudan has been to substitute directionless condemnation for action. An administration too committed to “global democracy” to wait for the United Nations to enter Iraq is now content to obey and wait for direction from those same painfully slow U.N. channels. The diplomatic sclerosis of the U.N. Security Council has yet to be condemned by the short-tempered Bush foreign affairs team — in this case. Even the decision to omit the explicit threat of sanctions from a Security Council resolution directed at Khartoum’s involvement in the Darfur region of Sudan was met with little more than disappointment.

Unfortunately, given the rhetorical power behind the Left’s critique of the Iraqi intervention, it is difficult to muster the intellectual consistency to decry this wait-and-see approach. The Democratic and moderate Left demand for a measured multilateral response in Iraq is being heeded in the case of Darfur. What we find at the heart of this deadlock is a strange double bind that has plagued Leftist politics at least since Vietnam: the opposition to empire lacks an alternative strategy and language for intervention.

Years of developing an anti-colonial critique of economic and military intervention have left most of the nations under the siege of violence without the basic resources necessary for defense or survival. Countries ravaged by both structural and military violence face a world of decreasing aid and attention. Some have accused the West of using half-hearted attempts at peacekeeping as an alibi for insufficient financial and infrastructure assistance.

Supporting minimal peacekeeping efforts to contain the fires started by post-colonial economic exploitation, Western nations are willing to commit just enough resources to create a kind of negative peace. That is, just enough stability to extract necessary resources, such as oil or cheap, expendable labor, but not a peace that allows for basic inequities — including organized sexual violence, debilitating diseases, or illiteracy — to be addressed in a comprehensive manner. It is this increasingly common vulnerability for which the anti-globalization, anti-empire Left has no answer.

Those who doubt this dark thesis should only ask why the invasion of Iraq inspired massive popular protest against the Bush administration for taking out a dictator while the daily murder, rape, dislocation, and terrorizing of as many as two million in Darfur has not inspired so much as a witty ad campaign from MoveOn.org (save the courageous acts by Danny Glover and a few others arrested outside the Sudanese embassy).

There is a selective silence, in that there is reporting on Darfur but inadequate political response regarding violence in southern Sudan — demonstrating a kind of bizarre narcissism in which only atrocities committed by the United States or other western nations matter. The failure of this fascination with our own destructive capability is that it obscures often more devastating and systemic levels of violence in what Bernard-Henri Levy calls the “forgotten wars” of planet Earth.

Even as the Bush administration and CNN grouse over the word genocide, vital elements of the conflict are omitted from the explanation of conflict in Darfur. The description of bloodthirsty Arabs on horseback now ubiquitously known as the Janjaweed in news cycles fits nicely into the current lexicon of Arab stereotypes. The blaming of internal ethnic divisions belies the fact that Western and Chinese oil development has played a fatally significant part in the massacres beyond the Darfur region, such as the Nuba mountains, Dinka villages, and Nuer populations throughout southern Sudan. Although described as a recent flare-up in ethnic tensions between Arab Muslims and Christian and Animist black Africans, the organized displacement and outright slaughter of villages in southern Sudan predates the narrow timeline cited in CNN’s coverage of the Darfur crisis.

Part memoir, part philosophical reflection on ethnic conflict, Bernard-Henri Levy’s recently published War, Evil, and the End of History relays accounts of southern Sudan identical to  “recent” events dating as far back as 1985, when, as a recent Human Rights Watch report argues, the Chevron Corporation began negotiating with Khartoum to gain rights to oil rich areas in southern Sudan. In a chapter dramatically entitled “The Pharaoh and the Nuba,” Levy recounts the aerial views of southern Sudan in 2001:

We have actually come upon the oil complex, in principle a no-fly zone, of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the consortium that includes the Canadian firm Talisman Energy, Chinese and Malaysian interests, and the Sudanese national company Sudapet. And now we’ve had confirmed what the NGO’s, Amnesty International, [and] the Canadian government itself, have suspected for years but which the oil companies and the state fiercely deny: namely that the government is systematically “cleaning” the land, in a perimeter of 30, 50, sometimes 100 kilometers, around oil wells; that the least oil concession means villagers harassed, bombed, razed, and columns of poor people chased away from their homes; in short, that wherever oil is gushing, wherever black gold is supposed to bring happiness and prosperity, the desert increases.

Levy goes on to chastise Carl Bildt, former U.N. emissary in the Balkans, for championing the oil companies’ building of roads and air-strips, which says Levy, are now used for bombing runs.

A 2003 Human Rights Watch report entitled “Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights” confirms the consensus cited by Levy with eyewitness testimony. According to a 1990 account of one Nuer villager, the army drove his family out of their town.

“What happened is the jallaba [Arab, but also the word used for slave trader] just walked into the village and opened fire so everybody just ran … The jallaba are wanting the oil,” he said.

When asked in an interview why he joined the rebellion, another young Nuer responded that Arabs had displaced his family. In return he asked, “Why do people disturb those who do not have guns?”  He answered his own question with one word: “Oil.”

Forgetting politics, forgetting genocide

What we find just behind the quick accusation of genocide by the Bush administration and others repeating shortsighted explanations in the popular media is the pursuit of another strategy of willful ignorance no less reprehensible than the Clinton administration’s denial of the Rwandan genocide. The overly simplistic, but seemingly progressive (at least compared to denial), decision to label the Darfur crisis genocide is hiding the disquieting details of its cause.

Is it possible in an age of almost total worldwide security surveillance that the Bush administration could have overlooked the direct correlation between the building of oil wells and the destruction of villages?

One could simply claim that this is an area outside the United States’ strategic (satellite and human intelligence) purview. But is that really possible given Sudan was one of the first sites of conflict with Al Qaeda?  Would the United States really ignore an Islamic government thought to have ties to the bombings of American embassies?

This seems unlikely. What is more likely is that U.S. involvement in the Sudanese peace process and the heavy investments of BP/Amoco in the Chinese oil companies that are dependent on Sudanese oil has created an incentive for stability at the price of genocide.

In an attempt to give voice to these forgotten or ignored histories, Levy’s book diagnoses the Sudanese conflict as an event outside of history. He refers to the people of southern Sudan as “the Damned.” That is not to say in his critique of Hegel’s and more recently Francis Fukuyama’s grand optimism for the “end of history” that Levy repeats the racist claim that Africa lacks the Anglo-European aptitude to experience and drive history’s dialectical progression. Rather, he suggests the United States and European states and businesses are stripping African events of their historic significance, leaving the living remainder of these “directionless” genocidal equations little more than their suffering to provide content to their existence. And even this we steal and sell to the merchants of 24-hour news feed.

Levy says our language euphemizes this process of dehistoricization and depoliticization as “humanitarianism.” In a brutal description of aid and the purely biological or health approach of current relief efforts as the “forgetting of politics,” Levy writes:

The confusion of humanitarianism with the politics whose place it is taking more and more … How can you avoid the political and make it seem you’re not avoiding it?  How can you abandon the disinherited populations of the Third World to their fate and prevent public opinion, whose emotionalism is familiar to us, from having a sudden awakening of conscience and reproaching their governments? By humanitarianism. A strong presence of humanitarian aid. The transformation of the government itself into a giant humanitarian aid agency. And a media/humanitarian frenzy that will at least have the effect of masking the absence of vision, of aim, of will. Sometimes, though, it’s not so bad; sometimes the humanitarians are the last ones, as I said, to carry the colors of Europe, to defend a certain idea of humanity and human honor and to remember, consequently, the time when it was through politics that one resisted oppression; I have known these kinds of humanitarians; I have seen their work, here, in the Sudan … But sometimes aid is catastrophic; and, without giving in to the temptation of pessimism, it is difficult not to reflect that the whole of the humanitarian apparatus serves to anaesthetize public opinion, to disarm its protests, and above all to discourage the initiatives of those who could be tempted to do more … That is the case here in the Sudan, where the humanitarian machinery has as its prime effect the prolonging of a war that the West has, if it wanted, the financial, hence political, means to stop.

It is this “humanitarian machinery,” as Levy calls it, on which the Bush administration is focusing its efforts. For whatever reason, the resolve to cross the line into the realm of political choices and military options is not present. The decision to do little more than think about the threatening of sanctions or offer to outsource our responsibility to intervene to groups such as the African Union maintains what Levy refers to in a June 24, 2004, interview with Charlie Rose as “a Western belief in two humanities.” One of dignity and one of sub-human suffering.

When Rose asked Levy why he wrote this book, Levy responded, ”No one else did it.” Levy went on to explain that he believes, “It may be because we believe in two Mankinds that Abu Ghraib happens.”  

Engaged journalism, or politics as usual?

Despite, at times, a very Eurocentric account of universal human value, what Levy contributes to the complexity of formulating a new Left response to genocide is a model of engaged journalism. In a moving description of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s brief stint as a journalist covering the Iranian revolutions, Levy describes a form of intellectual intervention in hopes of militating against the voyeurism of modern media atrocity coverage while also fulfilling what he calls the “responsibility of a writer traveling through the black holes.” This act of professional witnessing is for Levy what is truly to be done as an act of conscience.

Although Levy’s attempt to “be there” for the damned of Sudan and other forgotten wars should not be scoffed at, it is not entirely consistent with his nostalgia for the anti-fascist fighters of Andre Malraux and George Orwell, whom Levy would like to in some sense join. Not unlike the troubled — and at times confused — ethical inquiry of Christopher Hedges’ War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning, Levy declares that he is “sick of hearing talk of courage and heroism” in relation to the wars of which up-close seem to lose all meaning. He lambastes the “non-interventionists” of Bosnia and the opponents to the war on terrorism, going so far as to say, “There is one single objective: to stop burying our heads in the sand, to take responsibility of naming the adversary, and provide ourselves with the means to conquer him.” Levy is much more careful than the Bush administration in providing a precise definition of democracy’s enemy so as to distance himself from the Samuel Huntington-inspired Clash of Civilizations theory. But for those who wholesale dismiss the war on terrorism, there is a faint but discernable echo of great ideological — if not religious — war in Levy’s thesis. At his best, Levy contextualizes his definition of militant Islam in terms of a certain connection to a morbid desire for death over social change. In the introduction to War, Evil, and the End of History, Levy writes:

I knew enough about Islam, in other words, to suspect that, at the very least, two Islams exist. The new war, if there had to be a war, would be waged between these two Islams as well as between Islam and the West; and that to accept [Huntington’s] idea of an Islam entirely set against a Satanized West was truly too handsome a gift to give bin Laden and those who resemble him, and for whom he was perhaps only the front man.

Levy goes on to describe the role of an ahistorical interpretation of Jihad that has been politically hijacked by leaders such as Osama bin Laden. It is along these lines Levy is willing to locate his call to action.

However, it is such a call to action that creates Levy’s diametrically opposed theoretical positions: Heroic anti-fascist war and the anti-polemical commitment to witness, which are an aporia that not even Levy’s powers of literary flare and imagination can hide and at times clearly he does not want to hide. What is important about this book and its relationship to the current genocide in Sudan is the very schizophrenic impulse toward these two impossible goals that so aptly demonstrates the current ambivalence of the Left (particularly the anti-empire Left). Those of us who are troubled by the forgotten wars of Darfur and elsewhere are being torn in two by the increasing inconsistency and inadequacy of our anti-imperialist protest against intervention and the visceral call to respond to the Others who must not remain faceless and nameless.

While the Right’s ability to distract us from the greater global atrocities or “international escapades” under the preemptive doctrine can be addressed, what do we do once we possess the knowledge of who must be opposed and who must be joined in opposition? It is the transition away from the naïve politics of global retreat and non-intervention that poses one of the greatest challenges to the possibility of a global struggle for social justice. After all, the removal of the Bushes of the world without the removal of the bin Ladens from the helm of global agenda setting would simply shift the balance from one fatal ideology to another. Given the history of inaction on the part of the Democrats, including Kerry and John Edwards, even the hope of a new administration in the White House will do little to alter the trajectory of the conflict in Sudan and elsewhere. Change must happen domestically, but it must be real change, backed by a committed strategy to oppose the leaders that drive the other side of the conflict.

While Levy does an impressive job of describing the failures of current thinking on global conflict at the level of resolving the Left’s ambivalence, he offers very little. What seems overstated in his account of Sudan is the degree to which the “damned” are cut off from the knowledge of their own circumstances. Levy’s diagnosis of a loss of history may go too far, stripping those whom suffer of the human agency to resist and organize politically. This not only runs contrary to what Levy most admires about Foucault’s dictum, “Where there is power, there is resistance.” It also diminishes the capacity for cooperation between those in the West and the forgotten wars to work together against oppressive governments.

Another kind of European exceptionalism seeps in whereby only those in history can have the means to revolt. I do not believe this is what Levy intends, but intellectually, this is what the reader is left with. Contrary to Levy’s descriptions of hapless suffering, the Human Rights Watch report that seems to confirm many of Levy’s accounts of Sudan displays a slightly different picture of those who are the objects of genocide. In a pointedly self- and globally aware statement, one of the Nuer chiefs, Isaac Magok, responded caustically to a Human Rights Watch researcher in August 1999:

You are from America. We want you to see the location [in the fishing camp where we live]. I have seen on TV a village bombed in Kosovo … The U.N. brought camps and cooked food and then in little time everyone was laughing. Why do they not do the same to us?  Because we are black?  What is wrong with them?  You will see our conditions and then we will talk to you.

If our task, according to Levy, is to return to politics and escape the husbandry of humanitarian assistance, we must listen to the voices of those who suffer and insist on their rebellion. What is lost at times in the narratives contained by War, Evil, and the End of History is an attempt to find such political forces to align with seeing all acts of rebellions within the “black holes” of the planet as historically doomed. This seems to repeat the very forgetting of politics that Levy condemns. It forgets the politics outside the European tradition with which Levy so strongly identifies.

As this article goes to press, the Bush administration is supporting a U.N. envoy to Sudan. This envoy is predominantly an observation group. The question remains: How much more do we need to know? This is, of course, the paradox of Levy’s will to observe. To give names and faces to the Other is of little consequence to any except those who watch and survive at a safe distance. The near-heroic chances being taken by Levy and other journalists willing to break through what New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof calls the “information quarantine” of Darfur must be reinforced by more than food and clean water. Otherwise, those in the profession of watching will bear a special kind of damnation.

Like the angels of Wim Wenders’ classic 1987 film Wings of Desire, we will suffer a fate “to watch, record, and testify,” never knowing life or those that lived. To know and not respond with the full capacity of what we are capable as people is to sacrifice the very significance of our unique existence. The tempering of our commitment on the basis of national interest and pragmatic economic calculations reduces us to national packs of clever animals. The name of humanity and what it represents must carry a much greater weight than that of a charitable pastime.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“Sudan: Janjaweed Camps Still Active”
URL:  http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/08/27/darfur9268.htm

“Crisis in Darfur”
URL:  http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=africa&c=darfur

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

War, Evil, and the End of History by Bernard-Henri Levy
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0971865957

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0060541644

“

Jairus

(Courtesy of Random House)

Man [sic] at his [sic] best, when he’s [sic] set in all the muck and confusion of life and continues to struggle for his [sic] ideals, is near sublime …

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In response to the September 11 attacks, the figure of the hero has returned to all reaches of the political and intellectual spectrum. First canonized in the images of firefighters and New York cops, the post-9/11 hero has found its way into every varied aspect of the war on terror and even its opposition.

The conservative celebration of war heroes detailed in books like Senator John McCain’s Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life are mirrored in the volumes produced by leftist intellectuals and cultural critics. While heroism is a theme expected from former prisoner of war McCain, the left reclamation of heroic violence is more notable. Neo-Lacanians, such as Alenka Zupancic, and most commonly in non-academic circles, Slavoj Zizek, have entered the recent debate over ethics with a zeal for violent sacrifice that has been dismissed by many American leftists for being outdated and counterproductive because of its Leninist references.

Outdated or not, this rebellious work has found its way into everything from the Abercrombie & Fitch Fall Catalog to the publication Foreign Policy. Despite antagonism toward this scholarship as Leninist, Zupancic and Zizek are much more Kantian.

The fusion of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and German Idealist Immanuel Kant has developed into an ethical system that could only be called pathological deontology. In Zizek’s 9/11 treatise Welcome to the Desert of The Real, what he finds most admirable in the individuals that flew their planes into the Twin Towers was the undeniable courage to die for a cause (even if, as Zizek explicitly emphasizes, the cause was detestable).

In subsequent work on the subject, Zizek has described what he calls the ethical ‘Act’ as those choices that put the individual at significant risk, what he borrows from Sigmund Freud as being ‘beyond the reality principle,’ or quite literally suicidal. Drawing almost exclusively from pop culture, a stylistic choice that has made him infamous and highly sought after, Zizek isolates films like David Fincher’s Fight Club and other films that contain characters willing to mutilate themselves or even murder those that they love in the name of some ‘Thing’ that is ethical.

What Zizek and others drawing from psychoanalysis are not able to do is define or even hint at what this ethical ‘Thing’ is. A sort of tautology develops where by what is ethical is what you are willing to die for and what you are willing to die for is ethical.

This theoretical circularity not withstanding, it is easy to imagine the thrill of this kind of ethical action being romanticized and redeployed for nefarious purposes. Is not the Halliburton contractor who is so ‘committed’ to the American way of commerce and economic development that he is willing to risk his life rebuilding Iraq; no cost to themselves or others is too high — the very same ethical commitment ‘beyond the reality principle’ that Zizek and others champion?  

These rhetorical tactics have continuously circulated between the White House and those ‘private’ individuals involved in Iraqi reconstruction, calling into question how radical this system of ethics could possibly be. Even former counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke is enamored with bravery, mentioning in his tell-all book Against All Enemies that he disagreed with Bush’s choice to use the term ‘coward’ to describe the 9/11 bombers during his first September 11 address from Barksdale Air Force base.

Traditionally leftist public intellectual Christopher Hitchens has also championed the war in Iraq as an opportunity for those committed to democracy and universal human rights to test the mettle of their convictions. According to Hitchens’ book, The Long Short War, any criticism of the war that does not support regime change and intervention is ethically indefensible.

What animates both sides of the aisle — intellectually, politically, or otherwise — is nostalgia for sacrifice that, well, ‘kicks ass.’ Predictably and not without reason, Noam Chomsky and other leftists committed to non-violence have pointed out how counterproductive any U.S.-led intervention is likely to be, and in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been so far. The imperialistic interests served by Bush’s use of metonymy when invoking ‘us as hero’ and ‘them as coward’ has not gone unnoticed.

As Arundhati Roy writes concerning the war in Iraq in her essay “Confronting Empire,” “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it.” For Roy and others, 9/11 and the Iraqi war represent a turning point for the left that must now reorient itself towards a complete overthrow of U.S.-led globalization.

What has developed from all of these disparate attempts to conjure an heroic ethical response is both a deadlock and a remarkable amount of agreement. Everyone seems to agree that there is a fight to be had, and violent or non-violent, it is definitely oppositional; the only question is whether to reinvigorate individuals to put it all on the line for democracy, anti-globalization, or American security in all of its forms — national security, economic security, food security, and even sexual security. In a more reflective response to the current fervor, philosopher Judith Butler asks in the preface to her new book The Precarious Life “… whether the experience of vulnerability and loss have to lead straight away to military violence and retribution … [and] what, politically, might be made of grief besides the call for war[?]”

Ralph Ellison (Courtesy of Random House)

Juneteenth as a moment for pause

The preacher’s job, his main job, Bliss, is to help folks find themselves and to keep reminding them to remember who they are. So you see, those pictures can go against our purposes. If they look at those shows too often they’ll get all mixed up with so many of those shadows that they’ll lose their way. They won’t know who they are is what I mean.

In a response to this sobering question, Ellison offers a radical democratic ethics that requires a different sense of heroism in Juneteenth. His is an ethics that emerges from a Christian tradition of forgiveness that does not start from the same necessity for retributive justice prefigured in forms of heroism emerging after 9/11. To my knowledge, forgiveness is not an option that any of the talking heads, left or right, have openly considered. There is a reason for this.

In The Precarious Life, Butler describes in detail the rigor with which public debate over 9/11 has been regulated through the personalized attack of anyone willing to “consider the grounds and causes of the current conflict.” But, even Butler’s much needed, as she says, return to Aeschylus as a model to refuse revenge and instead “take stock of how the world has become formed” is not willing to go the next step and consider forgiveness in the place of justice. Despite the serious questions she asks, there is still a disclaimer at the beginning of The Precarious Life, clarifying that “one can — and ought to — abhor the attacks on ethical grounds (and enumerate those grounds).”

Without dismissing the ‘right’ to condemn the events of September 11, 2001, or the importance of debating military intervention, to take seriously Juneteenth is to ask what is truly taboo: Should we forgive those whom have so gravely injured us, and should that forgiveness come at the expense of safety and our desire for justice? It is this question which Ellison explores through the character of A.Z. Hickman and his relationship to his lost son, Bliss.

Juneteenth is a novel about things that can only be forgotten for so long. The return of a repressed history is both the site for the novel’s most important conflict, an internal battle for identity and security, and its most important relationship, an adopted child and a ‘least likely’ father’s attempt to bridge the racial gap. The characters of Juneteenth are caught between the apparent freedom of American individualism as described in the reoccurring quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the ‘servitude’ of history described by T.S. Elliot at the beginning of the novel.

Taking its name from the commemoration of emancipation that is celebrated throughout black communities, Ellison’s work-in-progress novel charts an untimely critique of the current democratic order and the paucity of political options that Ellison did not live to experience but in may ways foresaw.  

The story of Juneteenth begins in the office of Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from an unnamed Northeastern state. A congregation of black Southern Baptists led by preacher A.Z. Hickman has made a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak to one of the most controversial men there. Mistaken as a group of protesters, the delegation is escorted out of the building. We come to find that the congregation is actually the surrogate family of Sunraider, who was once known by those who loved him as Bliss. Rebuked by Sunraider’s receptionist, the group goes to watch the senator deliver one of his infamous speeches. Before Hickman is able to make contact with his estranged son to warn him of a plot on his life, another man opens fire on the Senate floor.

The majority of the novel takes place in a series of flashbacks and bedside conversations between Hickman and Sunraider/Bliss at a hospital in the immediate aftermath of the gunshots. Mortally wounded, the senator is led by Hickman to confront his past, who he is, and who he has become.

As Ellison’s stream of consciousness style unfolds, we find three distinct chronological periods in the senator’s life: A distinctly black childhood spent as a preacher, an interim period of questions and running spent mostly as a conman filmmaker, and the internal investigations of his identity on his deathbed. In all three of the periods, Ellison returns to Hickman’s struggle to understand Bliss’s decision to leave the black community and Bliss’s own struggle to find peace in the fleeting moments of his life.

One of the earliest sources of conflict for Hickman and Bliss is the arrival of the moving picture to a small town they are preaching in. The initial teaser for this new magical process comes from Bliss’s friend and provocateur, aptly named Body. Body, who overhears a conversation between three white men about a box that can show moving pictures in the dark, comes to represent Bliss’s flesh, his earthly desires. In fact, even when Body attempts to turn their discussions toward other topics, Bliss brings the conversation back to the subject of this strange new technology. Driven to learn more and more about this device, Bliss begins to pester Hickman to take him to see the pictures.

Giving into Bliss’s persistence, Hickman ultimately takes him to the picture show. But as the reverend emphasizes, the purpose of their trip is not pure enjoyment; it is also an important educational experience. In a rendition of Jesus’s proclamation in Acts 17 about living in — but not of — the world, Hickman describes the importance of knowing temptation in order to empathize with the sinner. Ellison uses the film’s distant world of shadows and spectacle as a metaphor for the socio-political. Both in the spectacular political shows that Bliss’s alter-ego Senator Sunraider puts on to rally white racism and in Bliss’s personal loss of identity, the movies are a vehicle for Ellison to explore the alienation that so many feel towards their own self-image. What is at stake in Ellison’s critique of politics is the centrality of manipulation.

For Bliss, the first picture show becomes a traumatic reminder of his lost mother. Attempting to reground the young Bliss, Hickman reminds him, “They’re only shadows … They’re fun if you keep that in mind. They’re only dangerous if you believe in them …” Despite Hickman’s early warnings regarding the movie house and this second attempt to deny the power of the ‘shadows,’ Bliss becomes transfixed by the moving image. Hickman’s description of the film as only shadows speaks to Ellison’s difficult relationship to politics. In Hickman’s attempt to reflect upon the place Washington, D.C., the reader finds a tremendous disdain for the compromise inherent in political power. For Ellison, the safety of social power — whiteness — always comes at the sacrifice of the courageous fight for ‘Truth.’

This conflict plays out in Hickman’s reluctant, yet deep and abiding, faith in the memory of President Abraham Lincoln. Despite all of his failures and inconsistencies, Lincoln represents the true vision of democracy. Lincoln made the difficult decision to emancipate the slaves not because he had the moral purity or interest do so, but because it was right.

This romantic democratic vision occurs throughout Ellison’s work. In his essay entitled “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ellison describes that it is the ability to demand what is right in the face of civil war and insecurity that gives democracy its meaning. Ellison writes that what is lost in equating democracy with stability and security is “the need for that tragic knowledge which we try ceaselessly to evade: that the true subject of democracy is not material well being … Without the [pressure] of the Black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has ever threatened its existence from within.”

It is in this view of democracy that the current political order in all of its exclusion — whether it be the detainees at Guantanamo or the contract on Baghdad — becomes the true threat to freedom. The choice to become part of this system of compromise is the ethical significance of Bliss’s turn to whiteness and politics.

As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Bliss ran away repeatedly to hide in movie theaters until his final disappearance and reappearance in the grand theatre — Washington, D.C. In the theatrical performance of race-baiting, Bliss believes he has found the sense of belonging that drew him to the movies. Bliss explains in a fevered conflation of his theater experience and his turn to whiteness that both were a search for security in the safety of being powerful. What is at stake for Bliss is a feeling of belonging. The love of the African American community is not enough because to accept his blackness would require a life that he could not control. Here we find Bliss’s moral decline as a warning for what America can expect at the end of security and justice at all costs.

Through Hickman’s prodding and guided remembering, Bliss comes to realize that what he found in the safety of white authority was as illusory as the moving image:

So I said: What is the meaning of this arrangement of time, place and circumstance that flames and dampens murder in my heart? And what is this desire to identify with others, this need to extend myself and test my farfetched possibilities with only the agency of shadows? Merely shadows. All shadowy they promised me my mother and denied me solid life.

The knowledge that he made the wrong choice grips Bliss towards the end of the guided journey through his past, but it is not enough to redeem him. Instead, it drives Bliss further into delirium. Confronted by so much failure and deceit, he calls out in a crazed declaration (potentially internal monologue): “If I had only known that what I came to know about the shape of horror and the smell of pride — I say, HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET LOVE INTO POLITICS OR COMPASSION INTO HISTORY?”

The fall of Bliss appears to be a double failure. A failure of Hickman to produce the white insider who can lead on behalf of black interests and Bliss’s failure of character to accept the love and humanity Hickman bequeathed to him. However, Ellison discourages this reading of Bliss through Hickman’s perseverance regarding Bliss’s spiritual fate. In these bleak moments, Hickman reiterates the role of the preacher to try to help in any way and bring understanding because, as Hickman says, “what else is there?” What seems like resignation on the part of Hickman becomes the context for Ellison to describe what is truly sublime about Emerson’s doomed struggle through the muck.

Sacrifice and the unlikely heroics of forgiveness

A man [sic] has to live in order to have a reason for dying as well as have a reason to be reborn — because if you don’t you’re already dead anyway.

It is in the fading and seemingly last moments of Bliss’s life that Ellison is able to develop the complexity of his ethical position as it relates to how to live in American democracy. Although Ellison describes in his notes that “the mind becomes the real scene for action,” the more overtly political import cannot be discounted. As signified by Bliss’s quickly declining health, the question of the ‘Truth’ is urgent for Ellison. From the moment Bliss is shot in the beginning of the novel, the search for the ‘truth of what happened’ is described as having an immediacy that exceeds the eminent biological threats to Bliss’s fate. As Ellison’s notes in the appendix to the novel indicate, Bliss’s black experience comes to represent the “embodiment of American democratic promises” as a last chance to confront the traumatic history that runs just below the “shaky foundation” of the nation.

In Bliss, Ellison explores the universal potential of the black experience, and more importantly, the already shared experience of black suffering. The discussion of Bliss’s ‘racial origin’ unfolds in an unexpected way regarding his connection to blackness. In the first confrontation over Bliss’s origin, the assumption is that Bliss must be half black since, as one of the Church sisters puts it, “Half the devilment in this country caint be located on account of it’s somewhere in between black and white and covered up with bedclothes in the dark.” Initially, it seems it is Bliss’s blood that connects him to both worlds, but Ellison’s democratic vision is much more radical than that. Bliss’s miscegenated past is not at the level of biology (we discover later his identity has no truth in that it is completely unknown), but at the level of experience.  

Hickman rediscovers the senator’s blackness in his ‘look,’ something from Bliss’s younger days that still shows through. This epiphany of recognition comes to Hickman when he sees Bliss’s anguish as he tries to remember his past:

Now I understand: That look, that’s us! It’s not in the features but in what that look, those eyes, have to say about what it means to be a man who tries to live and struggle against all troubles of the world with but the naked heart and mind, and who finds them more necessary than all the power of wealth and great armies. Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us.

Distinct from most other accounts of race is the potential for sacrifice to transform one’s social, even racial, designation. For Ellison, as represented in Hickman’s personal exploration, the political potential of the black experience is not the possibility of justice but the potential of forgiveness. Ellison uses the endgame between Hickman and Bliss to elucidate the heroic potential of living in this state of sacrifice and marginality.

Ellison’s equation of truth and heroism sound remarkably similar, at least in form, to the Bush administration’s justifications for war. After all, what is the war on terrorism if not the rally of the U.S. populace behind the rhetoric to sacrifice our lives in the name of worldwide democracy? But what is markedly different here is the ethos of that commitment, what Ellison calls an ‘understated heroism.’ Rather than the triumphalist tenor of current U.S. military actions, Ellison’s hero, Hickman, carries the burden of a tragic fate. Through Hickman’s attempt to make ‘Truth’ out of Bliss’s demise, Ellison defines ethical individuals as those “who have had the power to stay awake and struggle.” However, unlike the U.S. drive to victory, Hickman’s struggle defines the value of living in terms of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘muck and confusion.’ Hickman gives up on certainty and redemption in favor of sacrifice and forgiveness.  

The most trying decision for Hickman is the moment he is first confronted by Bliss as a baby. The reader discovers at the end of the novel that Bliss was an offering on behalf of a white woman who wrongly accused Hickman’s brother of rape to explain her extramarital pregnancy. Hickman is filled with hate and revenge on behalf of his brother’s wrongful death and wants to kill both the mother and the unborn child, but something exceeds his desire for revenge. It is the moment when Hickman experiences something ‘more than himself’ that he vows both to raise Bliss in love and devote his life uncompromisingly to forgiveness. Given the cycle of revenge that drives the current conflicts throughout the globe, Ellison’s concept of the hero offers a very inviting — and at the same time humbling — critique of both left and right politics.

Butler makes a similar move in her development of an ethics that is in response to the call of the ‘Other.’ Relying heavily on the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Butler attempts to find her ethical horizon in a commitment to those who have been written out of the Iraqi conflict and other violent actions at home and abroad — in her words, those at the “limits of what we can know.” But to what end? It is in her goals that Butler can be distinguished from Ellison. Butler dedicates her book to “an attempt to break the cycle of violence and revenge” while Ellison simply finds freedom in the sacrifice of justice and security that comes with forgiveness.

What should be clear is that Ellison qua Hickman makes no promises about the success that such a struggle for the truth of compassion will produce. Instead, he redefines the value structure for success, returning to the notion of love that motivates the acceptance of Bliss. Ellison elevates the pursuit of truth beyond the continuation of life:

That kind of man [sic] loves the truth even more than he loves his life, or his wife, or his children, because he’s been designated and set aside to the hard tasks that have to be done. That kind of man will do what he sees as justice even if the earth yawns and swallows him down, and even then his deeds will survive and persist in the land forever.

Thus the ethical force of Hickman’s character is his ability to turn against revenge to the point that it destroys everything he holds dear, even allowing his son to turn against the people he loved and still returning to save him with his forgiveness. It is in this impossible pursuit that Ellison defines freedom. In the selected notes to the Vintage edition of Juneteenth Ellison writes, “This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be.”

In this commitment beyond life itself, Ellison would seem to swing toward the ‘pathological deontology’ of Zizek and others who call for sacrifice in the name of ethics. I would not argue that Zizek’s film examples or his historical examples of Jewish uprisings are devoid of ethical content, but they are quite different, at least in Zizek’s representation of these events, from the sacrificial act of forgiveness. The ‘understated’ view of Ellison’s hero militates against the leftists that are spoiling for a fight. Sacrifice in the character of Hickman is not grand or dramatic; it is grounded in humility.

In this way, Ellison’s ethics dissolve the opposition assumed by the spectrum of leftist strategies discussed earlier. Unlike the oppositional strategies of Zizek and others on both the left and the right, Ellison uses Hickman’s intimacy with Bliss to demonstrate the degree to which, in a sense, we are all invited to be ‘Negroes.’ Hickman reminds Bliss and the reader that what was offered was the option to turn against the manipulative institutions of white authority. Bliss literally had the opportunity to be black despite his obviously white appearance. This transformation was made possible because of Hickman’s decision to forgive Bliss and Bliss’s mother.  

It is hard not to see this as a broader invitation to all that read Juneteenth. What Ellison gives up in this formulation is any exclusive right to be black. It is, in a sense, the ultimate act of forgiveness and sacrifice: Those that have injured, white society, are invited to ‘live as if they were free.’ The possibility of justice or retribution is short-circuited by Ellison’s act of forgiveness because it is a form of forgiveness without expectation. Like the Christian tradition that informs Ellison’s ethics, it is an undeserved forgiveness.  

It would be easy to dismiss Ellison’s generosity on the grounds that it lets ‘the injurers’ off the hook. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would not accept Ellison’s forgiveness; it seems so easy. But an opportunity like this comes at a cost; living free requires the sacrifice of power and privilege, trading in safety for a meaningful life. Such a call becomes a new Juneteenth celebration.

The political ethos that comes from this appeal to a universal human trauma, or at least the ability to share that experience, harkens back to the closing words of Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man. Again, it seems Ellison pins his art, his raison de etre, to the ability ‘on some lower frequency to speak for you.’ Again, this is not a simple solution; in spite of Ellison’s recurrent universalism, we are still left with a question regarding Bliss’s fate: Is it too late? Has Ellison’s provocation, like Hickman, arrived to find a deaf audience that cannot or will not be warned?

Even the state of Bliss’s soul, so to speak, is unclear; the closing moments of the book tell of a ghastly machine that continues to run despite its bastard, irreconcilable parts and a fading, paralyzed Bliss unable to reach out for Hickman’s fading voice. I would like to believe that Hickman’s fidelity to being a preacher ‘remind[ed]’ Bliss to ‘remember’ who he was. But leaving this question open embodies freedom as Ellison defines it; the incompleteness of history serves also as the point of ethical departure; in this tension lies a vision of democracy in stark contrast to the legalism and fear that define the will for revenge at the heart of the current political landscape.

It is difficult to imagine people taking the idea of forgiveness seriously in the context of 9/11 and the resulting obsession with national security, but at the same time, it is difficult to imagine the destruction that is continuing to occur if we were willing to commit ourselves to forgiveness above and beyond our own safety and security. A society without violence is as unlikely as a society without racism, but inevitability seems like a poor reason to not live like we are free. At the very least, it is a reason to seriously consider what Ellison’s work can contribute to the current search for new democratic strategies in an increasingly hostile nation.

Jairus