Dream life
The long history of thinking race problems have been settled
TNotebook he comfortable reconciliation of American blacks and whites remains in the future, an alluring vision that sometimes feels forever unreachable. The recent deaths of young blacks at the hands of white police have stirred fresh rage and controversy. Meanwhile, artists and intellectuals have been examining race relations in history.
The passionately told triumph of Martin Luther King Jr. in the film Selma gives us a King who is not only brave and articulate but also shrewd. Two new TV documentaries, one about the atmosphere surrounding school integration in the 1950s and the other about the exclusion of black photographers and black subjects, also deal with the long gone but still vibrant past.
James Baldwin, a black writer of great brilliance, would approve. He argued that the past is not the only crucial subject of history. The power of history shapes us because we always carry its meaning within us: “History is literally present in all that we do.”
Danielle S. Allen, a star performer in American Denial (airing on PBS Feb. 23), makes that truth one of her specialties. She
These moments aren’t mere footnotes: they matter
went to England to do a PhD in classics at Cambridge and then came home to do a PhD in government at Harvard. She won a MacArthur fellowship and in 2007 at age 34 became the first black faculty member in the history of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Allen has a warmly expressive way of speaking, and a touch of well-handled irony. She’s one of a squad of academics in American Denial who look back 75 years to a time when white Americans believed complacently that race was no longer a major issue. They thought that “the Negro problem,” as it was called, was caused by Negroes — just as many Europeans thought “the Jewish problem” was the fault of the Jews.
In 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, mandating racial integration of the schools, seemed to whites a serious annoyance. Allen says, “we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered.”
Sometimes the academics interrupt the documentary to cite an anecdote. Allen tells us that someone called her “a n----r” when she was studying at Princeton. These moments aren’t mere footnotes: They matter. Allen understands that democracy grows in ordinary life. Her focus is on the way people routinely deal with each other, the “habit of citizenship.”
When Allen considers how this affects the United States as a whole, she argues that in a democracy national authority rests on moral ideas. When these ideas shift, when people change their opinion of what is legitimate or illegitimate, the ground beneath political institutions also shifts. Where there’s room for dissent, the people can alter the landscape of moral opinion. The producers of American
Denial wrap much of their busy, over-stuffed film around the story of Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist of social democratic views who was a member of the Swedish parliament and briefly a cabinet minister. In 1938 the Carnegie Foundation asked Myrdal to make a study of race in America. Helped by several black scholars, including Ralph Bunche, later an important figure in the UN, Myrdal produced a lengthy report, published in 1944 to wide praise as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.
Myrdal loved American principles but discovered that America didn’t live up to them. The American creed called for equality but blacks had nothing remotely like equality. The condition of blacks contradicted the idealism at the core of America’s belief in itself. “White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice.” He compared his findings to the status of women: “The study of women’s intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history. As in the case of the Negro, women themselves have often been brought to believe in their inferiority of endowment.”
Much quoted, Myrdal’s book made it difficult for whites to continue the fiction that America gave blacks “separate but equal” education. Myrdal helped change opinion. It’s often said that he influenced Brown v. Board of Education but the evidence is slim: The Supreme Court judgment limits Myrdal to a single footnote.
That film, and Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the
Emergence of a People (on PBS Feb. 16) are two contributions to Black History month. There’s a rueful line used by comedians to describe this recognition: “So they chose February for us. That’s typical. We got the shortest month and the coldest.” But it has nevertheless become, in both the U.S. and Canada, a way of stimulating discussion.
Watching Through a Lens Darkly recalled to me a startling moment in my personal history. In 1945, age 13, I visited Buffalo, N.Y., my first on-the-ground look at the U.S. I thought I knew something about America. I had seen many American movies and I was an enthusiastic reader of Life magazine. But all that had left me ignorant of the fact that about one in 10 Americans was black. I was astounded that in Buffalo black people were everywhere, doing all the work in restaurants, stores and movie theatres. In those days black images were more or less omitted from films and picture magazines. It was my first lesson in media bias.
In trying to tell a coherent story, the producers of Through a Lens
Darkly have been defeated by their material and perhaps by their own sense of fairness. Their research uncovered many black photographers, each of them worthy in some way, so the film gives them all a brief moment. No one, not even the superb Gordon Parks, becomes a star. The story rushes by too fast, and the director is too anxious to show us his fanciest tricks. Still, the film has its moments.
We hear the purpose articulated: “Freedom is tied to the ability to create our own image.” At one point a young voice says, “I didn’t want to be black.” Answering that, these photographers conducted a campaign to clarify and dignify the image of their fellow American blacks. Several of them explain they wanted to give their subjects a proper place in “the American family album.” And in this enterprise they were altogether successful.