No chapter work this weekend
Too much taken up by editing and pox watch.
I read this on vacation and kept meaning to post it here so I could recycle the magazine. From February’s Atlantic Monthly, an interview with Bishop T. D. Jakes:
The cabbie was African, and in the course of a conversation the preacher, never one not to speak his mind, told the driver that he had never really connected with African people, that he just didn’t understand them, that they came across as arrogant. Turning to Jakes, the man said, “We are not arrogant. We are what you would have been had you not been slaves.”…”One thing you have to understand is that the African-American soul is wounded,” Jakes says. “And for us, slavery was like the molestation of a nationality of people. Molestation to me is a good metaphor because it speaks to the person in power taking advantage of the person who had no power. Even though that has passed, there is a scar that remains. And to expect our community to be over it is like molesting somebody from the time they’re five years old to when they’re fifteen and then meeting them at eighteen or twenty years old and saying, ‘You should be over it!’ Well, no. That’s part of my life, I can’t get over it.”
I read this about an hour after I got done listening to Caroline, or Change in its entierty and this is from my favorite review of that musical, The Closest of Strangers from The Nation:
These dynamics were addressed by an eloquent exchange that occurred, as it happens, in the same year in which Caroline, or Change is set. Looking askance (and perhaps a tad jealously) on Irving Howe’s high praise for Richard Wright, served up in Howe’s 1963 Dissent essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Ralph Ellison leveled a blunt blow: “The real guilt of such Jewish intellectuals,” he wrote in response, “lies in their facile, perhaps unconscious, but certainly unrealistic identification with what is called the ‘power structure.’ Negroes call that ‘passing for white.’”Jews passing for white? It’s an odd claim, but not an implausible one in certain contexts–1920s America, for instance, when xenophobia and nativism made racial lines sharper than ever, and Jews could not be certain where they stood with respect to the color line. In other contexts–like 1950s America, when Jews were suburb-bound, or contemporary America, now that they’re suburb-settled–the claim is harder to sustain. True, a longtime legacy of anti-Semitism has promoted Jewish identification with African-American causes and cultures (and, occasionally, with African-Americans themselves). Such is the identification embraced by little Noah Gellman, a Jew among Christian Southerners. The best number in the play is one in which the boy imagines himself “Noah Thibodeaux,” one of Caroline’s children: “Now I know what they talk about/at the Thibodeaux house, at suppertime,” he sings, visualizing his pocket change among Caroline’s kin. “Now they count their quarters and/they talk about me!” Noah longs for Caroline, but more than that, he longs for a world he imagines as the better opposite of his own: bleak but blithe, poor but playful. His are the “noble savage” fantasies of the privileged. Watching the Jewish boy shoop-shoop and doo-wop beside three black children evokes Jolson or Sophie Tucker singing of Mammy on the Broadway stage, offering an impressive version of someone else’s song. It’s the musical incarnation of a black-Jew partnership based on homage, envy, collaboration and theft–a partnership that indeed has one foot in truth.
Much to think about.
An elderly (Jewish) friend of my (Jewish) grandparents would sometime exclaim, upon some piece of good fortune, “Now this is living like White folks!”