On Being a White Male, Part II

When friends learn that I'm writing (what will hopefully someday be) a book on American views of Africa, they often bring up the celebrated writer Barbara Kingsolver, author of a widely read novel set in Africa published in 1998, The Poisonwood Bible.  The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and, on the face of it, seems very  sensitive to black Africans, particularly those who lived in the Congo during and after independence.

The story features a patriarchal missionary father, his long-suffering wife, and their four very diverse daughters.  The father is a cardboard figure, the sort of rigidly domineering figure that so many white liberals imagine conservative male Christians to embody.  But black Africans from Prime Minister Lumumba on down are also described with little nuance.  They all--save for those corrupted by western imperialism--appear to be completely noble.

Of course one could argue that Kingsolver is performing a necessary corrective for Americans who grew up with images of morally perfect westerners, from Tarzan to Dr. Livingston, trying to straighten out savage black Africans.  And certainly the U.S. role in deposing and killing Lumumba and then supporting the brutalities of President Mobutu should be both exposed and excoriated.

But I have two sets of objections to Kingsolver's oversimplications.  First, they are distortions.  Many black Africans will tell you that western missionaries were often useful, even admirable, and Americans who set about telling Africans otherwise are often reprimanded.  Second, if missionaries were not simply evil, nor where black Africans simply saints.  Books like The Poisonwood Bible distort the nature of human nature and of evil.  Asserting or implying that evil can only flow from white or western sources is itself a form of racism, in part because it robs people of color of their full humanity and complexity.  Second, this conflation of evil with white males and innocence with black Africans can lead to a sort of paralysis.  Indeed, the lead character, Leah, seems to believe that she escape this dilemma by becoming black.

I have noticed that this desire on the part of liberal or radical white people to somehow change their color, their racial identify, is far from rare.  Next week I'll discuss why I think this desire commonly distracts white men, in particular, from the sobering work of doing something about the considerable damage we have wrought.

On Being a White Male: Part I

I was reading a very interesting piece yesterday on multi-cultural education that pointed out that the point of such education is often to celebrate people of color and white women (and perhaps people with disabilities or alternative sexualities) while castigating white men.  The author cited a teacher who summed up George Washington's life by dismissing him as a slave owner.  I also know a number of white males (and not a few white women, for that matter) who seem determined to somehow shed their racial identities through their grooming, clothing, religious practices, or what have you.

Of course growing up in rural Oregon in the 1960s all we learned in primary and junior high school were the wonderful achievements of white males..  But I fear the pendulum has swung the other way at times, and in ways that ironically end up celebrating and empowering white males even further.  So I'd like to talk about some of those examples and dynamics.

Let's start with George Washington.  Washington was a slave owner, and when some of his slaves tried to escape during and after the Revolution, he tried to get them back.  But he also freed his slaves upon his death and was troubled by the institution--which we must remember was widely accepted across the globe until the century in which he was born.  He also managed to keep together under very trying conditions the Continental Army, served as a powerful symbol of strength and unity as both the nation's leading general and first President, and set an extremely important precedent in refusing royal titles and stepping down from office voluntarily.

Washington had his flaws, even by the standards of his own day, and we should not repeat the mistakes of past generations by pretending otherwise.  But he was also an extremely influential and in many respects inspiring historical figure.  To dismiss him as nothing more than a racist slave owner strikes me as silly and sets up a sort of dichotomy in which white men are inevitably evil (and powerful) and every one else is good (and weak), a dichotomy that.both does violence to history and reality and robs all people of their complex humanity.

Next week I'll discuss how a popular American novelist distorts African history through her determination to escape the burden of whiteness.

Finding a Partner for Ghana Adult Literacy Program

In the past few weeks I've been e-mailing back and forth with Leonard Annan, the co-director of Adesua Ye, an adult-literacy program in Ghana.


Leonard is a student at Ashesi University, the distinguished liberal-arts college that asks its students to be creative problem solvers and to serve the broader community.  For Leonard and Sela Agbakpe, this meant working with adults who could not read and write English in the surrounding community.  These were people who could not help their children with their homework and who had to fight back feelings of shame to work with Adesua Ye.


Here is a short video that describes the progam, including some students who explain what a difference literacy has made in their lives.


Yo Ghana! is looking for an adult-literacy program in the Pacific Northwest so that Adesua Ye's students can share with friends here what breaking through to literacy has meant to them.


Please e-mail me (delmard@pdx.edu) if you are interested.
And if you are not already doing so, let's ponder how to join Leonard and Sela to improve the lives of people less fortunate than ourselves!  If these two very busy undergraduates can accomplish so much, what excuse do the rest of us have?!

"Emerging Evangelicals" and Loving Your Neighbor

I just read a very interesting article by anthropologist James S. Bielo, "Belief, Deconversion, and Authenticity among U.S. Emerging Evangelicals."  Bielo points out that a growing number of young evangelicals are moving out of churches that emphasize individual faith and having the right beliefs to instead embrace a Christianity that accepts fuzziness and ambiguity (after all, humans are limited in their capacity to know "truth") and stresses relationships with and service to others, not holding the proper doctrinal positions.


It seems to me, also, that this sort of Christianity is pragmatic inasmuch as it puts a premium on a faith that works.  As I understand it, religion in traditional societies is a tool rather than a sentiment, a way to adjust oneself to how the world is.  One pours libations to the ancestors not simply to demonstrate respect, to do them some sort of favor, but because to neglect them is to invite disaster, even retaliation.  If the great disaster of the Modern West is loneliness, our greatest demon self-preoccupation, then a faith that invites us to love our neighbors as ourselves is not simply a religious imperative, but a tall glass of water in an arid wasteland.

Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery

Sites of Slavery has a fascinating chapter on how West Africa's "slave castles" have been depicted by African American visual artists.  There is in fact a growing and rich scholarship on how places like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana or Goree Island in Senegal have assumed a large role in diaspora tourism.




I am particularly impressed by how Tillet identifies such sites as key points in how post-Civil Rights black Americans have established a sort of alternative American identity.  Tillet argues that the black experience of slavery and alienation is so threatening to white American mythology that black Americans must look outside that mythology to recapture a sense of their own history and heritage and to incorporate that history into the American experience.  Unlike black Americans such as W. E. B. and Shirley DuBois, Maya Angelou, Kwame Toure who moved to West Africa in the late 1950s and the 1960s hoping to stay, the great majority of modern arrivals are coming to capture a sense of their heritage and then return home, to the U.S.




The risk in using places like Cape Coast for this purpose, though, is that it can erase other, especially West African, histories.  Photographs such as Chester Higgins's stark, iconic image of a young black woman silhouetted against the "Door of No Return," with the Atlantic Ocean on the horizon, seeks to "recover the traumatic experiences of enslaved Africans . . . by removing any signs of life or contemporaneity," as Tillet puts it.  West Africa is commonly reduced to its role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. 




But this desire to claim slavery as at the heart of the American and African-American experience must occur overseas in part because American historical sites and mythology exclude it.

A Panther in Africa

What a wonderful video! Over the past couple of years I have been reading more and more accounts of black Americans in Africa--as well as watching my own son's reaction two years ago.  For many,
Africa has been imagined to be home.  It seldom turns out to be that simple, though many have made themselves at home there, sometimes for most of their lives.




That would seem to describe Pete O'Neal, who in 1970 left the U.S. for Africa to avoid arrest on "trumped up charges."  Members of the Black Panthers were in fact jailed and killed by U.S. authorities in startling and troubling numbers.  Tanzania offered something of a haven.




Yet O'Neal and the film about him are both decidedly unromantic.   He admits that he felt uneasy getting off the plane in Tanzania with his young wife: "we are in for a different kind of life."  Even as he moves farther from his African-American roots, he never feels that Tanzania is really home.  The culture is similar but different.  Malaria  takes "too much of a toll on our bodies."  He lacks the sort of friendships he used to have until a former Panther, finally released from prison, moves there.




O'Neal's secret seems to be his determination to care for others, the devotion that he and Mama Charlotte, his more easy-going spouse, have for people near and far.  The most moving section of the film comes when O'Neal reflects on the lives of people he destroyed as a young hustler in Kansas City, in his pre-Panther years.  Helping others in his middle and old age "is for my salvation."




Film Website

Why I Like to Tutor

Most every Thursday during the school year I spend two hours at St. Andrew Nativity School tutoring middle school students.  I always go thinking that I could get a lot of "my own" writing and reading done with that time.  I always leave happy that I came.


I like tutoring at St. Andrew for two reasons.


First, it is an amazing school.  The teachers are very committed to the students and have very high standards (in every respect) for them.  The students are from relatively low-income families and seem uniformly pleased to be at such a fine school.  They tend to work very hard and to take their studies very seriously.  It is a good place to be.


Second, I can tell that the students value my presence.  I am not a great tutor, and some days I do not even approach average.  Despite having written six books,  am often confused by rules of grammar and terms like "subordinate clause."  I do not always understand the steps that the students are expected to take in math.  Many of them know Catholic theology better than I do.  Sometimes the students have to explain the assignments to me.  But I can tell that my being there means something to them, in part because I insist on telling them the same thing that I try to tell my university students and my son: this is hard, but you can do it.  I think that they can tell that I respect them and care about them.


Much of life is complicated.  It is not always clear what the best, the ethical, the loving and wise thing to do is.  But it is very seldom a bad idea to spend time trying to help a child.  I strongly believe that this is one of our main reasons for existing.