Reading Patricia J. Williams while Listening to Rabkin on Wells

Every now and then, the habit I have of engaging two or more books at once pays off. For the last few weeks, I've been reading Open House by Patricia J. Williams, and listening to a series of lectures on science fiction from the Teaching Company. I know Patricia Williams mainly through her articles in The Nation which, frankly, have not really said anything new to me in over a year. It is not even that I disagree with her, though of course sometimes I do; it is that her columns don't surprise me. Happily, this book, which is sort of a miscellany of family, personal, African American, and political history is full of surprises.

The best surprise is that Williams has not lost the ability to write strikingly good prose. Reading it, one gets the sense of that all of the startling metaphors and juxtapositions which the constraints of a bi weekly column squeeze out of her newsprint fair have found rich soil and taken root; at one point she even critiques one of her colleague’s reversion to a rationalistic legalese in a broad discussion of, among other things, extinction. Her descriptions of the food, night skies, cement stoops, mudpies, and fireflies of her Boston childhood enrich the writing, not by weaving a flannel shawl of nostalgia over the past, but by forcing the counterpoints to emerge between the past and the Manhattan concrete life she and her son inhabit.

She has a lot to say about the prospects for improving the human species. Towards the end, she declares that she doesn’t want to be sound like a luddite, but the history of biological “progress” –eugenics, Tuskegee experiments, etc.--has not been terribly good for black folks over the years. But that’s not what I particularly want to reference here.

One of her essays deal with the malleability of racial definition. Let me quote from a version of it she has posted on the web (http://ichrp.org/paper_files/112_w_06.pdf.)

In courts throughout the South, the borderline statuses of the “enslaved white” and the “passing black” were methodically examined, defined and reduced to stereotypes that endure to this day. Putatively enslaved whites came mostly from the ranks of “poor whites,”whom the common law generally disparaged as those with coarse features and bad manners; in contrast, “passing” blacks were those with “fine” features and deceptively good manners.



In the 1835 South Carolina case of State v. Cantey, the judge observed that, despite an ambiguous appearance, “it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.” And in an 1845 trial litigating the whiteness of one Sally Miller, a Louisiana judge cited Miller’s “moral power and weight, and influence. An influence, which I contend no one but a white woman could possibly raise up and control — an influence as inconsistent with the nature of an African, as it would be with the nature of a Yahoo.”

I encountered these remarkable legal opinions equating whiteness with manners and moral rectitude a day after hearing a speaker talking about the crisis in black, male education. Young black men have no role models. They think being a man is defined by how many women they’ve been with, that being a father means inseminating a woman, not raising a child. We need to teach them to hitch their pants up and take their hats off.

Of course I am summarizing, somewhat unfairly, a speaker who had more to say, and has an impressive record of accomplishment, but what I am NOT being unfair about is his linking of middle class manners (pants, hat) with morality. Young people and the very privileged (think Jenna and George W.) are often shielded from the fact that their actions have moral consequences for which they are responsible, and be painfully slow to learn that lesson. But taking your hat off in class is not even the first step in learning that process.

A day or two later, I listened to a lecture on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, from “Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind” by Eric Rabkin. The novel, you will recall, is about animals Dr. Moreau has changed into something like humans through his own biotechnology. Rabkin finds in the “Sayers of the Law” chapter, in which the transformed animals learn to act like men, an analogue for British colonial brainwashing of colonial subjects.

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is The Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

My point is that “manhood” – as in the case of the speaker I referred to earlier – is being defined by adherence to an arbitrary code of conduct, just as “whiteness” was in the cases Williams referred to.

I am not going to deny that there is economic value in learning and conforming to prevailing social mores just because they happen to be the prevailing and social mores. But I am going to deny that any substantial change for the better will ever come of that.