now or never?
Good morning! It’s a gloomy day here in Brooklyn, but after not sleeping a wink Monday night, it was lovely to fill up on Indian food and then CRASH on my sofa late last night. It’s so comforting, waking up in your own home! I wasn’t sure I’d be able to teach on Tuesday; I got about 45 minutes of sleep during the night, and needed to play catch up because I missed class last week. Everything worked out–despite the VCR dying and refusing to surrender the tape I’d shoved in–and we started out with a conversation about the right time to teach students about lynching. Some of you may know that my “area of expertise” focuses on representations of racial violence, mostly in literature. That was my dissertation, at any rate, and because I teach a course on the subject, I sort of have a reputation for being “the lynching girl.” It’s not a subject I dwell on necessarily, but I am invested in representations of violence, and I’m fascinated by the subject of trauma–how does it manifest in literature? As an absence? A silence? do authors code trauma the way women writers in the 19th century had to veil their references to sex/sexual assault?
So yesterday my students had been asked to view the disturbing website Without Sanctuary, and I asked them to describe their experience looking at so many graphic postcards of lynching victims. I then asked them whether they had ever studied lynching in school. Almost always, students tell me they never learned about lynching or mob violence until they reached college. Yet almost all the students admit to seeing graphic images in middle school when they were introduced to the Holocaust. So what is it about lynching that makes it vanish from the curriculum? The fact that native whites are implicated, as opposed to the terrible Nazis “over there”? Without Sanctuary began as a touring exhibit of postcards, and when it was time to tour the South, some galleries balked–they feared visitors to the exhibit might recognize the members of the mob who surround the burnt, hanged, mutilated bodies–often laughing and pointing, reveling in the festive occasion made of another person’s horrific death. So when Attorney General Eric Holder calls Americans “cowards” on the issue of race, in some ways I have to agree. I’m more inclined to think many Americans are simply hypocrites–they’re all for teaching school children about 9/11 and the War on Terror, but only when “the terrorists” look like “someone else”–someone brown, foreign, from “over there.” My YA novel, A Wish After Midnight, opens with a brief mention of Timothy McVeigh (who was executed for blowing up the Oklahoma State Building), and concludes with the NYC Draft Riots of 1863 when white mobs rampaged through the city, murdering blacks (and attacking wealthy whites, Republicans). I sometimes wonder: did I have such a hard time finding a publisher because the novel figures American whites as terrorists? I recently found out about an exciting opportunity through Mosaic Literary Magazine; their umbrella organization, The Literary Freedom Project, will bring artists into the classroom to show secondary school educators how to incorporate literature into their Social Studies curriculum. If you’re in NYC and you’re interested, the deadline to apply is March 25. I think I’m going to propose a course that will teach educators how to broach the subject of mob violence. It’s not about violence as much as it’s about *justice* — mobs usurp the power of the courts, and though the criminal justice system hasn’t always worked for people of color, it’s still the right of every person accused of a crime. I think by the time a student reaches high school, s/he is ready to grapple with the complicated history of race relations in the US. Keeping the truth from our youth is NOT the way forward, that much I know…Julius Lester has a novel about a lynching (Guardian); I’d like to use that, and I’m also interested in Tonya Bolden’s non-fiction book, Maritcha. It was by reading the diary of Maritcha Lyons that I first learned of the NYC Draft Riots back in 1998; she was a teenage witness, and had to flee with her family when the mob turned on their home. So–lots to think about!
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