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In August 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead sat down to talk about race, culture, history, and the United States of America.
Mead, 68 years old, white, and liberal, was the most famous anthropologist on the planet. Baldwin, 46, black, living in exile in France, was one of the most prominent novelists of his era. The two had never met before. Their conversation, carried out in three long sessions over two long days, was tape recorded, transcribed, edited, and published as a book: A Rap on Race.
I’ve just finished A Rap on Race, and it’s a weird and fascinating document. The early pages read like a slightly demented graduate seminar, or the opening hours of the best first date ever — all jousting and empathy and audacity.
It bogs down later, as our heroes start getting irritated with each other. They gradually stop interpreting each others’ statements generously, start nitpicking, start interrupting. As they each struggle to synthesize what’s come before, they drift farther away from discussing lived experience and begin to retreat into metaphor and platitude.
But these are two very sharp people, and when they’re on, they’re on. The book exasperated some readers at the time, and subsequent academic assessments have dismantled many of its arguments, but I was mesmerized. Forty years after A Rap on Race was first published, I read it not as a weighty intervention in the world’s problems or as a serious addition to scholarly literature but as an artifact of its moment — a conversation between an aging white observer of world cultures and a middle-aged black expatriate, both struggling to make sense of their own histories and the country that was changing around them.
Here in 2011, we Americans have a pretty settled narrative of the civil rights era. What Betsy Ross and George Washington were to older generations, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are to us. We know the stories by heart, and we tell them again and again. But it’s easy to forget how short that era really was — just twelve years passed between Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus and the gunshot that took King’s life. Twelve years, four months, and three days.
Mead and Baldwin were both adults when Rosa Parks took her stand — Mead an acclaimed scholar, Baldwin an established author. Both came of age in the time of Jim Crow, and they met well after the movement that ended it had run its course.
And so the civil rights movement is not a central concern of their discussion. When Medgar Evers’ name comes up, it’s in the telling of a story about white supremacy’s stifling, deadly grip on the South. King is mentioned in passing, but Huey Newton (for instance) is a much more immediate presence.
This is a book, in other words, not about civil rights but about two subjects Americans don’t talk much about at all — what came before, and what came after. It’s a window into two eras in American history that we rarely contemplate today, two eras which together did more to construct the one we now live in than did the brief moment that separated them.
Over the course of this coming summer, I’m going to be posting a series of excerpts from A Rap on Race. Some of those passages I agree with, some I find ridiculous, some I’m not sure what to think about. Sometimes I’ll share my own thoughts in the original post, sometimes not. In all cases, I welcome questions and comments and disputation.
Hope you enjoy it all, and I hope you feel moved to bring the conversation forward. This should be fun.
A Republican-backed voter ID bill, one of the most stringent in the nation, passed Wisconsin’s State Assembly last night. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where it seems assured of passage.
Wisconsin is one of a long list of states considering similar legislation this year. Though voter fraud in Wisconsin is minimal — sources say only twenty votes were cast illegally in the state’s most recent election — the law would impose new barriers to voting among students, the elderly, and the poor, all of which are traditionally Democratic constituencies. At a time of massive budget cutbacks, moreover, the legislation carries an estimated $7 million pricetag.
One last-minute change to the legislation makes its aims crystal clear — though it was originally drafted to be implemented next spring, supporters rewrote it to take effect immediately on passage … just in time, in other words, to be deployed in the upcoming special elections which will decide the fate of state legislators targeted for recall over their recent budget votes.
I posted on Tuesday about three Canadian student activists who — to their surprise and everyone else’s — were elected to their nation’s parliament on Monday. Since then, reporting in the Canadian press have revealed that they are just three of six undergraduate students who won seats this week. At least half of the six are under twenty-one years old, and one, at nineteen, is the youngest Member of Parliament in Canada’s history.
All six of the students are members of Canada’s New Democratic Party, which until this year was a minor player in that country’s politics. But in polls leading up to this election the Liberals, Canada’s main center-left party, declined significantly, while the Quebec-nationalist Bloc Quebecois utterly collapsed. In the face of this party realignment many liberal Canadians, particularly in Quebec, unexpectedly cast their votes for the NDP. As a result, candidates who had been recruited as placeholders — many of whom did little or no campaigning — found themselves thrust into office.
Four of the six undergraduates who won election are students at Montreal’s McGill University:
Mylène Freeman is a past president of the McGill NDP club, graduating with a politics degree this spring. Freeman is from Ontario, but “fluently bilingual,” which is an important consideration in Quebec. She worked for the NDP in the country’s last national election in 2008, has run for Montreal city council in the past, and coordinates a program at McGill that is designed to encourage young women to volunteer in MPs offices.
Charmaine Borg, 20, is one of the co-presidents of the McGill NDP club this year, and has experience as a union organizer on campus. She was planning to study abroad in Mexico next semester, but will be moving to Ottawa instead.
Matthew Dubé, also 20, is Borg’s co-president at the McGill NDP club. He’s been keeping a low profile since the election.
Laurin Liu, who is 20 as well, is a second-year student, doing a joint degree in history and cultural studies. She spent election day volunteering in a district a few miles from her own, working to help re-elect one of the NDP’s few incumbent MPs. Liu is involved with student government and the campus radio station at McGill, and is now trying to figure out how to handle the logistics of legislating and constituent services — she doesn’t have a driver’s license or own a car.
Marie-Claude Morin is one of the two new students not enrolled at McGill, with one semester remaining until she graduates from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Like Dubé, she’s been mostly declining interviews this week.
The youngest of the six new student MPs is Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, who is doing a degree in applied political studies at the Université de Sherbrooke. Unlike many of his fellow winners, Dusseault stumped strenuously in his district, which is home to the university he attends. (He also reportedly made extensive use of Twitter in his campaign.) Desseault, a first-year student who co-founded the Université de Sherbrooke NDP club just months ago, calls himself a “political junkie” and had planned to spend the summer working at a local golf course if he didn’t win.
The six undergrads have been elected to four-year terms, with annual salaries of $157,000. I’m fascinated to see how their stories develop.
So that “I will not rejoice” quote that everyone reposted yesterday wasn’t from Martin Luther King, it turns out. Instead, it looks like it originated with a young woman in Pennsylvania who had no intention of hoaxing anyone. She just posted her own thoughts on Bin Laden’s death to Facebook, and the rest is internet history.
If your Twitter feed and Facebook page look anything like mine, yesterday various versions of the quote were all over both:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
The problem is, though, that King never said that. Or rather, he said the last three sentences, but not the first.
The bulk of the quote comes from a 1957 Christmas sermon of King’s, in the following context: “Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate…” But the beginning part, the “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy” part — the part that seems to apply most directly to the death of Bin Laden — appears nowhere in King’s writings, nor does it appear anywhere online before yesterday.
So where did it come from? The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who was the first to pick up on the quote’s falsity, tried and failed to track it down. About an hour ago, Drew Grant at Salon claimed that magician/objectivist/prankster Penn Jillette was the first one to post it to Twitter, saying he suspected that “Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking up on the sources.” (Penn quoted only the first sentence — the part that’s not King’s at all.)
Penn denies making anything up, though, and has in fact gone into full self-flagellation mode on Twitter. And by the time Grant posted, someone else had come forward with what looks to me like a more plausible explanation:
Late last night Jessica Dovey, a recent college grad from Pennsylvania, sent Penn a tweet saying that the quote was hers, posting a screenshot from her Facebook page explaining how the confusion started. Here’s what went down, she says.
Early yesterday afternoon she posted a status update to Facebook that read like this:
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” MLK jr
Note the location of the first quote mark. Dovey wrote the first sentence as an expression of her own views, appending the King quote as a further explanation.
I haven’t seen any evidence to back this claim up, and it’s possible it’s a hoax of its own — I just tweeted Dovey to ask her for more info — but my first reaction is that this seems completely plausible. The original quote, as McArdle pointed out, never quite rang true. In addition to the weird specificity, there’s an abruptness to the transition that clangs a little against the mind. But when you move the quote mark, that abruptness disappears, and the whole thing flows.
More generally, it’s my experience that a lot of these false facts start out just this way — not with a conscious attempt to propagate a lie, but with something that gets misquoted, misunderstood, or misrepresented entirely by accident. We’ve seen this happen with stories as different as the beer pong herpes scare of 2009 and the claim that only 4.7% of American blacks voted in the 2010 elections.
It’s hard to get a hoax right when you’re doing it on purpose, but it’s weirdly easy to get one going by accident.
studentactivism.net 
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