Poetry Month

POETRY MONTH 2016

Like Black History Month and Women's History Month, Poetry Month sounds the alarm for annual rituals, or daily ones.  Thus, April is for

Remembering and forgetting. 

Hurting from ancient injuries and healing whenever possible.

Smelling  the skunk  of  blame and drinking palm wine of forgiveness. 

Tracking down the terrorists and seeking the saviors. 

Repeating rituals to confirm that we are motes of dust and grains of sand in an ever expanding universe of consciousness.

And what has poetry to do with this busyness?  A great deal as it circulates without need of invitation in society.  Nursery rhymes, adolescent "love" poems, ads that tax intelligence, and epics are all instances of a genre that defies consensual definition.  So too are song lyrics and deft words jammed against the air on the spurs of moments.  The uncertainty of knowing precisely what we are talking about, other than a process of talking about something, gives poetry a bad reputation among  literal-minded readers who question its legitimacy and a trumped-up name among folk who offer  hasty  praises and subjective prizes.  We are inundated with poetry.  Even people who say they do not read or listen to poetry are affected by it.  A to Z we have poetry.  Poetry, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, inhabits mundane  crevices of daily life.  Even the kind produced by produced by artificial imagination and mechanical intelligence. 

 As Peter Middleton puts it in Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), the making "of meaning by a poem is an intersubjective process extended over time, many individuals, and only ever partially available for cognitive reflection"(xv).   Middleton aptly identifies one of many reasons for contemporary anxiety about poetry in our cultures of reading. Under the influence of anxiety, the old chestnut that a poem shouldn't mean but be looks attractive.

"The value of reading contemporary poems, apart from the considerable pleasure of thinking about what they're up to," according to Don Share, the editor of Poetry, "is that it gets us to focus our attention and sharpen our critical skills, things we need more than ever in an age, like ours, of distraction."  And it does require special skill to become aware of what poetry may distract us from, especially when the word "protest" enters the conversation.

For example,  in June 2016 W. W. Norton will publish Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, edited by Phil Cushway and Michael Warr.  According to what is advertised on Amazon.com

This stunning work illuminates today’s black experience through the voices of our most transformative and powerful African American poets.

Included in this extraordinary volume are the poems of 43 of America’s most talented African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize–winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith, as well as the work of other luminaries such as Elizabeth Alexander, Ishmael Reed, and Sonia Sanchez. Included are poems such as “No Wound of Exit” by Patricia Smith, “We Are Not Responsible” by Harryette Mullen, and “Poem for My Father” by Quincy Troupe. Each is accompanied by a photograph of the poet along with a first-person biography. The anthology also contains personal essays on race such as “The Talk” by Jeannine Amber and works by Harry Belafonte, Amiri Baraka, and The Reverend Dr. William Barber II, architect of the Moral Mondays movement, as well as images and iconic political posters of the Black Lives Matter movement, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party. Taken together, Of Poetry and Protest gives voice to the current conversation about race in America while also providing historical and cultural context. It serves as an excellent introduction to African American poetry and is a must-have for every reader committed to social justice and racial harmony. 75 photographs.

 [[quoted verbatim from Amazon.com, March 26, 2016]]

There is less fanfare in what is posted on Amazon.com regarding Resisting Arrest: poems to stretch the sky (2016) edited by Tony Medina.

An anthology of poetry addressing violence against African-Americans featuring work by Jericho Brown, Kwame Dawes, Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Martin Espada, Ross Gay, Jaki Shelton Green, Joy Harjo, Patricia Spears Jones, Allison Joseph, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jamaal May, Thylias Moss, Marilyn Nelson, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, Frank X Walker, Afaa MIchael Weaver, Mark Doty and more. Edited by Tony Medina. Proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to the "Whitney M. Young Social Justice Scholarship" sponsored by The Greater Washington Urban League, Thursday Network. [[ quoted verbatim from Amazon.com, March 27, 2016]]

Although Medina's anthology is already in print and is conducting a conversation about violence and is contributing directly "to social justice and racial harmony" by donating money to a scholarship, it is likely that so-called mainstream media will say little about Resisting Arrest and a great deal about Of Poetry and Protest.  Medina's anthology illuminates today's American experience through the voices of our most transformative and powerful African American poets.  Of course, the pronoun "our" here does not refer to exactly  the same body of people (potential readers)  as does "our" in the W. W. Norton description.  The disconnection matters.  The discrepancy  constructed between protest and violence matters as much as does what can legitimately claim to be "an excellent introduction to African American poetry."  Does W. W. Norton wish for us to believe the excellence in the anthology edited by Cushway and Warr  is somehow of a different kind or degree than that embodied in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2013), edited by Charles Henry Rowell?

If you can smell the funk behind the hype, you can understand why Of Poetry and Protest , backed by big money, only makes IDEAL  what Resisting Arrest makes FACTUAL by its  transferring of proceeds of poetry to an admirable cause.  If your sense of smell is not so keen, listen to the YouTubed voice of  

Clint Smith III--"History Reconsidered"

https://youtu.be/V0QCKP7__7k

Smith will open your nose and allow you to smell what needs to be smelled during Poetry Month.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 27, 2016

PHBW BLOG

To a green body

TO A GREEN BODY

Your rotting reflection,

wow, we have to agree with?

You or we are racists?

This is why you find us defensive:

you tell us all that we have

isn't due to our own work,

but only because we are not green.

And perpetuating racism conservatively.

You think we are sick

with chlorophyll of millions

on our hands

and then wonder why

we are not photo-sympathetic with you.

We don't have a problem with plants.

Plants have a problem with farmers.

Most breadfruits today

(and yes I attend the secret meetings)

don't think about your race.

We don't make plots to hedge you,

oppress you.

You get extra points for nutrition and on CDC reports.

We don't complain.

You have green-only stuff,

while we have to include you

in everything or be branded.

We don't complain.

You blame us for every single blight

in your plasticity

and wonder why we don't agree.

We are racist for holding plants

responsible for morphology?

You are the problem.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 18, 2016

Excellence in the Delta

Excellence in the Delta

                I am grateful to the administrators,  faculty members and students of Mississippi Valley State University for inviting me to speak at its 2016 Honors Convocation.  My topic is excellence in the Delta. Although my brief remarks are addressed especially to  students who will receive awards for achievement, to  young women and men who have  demonstrated that they made good choices in using time and  innate intelligence to strengthen their minds, my words are directed to everyone.  Yes,   I salute students who have earned special distinctions.  I commend their use of common sense to acquire uncommon knowledge. Their achievement, however, is not isolated from the efforts of their unsung peers who are preparing  themselves for a future in a world that is increasingly assaulted by global changes and uncertainties.   Remember that whether we are distinguished or quite ordinary our lives and minds do matter.

                After many decades , I have come to know that  excellence is often invisible, beyond measure, and hidden in individual and collective efforts.  Thus, we can speak of excellence in the Mississippi Delta and at Mississippi Valley State University  as part of a process of thinking and doing, of work,  of the being in the world  that we call history.  If we do not grasp that we all play various roles in the production of what is to be commended in life, in the production of excellence, we  display a poverty of intelligence and imagination .

                I use the word "excellence" to include the obsolete, 14th century meaning of a favor or a kindness, because  in the State of Mississippi and in the Delta we are obligated to read both between and behind the lines.  Excellence has many dimensions.  The living text or spoken (oral)  history of the Delta that unfolds year after year provides an external reference for the invisible states of being that consistently give shape to the indigenous music of the Delta  --- the blues.  It is in the lives of people who stayed in the Delta, who did not or could not opt to participate in the Great Migration, that we discover excellence as kindness. And  perhaps that kindness is a triumph of determination and will power.   So, on this occasion,  I speak of the  ancestors and relatives of those being honored today, of  the people who lived the realities of  American Nightmare that is a corrective  for the myth of the American Dream.

                 In my poetic imagination, the nightmare is a man and a woman standing in the middle of July in the middle of a field , their bodies glistening with sweat.  They look at the land from 360 angles and declare "Lord, Lord, there is no end to it."  Then, they resume chopping.

                 The woman and the man who haunt  my imagination are the creators of lore and  wisdom that exceed what those of us in institutions of higher learning spend years to understand.  They have been written about in  Kim Lacy Rogers's  Life and Death in the Delta, John Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History, K. C. Morrison's Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Insider Agitator, Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, and hundreds of books about the peculiar history of the State of Mississippi and its Delta.  The sacrifices, suffering, and moments of joy the woman and the man endured have been partially documented.  It is our obligation to  continue documentation and to continue remembering.  What we must research, speak and write about again and again, and transmit to a future  is the man and the woman saying "Lord, Lord, there is no end to it."  They did not define "it." They figured we would be savvy enough to figure that out for ourselves.  What I want Mississippi Valley State students to never forget is this: in their defiance of every ignoble effort to break and dehumanize them , the man and the woman illuminated what excellence in the Delta is in actuality; it is  the excellence of common sense and  will power.

I shall draw attention to the power of the will by noting a few facts about the life of

A WOMAN BRAVE AND BRILLIANT

Dr. Lula C. “L.C.” Dorsey, December 17, 1938-August 21, 2013

She rose from the spirit-murdering poverty of Mississippi Delta plantations to spirit-giving national service by way of appointments from Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and William Clinton.  She never finished high school.  She earned a Doctorate in Social Work from Howard University.  Although she had purposeful experiences in South Africa, Israel, India, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China, she was primarily a mother of six children and a cultural worker who stayed at home in Mississippi.

She dedicated energy to improving health care and human rights in the Mississippi Delta.  She had the courage and genius to effect crucial prison reform at Parchman, one of the most notorious penitentiaries in America.

In special ways, her life was a response to the question Margaret Walker posed in the poem “Lineage.”

My grandmothers were strong.

Why am I not as they?

The life of L. C. Dorsey replied: My grandmothers were strong, and I am just like them.

In the rare chapbook Mississippi Earthworks (1982), an anthology of the Jackson Actors/Writers Workshop, Dorsey published “The Hunters/Executioners.”  The voice in her poem is that of a woman who offered “no apologies for the events that brought her /here to speak of love and determination.”  Her listeners  ---lawyers, professors and learned folk, fathers, hunters and men ---cried.  The speaker did not cry as she sketched a question of existential irony ---

And when she finished speaking

everyone knew why

this woman did not cry

for her tear well had run dry

as she had pondered this question many

times before

and was desperately trying to understand

the laws of God and man

that would let a bird escape death through

flight

and a rabbit to out run death on the ground

while her sons could neither run or fly

and until she found an answer

she didn’t have time to cry.

Brave people do not cry. They ask diamond-hard questions.  They think. They act.

Dr. L. C. Dorsey is mentioned in a single sentence as one of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s friends in John

Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994):

During her last days she felt abandoned by all but a few old friends, movement colleagues like Owen Brooks, Charles McLaurin, June Johnson, and L. C. Dorsey, a woman who shared Mrs. Hamer’s background as a sharecropper and who, inspired by Mrs. Hamer’s example, became active in the struggle in the mid-1960s. (433)

Dr. Dorsey’s personality and voice emerged more vividly from Tom Dent’s Southern Journey: A Return to

the Civil Rights Movement (1997).  Dent asked “But what can we do to change some of this [rapid loss of

hard-won gains in the Delta]?”  Her answer was

All I can see…is that our salvation has to come from looking back at what we’ve done in the past that worked.  We’ve got to do something for ourselves; those of us who see what’s happening have to take more initiative.  For one thing, we have to put money back into the black community.  And we’ve got to do a better job with the education of our youngsters, both in and out of the public schools. (368)

In Kim Lacy Rogers’s Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and

Social Change (2006), Dr. Dorsey’s importance as an agent of change in Mississippi is quite strongly

projected in what is quoted from interviews Owen Brooks and I conducted on June 21, 1996 and Brooks,

Rogers, and I conducted on July 18, 1997.

Dr. Dorsey’s accomplishments, her gifts to humanity, have been partially documented. There is more to be remembered, especially the standards she set for the women and the men  who would speak truth in the United States of America.  Future generations can document her achievements more fully.  They and we can give honor and respect by trying to be as brave, brilliant, and strong as she was. It is my belief that MVSU students know as much, whether they speak out loud or meditate in silence.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Distinguished Honorary Professor (2015-2017), Central China Normal University

To trump or not to trump

To trump or not to trump

Many people would sleep better at night if Donald Trump were a cartoon character in an Aaron McGruder film.  To paraphrase Ralph Ellison, Trump isn’t one of our ectoplasms; he is a human being of substance, of flesh, bone, and liquids --- and he might even be said to possess a mind.  He is blond, loud, and militant in giving American flavor to a wonderful Middle English document, Ayenbite of Inwit (1340), a perfect mirror for the white-faced conscience.  Trump is an embarrassing gift to contemporary politics.  He is the voice that asks:  Why did I happen , and how does your outrage and your silence give substance to my shadow?

Whether they are well-educated or poorly-educated, obscenely wealthy or abjectly poor, American citizens follow instinct, custom,  perverse desires, and common sense as they gaze upon and listen to the sound bites of the Donald.  No politician in recent memory has been quite as inspiring as he is.  Thanks to him, many people have taken to purchasing weapons and ammunition and to rereading such classic texts as Democracy in America, Candide, Mein Kaumpf, and the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Fascism is back in fashion, along with Leo Strauss, Karl Rove,  Machiavelli,  Henry Kissinger and the romantic realism of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand).   And no one worries overmuch that, according to intelligence from the Southern Poverty Law Center, we have 892 active hate groups and 998 antigovernment groups in the United States.  It would not do for the world to think the greatest country on the planet came up short in manufacturing terrorism. The great fear is that one who says Ave Trump rather than Heil Trump is politically incorrect. Or is it the other way around?  It is difficult to say.

Like Facebook, Trump is a universal friend.  He has a surplus of fury and sound.  He signifies ad infinitum on the dread and impotence of the proverbial average American voter.  Should the American democratic experiment come to an abrupt halt in November -----and I dare you to say it can't happen, we have the option of chewing bullets and drinking James Warren "Jim" Jones  Kool Aid in our self-fashioned temples. But that's not our only option.

Before resorting to bloodshed and cheap drinks, or Arkansas barbeque with Vermont syrup, free will  and our nation's frayed racial contract do allow us remember that the love of power and money is the only God that many billionaires opt to worship. And those billionaires clone their imaginations without a scintilla of guilt.  We can still recall that a trump is a playing card elevated above its normal rank in trick-taking games and that a trump, by virtue of metaphor, can be a person, a weapon, or the starting of a chain of events.

  It is meaningful to reconsider  how Michael Polanyi answered his rhetorical question --Are we to subscribe then to a theory of knowledge which allows the shaping of knowledge to depend on such ephemeral and parochial impulses? ---in The Study of Man (1958). The impulses Polanyi had in mind were moral and civic responsibilities, the shading of those responsibilities "into political obligations, and how these in their turn form part of the established institutional framework, or else are merely the expression of political partisanship" (42).  Polanyi's answer was quintessentially British:

Surely, a judgment determined by the outcome of a struggle for power and profit cannot be accepted as authentic; as some point the acceptance of moral responsibility for the shaping of our knowledge of man will inevitably turn into an acceptance of bias, prejudice and corruption.  Personal knowledge, as established by a responsible decision of the knower, degenerates here into a mere caricature of itself (42-43).

Why, we must ask, did it take us fifty-eight years to register the shock of recognition?  Are American voters retarded black holes?  The answer pivots on whether you decide to trump or not to trump.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 3, 2016

 

Ramcat Reads #9

Ramcat Reads #9              February 22, 20167

 

 

Lee, Steven S.  The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution.  New York: Columbia University Press,  2015.

Groundbreaking in its exposing of the abject poverty of the white/black binary,  Lee's study of aesthetics and politics outlines new directions for inquiry about which cultures are giving palpable shape to which kinds of revolution.  The new territory to be examined , as Lee keenly recognizes, may demand that we redefine "avant-garde" in African and Asian terms and relegate the pompous West to a subaltern position in our tentative conclusions about what world revolution entails.

 

Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

 The phrase "how X changed America" is cliché-code for "this book will serve well as a smokescreen for bloody flaws in the constitution and evolving character of the United States of America ."  This is not to imply that books having the phrase in their subtitles are themselves flawed.  On the contrary, many of them are damned good.  But we must not be taken in by the rhetorical gestures of mainstream publishers to assure readers that the process of change merits great praise.

 In the case of Michaeli's The Defender, it is apt to say the book is meticulous, necessary, and rewarding for people who have the discipline to read more than a tweet.  After reading 534 well-written pages, it is rewarding to read Michaeli's crowning assertion: "Working at The Defender allowed me to see the truth about America, that 'race' is a pernicious lie that permeates our laws and customs, revived in each generation by entrenched interests that threaten to undermine the entire national enterprise, just as it is challenged in each generation by a courageous few who believe that this nation can truly become a bastion of justice and equality" (535).

The Defender did not change America. It was one of many uses of African American literacy in our endless war with forms of dehumanization in our nation.  Let us give due credit to Michaeli for constructing a history which can retard  the velocity of disremembering.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Hawthorne and Trump

Hawthorne and Trump

 

                Few people read Nathaniel Hawthorne's first novel, the short romance Fanshawe (1828) in 2016.  However  melodramatic  and thin the book is, it is a key to problems treated in Hawthorne's later  fiction and to Donald Trump's  whiteness.  Early American literature blackens the eyes and allows contemporary readers to see better.

                Henry James noted that Hawthorne was not pleased with this early work, assigned it to his boyish period, and eventually destroyed most copies of the first and only edition.  Hawthorne's technical skills matured and reached perfection in his later works, but the themes introduced in Fanshawe recurred throughout his career and still resonate.  Such critics as Carl Bode and Millicent Bell made modest claims about the romance.

                In a 1950 issue of New England Quarterly, Bode asserted the book "makes the earliest announcement of one of his greatest themes: that man must not cut himself off from man," and twelve years later Bell suggested the theme was connected with Hawthorne's problem of justifying the artist's way of life, because "art…is an isolating occupation, which destroys the capacity for normal happiness."  Scholars worked slowly in the old days and were  more forthcoming about the weaknesses of art , and truly great artists did not rush to transform garbage into pabulum.

                Read attentively, Fanshawe reveals much about Donald Trump. The protagonist Fanshawe is a prototype for such later  Hawthorne characters as Dimmesdale, Aylmer, Holgrave, and Kenyon;  Butler, the villain, seems to foreshadow Westervelt and the sinister Capuchin monk.  The hidden gems in the romance are two archetypal patterns:  1) a basic triadic relationship and 2) woman as a tempering force capable of reinstating the isolated male in the magnetic chain of humanity.  These patterns fit Trump to a "T."  The more he speaks from the three sides of his mouth, the more he reveals his being in need of a woman's touch. The patterns mark the Trump discourse.

                The triadic relationship in Fanshawe involves Fanshawe as the isolated scholar, Ellen Langton, and Edward Walcott.  Fanshawe has strong affections for Ellen, but his dedication to the pursuit of knowledge is stronger than his ability to love.  He cannot give of himself as freely as does his fellow student Edward.  He rejects Ellen's love:

No, Ellen, we must part now and forever.  Your life will be long and happy.  Mine will be short….Think that you scattered bright dreams around my pathway, --  an ideal happiness, that you would have sacrificed your own to realize.

To make Ellen a victim in a marriage the way he is a victim in his studies (Fanshawe mentions his studies have consumed the strength of his heart) would be a greater sin than rejection.  Had Fanshawe had the strength to accept Ellen, she would have been his guide to salvation:

Will it not be happiness to form the tie that shall connect you to the world? to be your guide…to the quiet paths from which your proud and lonely thoughts have estranged you?

Fanshawe is never united with normal humanity, nor is it probable that Trump shall be so linked.  Fanshawe dies unfit for this world.  Four years later, Edward, disavowing his passions and pursuits, marries Ellen.

                Hawthorne sprinkled similar themes and structures in The Blithedale Romance, The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, The House of Seven Gables, and several of his short tales.  Two triadic clusters operate in The Blithedale Romance:  1) Zenobia, Coverdale and Hollingsworth and 2) Priscilla, Coverdale, and Hollingsworth (if the last sentence of the novel is reliable).   The poet Coverdale is incapable of personal  involvement with the problems of other characters until Zenobia's suicide brings a shock of recognition.  Only then can he confess his love for Priscilla.  Likewise, Hollingsworth is blind to his error until in death Zenobia shows him what he must reform.   Like Fanshawe and Walcott, he and Hollingsworth are rivals, but Hawthorne was no longer the boyish author, and he recognized the efficacy in a division of labor.  Woman must be split into light (Priscilla) and dark (Zenobia) in order to normalize the men.  How white of Hawthorne to arrive at such wisdom; how white of Trump to realize that one wife is not sufficient.

                Just as Hawthorne used general qualities of Fanshawe the scholar-artist-idealist in creating several  his male characters, Trump uses the qualities of the quintessential  politician-pragmatist to create himself.  A description of Fanshawe in his chamber resembles a description of a future Trump in his penthouse:

He called up in review the years, that, even at his early age, he had spent in solitary study, in conversation  with the dead, while he had scorned to mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives.  He asked himself to what purpose was all this destructive labor, and where was the happiness of superior knowledge.  He had climbed but a few steps of a ladder that reached to infinity: he had thrown away his life in discovering, that, after a thousand such lives, he should still know comparatively nothing.

It is only by virtue of triple-talk and postmodern ironies that the analogy between Fanshawe and Trump remains intact. As far as we know from public evidence, Trump has soaked in the living world and fully enjoys the taste of money, and only a mesmeric eye permits us to see any kinship with Fanshawe.  But Hawthorne has long been a mesmeric eye in American literature, and through his eye we see the odd value of an adjusted  question from Millicent Bell:  Is not the obsessive quest…possibly dehumanizing, even sinful, since apparently it leads to an atrophy of the functions of affection and social responsibility?

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

February 18, 2016

Blog 2.13.16

 First Race. Then Erase.

 

It is instructive  to read Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.'s  Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown, 2016) and to follow-up by asking what most distinguishes  it from Ta'Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015). Both books focus on hot topics. There is a casual echo of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) in Glaude's title, and Coates's title absorbs the title of Richard Wright's powerful, accomplished poem "Between the World and Me."  Both Coates and Glaude use autobiographical strategies to diagnose American ailments and pathologies, and both write as fathers who are deeply concerned about the futures their sons are condemned to live.  They are aware the peculiar history of the United States of America assigns stereotyped roles to its citizens, roles that we accept, reject, or go into exile to escape.  They know also that our nation is a republic not a democracy, that a racial contract occupies the space where a transparent social contact should exist, and that asking Americans to make full disclosure about anything is  folly. What most distinguishes the two books is how the writers use language to inform readers about  our nation's political theatre.

If environmental theories of language development were credible, it would be easy to surmise that Coates's language is rooted in the hard, urban dirt of Baltimore, Maryland whereas Glaude's language germinated in the organic soil of Moss Point, Mississippi.  Environment, however, gives us no more than shallow information about how we speak and write.  Consider that Coates's language (stylistically consistent with his prose in The Beautiful Struggle,  2008) is to Glaude's what a watercolor is to an oil painting.

 Given that Glaude and I both spent our early years in Moss Point, ideas about the paradoxes of segregated environments are hard to divorce from what I will myself to hear in his writing.  I read Democracy in Black with a prejudice of Southern associations which I can't employ in reading Between the World and Me.  Certain assumptions that are taken for granted in urban communication escape my notice.   Moss Point was semi-rural and down South, and things there were spelled out more clearly than they were in the near-North of Baltimore.  The criteria for white hatred and black resentment were pretty damned plain.  Despite his having become an esteemed American scholar, Glaude has not forgot that common sense  does have virtues we ought not abandon. He puts what Jerome Bruner designated folk psychology to good use.

 There is a grain of accuracy, no doubt,  in Toni Morrison's proclaiming that Coates's language is "visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive," but there is greater utility in finding  Glaude's language to be forensic, existentially affirmative, and reassuringly pragmatic.  For many readers, Coates may have the moral charm of a 21st century James Baldwin, and that is a good thing for readers who live  in the underground of the colorblind or in the gated community of whiteness.  Nostalgia for Baldwin is doing well in the marketplace.  Glaude, on the other hand, has mastered the complex simplicity that Richard Wright cultivated,  and he uses it appropriately to give eyesight to the blind and to those who suspect that democracy is too often a cruel and endless dream. The market undervalues such unsweetened  honesty.  Coates's language is smart, hip, and engaging, but it  conceals an absence of  the gritty discipline Glaude has in reading political mindscapes and exposing  how the concept of race has enslaved all Americans from  1776 to the present.  

 Glaude does not turn his back on  redemption, but he is aware that having a Kenyan-American President is neither promise nor  proof of salvation. While readers who have no memories of what the 1950s were in America  (for which Mississippi was and still is an apt metaphor) might be mesmerized by Coates's cool prose in The Beautiful Struggle (2008) or in his acclaimed June 2014  Atlantic  article on "Reparations,"  older readers in Moss Point and other Mississippi-flavored sites  might be more receptive to judging Glaude's  current ideas about democracy and enslavement against his earlier book In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). an eloquent meditation on "the tragic dimensions of the world of action" (49).  Indeed, it might be possible, in Moss Point,  to initiate a worthwhile conversation about how modern technology, globalization, and race give birth to blissful ignorance; it might be possible to smash a few debilitating stereotypes and binary (black/white) idolatries by reading Democracy in Black with healthy skepticism. I'd like to have my belief confirmed  that people in my hometown are republican and catholic enough to do so.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

February 13, 2016