Iona Community, Scotland

Current Location: Wild Rose, Wisconsin

Wild Rose

Since my last post, my girlfriend Riki and I drove more than a thousand miles across the country, activists challenged the Israeli flotilla surrounding Gaza, and my visa for Scotland got approved.

It’s certainly bizarre how time and space shrinks when you’re living in the woods.  My family’s lake house in Wisconsin is probably the one place where I feel entirely at home.  When we arrived, after two days in Riki’s Honda station wagon on the way from York, PA, I walked out onto the dock and felt choked up when I saw steam rising from the lake after the recent rain.

For the past two days we have slept and read and chatted with my dad and sister, enjoying the smells of the old cabin my great-grandfather built and that has become a ritual vacation spot for my father’s family of seven kids.  It’s surreal to be here without the activity of fourteen cousins, twelve uncles and aunts, and an indefinite number of dogs, but because I’ve come to Gilbert Lake for a week or two every year of my life, being in Wisconsin always feels right.

Internet access is spotty here and the only small, old television that used to be housed in the cottage has been replaced by a few iron knickknacks.  I am temporarily ridden of my addiction to checking the news.  But in my news, I’ve finally received word that my UK visa was approved, and it’s already in the mail.  That means I’m officially, certifiably, going to be spending the summer at Iona.

In the news of the world, I’m afraid for war in Gaza, and the New York Times tells me that Pope Benedict looked frighteningly glib while leaders in Cyprus launched a “furious broadside” against Turkey on Friday.  It seems trifling, when facing the onset of collapsing foreign relations, when bills cross the Senate floor daily, to pause and think about reframing historical narrative.

But I am deeply thankful to the Internet (and the power of Google’s news alerts), because the web director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture somehow read my last post.  He shared it with his staff and the museum’s founding director.  Framing our lives within contexts, within contexts that allow everyone to have voice, changes things.  It’s not as hot-botton or instantaneous as a ticker on CNN, but maybe it matters because our lives aren’t at as fast as that either.  We go to a museum, we go to class, to work, leaves change, snow comes, a birthday, a dog dies, we read an email, an article, a blog.

Riki and I leave from Wisconsin on Tuesday, after we’ve swum, tire-swung, and played languorous games of mancala on the porch.  I’m reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.  She’s reading Lolita.  We made chicken kebabs and my sister made angel food cake.  Tuesday will be my 21st birthday.  It’s nice when things happen this slowly.

I was at the helm of the Bi-College News this semester, so I decided to ease off on courses.  I took Latin, creative writing, and an independent study with Dave Dawson at Haverford.  My semester visiting Professor Dawson’s office with readings in hand was by far one of the best academic experiences I’ve had in college.

I went in with ambitious goals: to decode ways in which the Reformation and Enlightenment contributed to modernity and American history.  Luckily, I had a few other guiding points to narrow things down.

There was a day that haunted me in a class I had taken a year before with Tracey Hucks, Varieties of African American Religious Experience.  Among many other powerful moments in her classroom, this particular one was when Professor Hucks read from White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan’s paradigm book about the history of race in America.  The section was about English perceptions of blackness, not from during the height of the transatlantic slave trade but from before, the time leading to Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, and pilgrims en route to America.

“Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values.  No other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact.  As described by the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of black before the sixteenth century included, ‘Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul…Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc.’…White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil.” (White Over Black, pg. 7)

For English Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and planters in the southeast, strong cultural and literary references to blackness were alive and in place so that slave-trading and slave-holding could become institutions protected by legal and political authority.  Before the Mayflower, the European mind was already subject to ideas about color that would lead to the proliferation of slavery in the New World, and for religious and scientific stories alike to justify its persistence.

In a class a year later, Blacks and Jews in America, we were talking about how on the National Mall there is an American Indian museum, the nearby Holocaust museum, a tiny African Art museum, but no African American museum.  I spoke without knowing exactly what I was going to say, stringing together conclusions I had scrawled in my notebook: “I don’t believe that white America would allow an African American museum to be located on the Mall.  Letting blacks tell their story of America would overthrow the narrative structures on which America was built and continues to exist.”

I remember the room fell silent, and overall, people looked uncomfortable and grim.  I felt uncomfortable too.  I’m white, after all.  I, and my family, have benefited from the exclusion of black Americans from this country’s story and economy since our Massachusetts Puritan ancestors to my mother’s childhood in Birmingham, Alabama.  But as someone who believes very strongly in the power of stories and public education to change politics, and also as someone who has a growing sense of religious faith, I felt it was very important that I face the truth of what I was realizing.

Moments like this have rechartered the course of my academic interests from propositions about reason and free will to the experience of being in America and the world today.  Race and inequality is something we live daily, something about our bodies as well as our minds.  They are realities that are political, economic, and as I’ve learned from reading James Cone and other liberation theologians, transcendent.

Little did we in the Blacks and Jews class know that there will indeed be an African American museum on the National Mall (or that President Bush was the one who signed it into being).  The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest Smithsonian museum in Washington, is scheduled to break ground in 2012 and be ready for visitors in 2015.  Check out what they’re planning.

The museum will play a huge, exciting role in exactly what I feared couldn’t happen – a significant change of course in the way we tell the American story – right on the Mall.

In my studies with Professor Dawson, one of my primary concerns was to decipher what ideals lay at the heart of the European Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the founding of America.  Which ideas actually created, rather than demolished, the categories by which people were and are excluded from the American dream? It’s not the kind of thing you can answer in a semester, or in a summer.  But I think figuring it out is important.  White Americans must be politically and culturally ready for what it means to take black American narratives seriously.  White Americans must be ready to come to terms with the assumptions in our own history that permitted slavery, Jim Crow, and that continue to allow for shocking statistics of inequality based on race.  History books need to change.  The education gap needs to change.  We must understand that giving African American history and culture the place (and funding) it deserves is central to understanding ourselves as Americans, because as the founding director of the NMAAHC Lonnie Bunch says, we are all shaped “by this story, by this culture, by this history.” And if we change the narrative, it will help change our politics.

"a lie is not a shelter" Lorna Simpson, 1989 (part of NMAAHC collection)

design for the NMAAHC