Critics have a way of judging with hindsight what writers said or should have said about them while knowing what has happened since. A case in point is a recent article of The New York Review of Books which reappraises what Faulkner should have done about segregation during the period in the early Fifties when he thought in favor of a gradualist approach to restructuring the South. What I too him to mean was that Southern whites were soon to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of the South and that we should not expect them to readjust quickly, to which I would have responded, as MLK did, to ask how long are Blacks to wait to get their redress of grievances, but that was a consideration at the time, to easily dismissed nowadays as Faulkner simply being not up to the moral and political challenges of his times. I want to generalize this problem. Like Faulkner, there are some people that have to deal with the fact that they are now to recognize themselves as having been exploiters, and how they are to regard that fact. Southerners have to come to terms with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Other ex-exploiters include those who ravaged the American Indians and Germans have to deal with the Holocaust and the British with what to say about the imperial control of Africa. Other people, on the other hand, are those who are or are the children of those who were the victimized, such as blacks and native americans and Jews and so they also have to deal with the psychological and structural advantages and disadvantages of being in those roles. Lets elaborate the ways in which people of either sort understand these roles: the ex-exploiter and the ex-victim.
Erving Goffman expanded the concept of deviance by including new categories of people who were not regarded as fully human. People who were in wheelchairs and people who were ex-convicts and people who wore colostomy bags were also stigmatized by their afflictions and so had to either hide their secrets or put forward their afflictions so as to ease the tension between the able bodied and the handicapped. Goffman’s was a serious advance in going beyond deviance as either the political or social disparagement of people, as was the case had been ever since Durkheim coined the idea of deviance as a process for separating some people from the great majority of “normals”. I want to expand the categories to others who are to be understood as bearing a burden that a great many have, no longer needing to invoke the concept of deviance at all, but simply circumstances that people have to manage which other people do not. These include the categories of the ex-victimizers and the ex-victims, categories that encompass a great many people, these nonetheless having to manage their stigmas. Both of these groups have to either deny their category or claim to have gone beyond their condition so as to be fully rounded or normal human beings. But it is not clear that those who are the worst offenders or victims have to do the most work to overcome their disability. History gets complicated.
It might seem that a people cannot avoid their history and so can’t avoid taking their blames for the exploitation they have inflicted or the atrocities they have occurred. But people do deny blame whether for shame or for retaining self respect or so as to avoid having to manage the stigma one has as a previous exploiter. A recent example is President Erugon of Turkey denying that the genocide of Armenians during the First World War had taken place, even though most historians and international groups and President Biden have said so, dismissing those claims as propogandistic lies. The Biden Administration had even given a way out. It said that the genocide had been done by a previous nation, the Ottoman Empire, which was replaced by the modern Turkey founded by Kamil Ataturk. It didn’t wash because the collective guilt was on the ethnic Turks who had presided over and populated the Ottoman Empire as well as Modern Turkey. What attaches to a people, what ties its past to its present, is the distinctive consciousness and actions of that people, and so Catholics and Turks and Germans are treated as actors in life and so capable of making decisions for good or bad. That holds for social classes as well as ethnicities and nations. People can castigate the rich as the exploiters, and that is easy enough to imagine as a collection of what were called the Five Hundred Families or what Biden defines as the .03% who make a million dollars a year. Marx thought of it as the families who controlled the means of production and those people made their money for reasons of greed rather than just the remorseless engines of economics and so also to be attributed to blame. Even poor people, a larger group tied together into a style of life by their unfavorable chances of doing well economically, are also stereotyped as a people in that they have stereotypically designated feelings and ambitions, such as laziness, fecklessness, and short tempers. The rich think the poor are the slugs that hold the economy back while the poor think that the rich are pampered and do nothing useful while they enjoy their unearned privilege.
Another group of deniers includes the American people in that it has never come to terms with the genocide of American Indians. It isn’t that Indians had not been portrayed in movies as noble rather than degenerate, even Cochise made noble in a Wwestern, Parkman himself having set up the dual image when brave warriors were followed by the drunkards in “The Oregon Trail”. Rather, it was that the death of the redmen was treated as inevitable, the result of disease and displacement, all summed up as the tragic result of the inevitable cultural and material disparity between a hunting and gathering people with an industrial nation, rather than because greedy people took over mining rights and other people had been militarily contained through overt efforts to do so. The internment camps of Japanese Americans has reversed causation: the excuse of there being fifth columnists among us was understood as really the result of getting those profitable farms away from them, however much the pretext was satisfied by and up through the Supreme Court. The Nisei were victimized and compensation made, acknowledged as an apology needed perhaps because there were so many other groups at the time who were having to eat crow.
The journey of acknowledging that a group was an exploiting group and having to burden its shame for at least a while to show that it was ashamed and had changed and so rehabilitated is a heavy one that makes it easier to remain a denier, which is what Japanese governments have done for atrocities going back to the Rape of Nanking and the comfort women used by Korean women. Consider what Germans have done for almost seventy years after the end of World War II. They gave reparations to Israel for the Holocaust; they allowed Jews of German extraction to resettle within Germany and gave them money to do so and a generation or two had to worry about what their fathers and grandfathers had done during the War and had to manage a guilt whereby the sins of the fathers are carried by at least their children. Fassbinder once portrayed the half dozen Chancellors of West Germany as martyrs and scapegoats for enduring their past crimes. Helmut Krol took the fall guy because staff work had mistakenly allowed Ronald Reagan to appear at a cemetery where Waffen SS were presently interred, Kohl not willing to offend dead German soldiers, even though Germany as a nation had been exemplary moral models from the first post War German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, through the present Angela Merkin.
The Jews had a mirror image experience. They also had to deal with having been victims in spectacular ways just as the Germans had been victimizers in spectacular ways and the question was how to overcome that stigma, to become more normal again, rather than just people with numbers tattooed on their arms. There was a time when “The Diary of Anne Frank” was required reading in middle schools around the country. How could you overcome the notoriety, whether by reveling in the experience of victimdom or by overcoming it? Even as the Holocaust Literature in the Sixties and Seventies were at their peak, German television broadcasting a multi-episode fictionalized history of the Holocaust, Jewish intelletuals were pointing out that Judaism was far more than the Holocaust. It had a complex theology and history and literature that preceded it and were worthy of value aside from the Holocaust. Perhaps the most valuable resource for normalizing judaism was a very old one where the Passover Haggadah includes the idea to remember that once we were slaves in Egypt, as a way to remind people that slavery is a scourge everywhere and therefore never to forget, an admonition to present slaves and ex-slaves.
A particularly felicitous way of dealing with both victims and victimizers was done by what happened when it became generally agreed that Thomas Jefferson had children by the slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman who he took up, she having been the half sister of Jefferson’s deceased white wife. How were the daughters of Thomas Jefferson many generations removed to deal with it? They might have insisted that this was a group of just the white descendants since history had recognized the separation of the two wives. Instead, the group enlarged itself to include its Black descendants and their annual meetings included all their offspring. That seemed to me a fitting way to overcome the resentment between the two parties.
A more complex and troublesome matter deals with how present generation ex-slaves see themselves. Contemporary Black advocates maintain the picture of themselves as victims. They say that Blacks continue to be persecuted by white society in that there is continued political violence against them and because of the institutional racism which makes Black lives unequal to white lives. This is true enough but, as I have suggested, this call for justice covers up the complexity of the circumstances that lead to police abuse. Perhaps even more important, feeling embattled in this way means finding new ways to fight new ground for vindicating Black life, as if they had to top what the Civil Rights movement had done and so Black advocates are reduced to treating drug dealers as victimized by the police.
It is also very isolating and self serving for Black youth to be only about Black life rather than, as W.E.B. Debois thought, open to the whole world of literature as a resource whereby people could form their souls. Instead, Blacks fought to retain their Classics Department in Howard University so as to give the Black nuances of ancient culture rather than what it is worth for and of itself. Students in Historically Black Colleges speak only to one another rather than mix with people who have different points of view, though there may be a self-selection whereby very able Black students go into the better universities and prepare themselves for what they will accomplish in a world that mixes Blacks and whites and Browns. In fact, young Black people could take great pride in how many of their older brethren have become powerful figures in finance, business, government and academia, a tremendous leap since true integration did not take place until only three generations ago. But harping on whether how many Academy Awards go to Blacks diminishes their achievements and makes the group self-serving rather than a contribution to America. That is the result of being inward turning, of being a permanent victim rather than a way to riwrongs but also to accomplish what rights are allowed to achieve.
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