…it is much easier to resist temptations if we adjust our worldview so that they no longer seem like temptations at all…Healthy living, of course, amounts to more than quick decisions: it involves cultivating new routines, bodily habits, and values.
Andrew Aghapour writing at Religion Dispatches about whether religion will solve the obesity crisis.
Joanna Brooks wrote the following the other day at Religion Dispatches. You can read it over there, but I placed the entire entry here since it is brief.
This week, I had to do something no one ever taught me to do. I had to explain to my kids why a stranger might want to kill someone like them.
There we were, my two daughters and a seven-year-old friend, sitting in the backseat, in their leotards and tap shoes, on the way home from dance class at the YMCA. Before I could grab the volume knob and turn it down, NPR broadcast news of this week’s murders of three Jewish children and a rabbi at a school in Toulouse.
“Three Jewish children?” my older daughter exclaimed.
My husband is Jewish. I am Mormon. Our children identify with both traditions.
My six-year-old turned to her dance buddy: “Aren’t you glad I’m not dead?”
“Why did that guy kill Jewish children, Mom?”
“There are some people in the world who hate Jews,” I told them, matter-of-factly. “But you should know this happened far away from where we live.”
Yes, we have been those parents dropping their small children off at Jewish preschool, at Torah School, at synagogue. But as I write this, police have surrounded the apartment of Mohamed Meraz, the man suspected of the Toulouse murders.
Not so for George Zimmerman. The man who pursued and shot a young, unarmed African-American man named Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, is known to police, and remains free.
“My son is your son,” Trayvon Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton told demonstrators in New York City on Wednesday evening.
While I’m fully aware of the vulnerability of my own children, I also think about the ways my friends who are African American must raise their children, especially sons, with an ever-heightened vigilance.
Because in America, some children’s lives are held more sacred than others.
The American imagination has vested young white children—girls especially—with an aura of the angelic, while black children—boys especially—often carry the stigma of chaos and criminality. It’s a persistent, centuries-old American pattern of imagining what is sacred. Find it in the nineteenth-century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and find it still in twenty-first century coverage of child murder cases.
If Trayvon Martin were a blonde and blue-eyed girlchild, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s Little Eva (short for Evangeline) the story of his death would be on everyone’s lips.
If Trayvon Martin were my son, truth is, his killer would be in jail by now.
Have you read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help? I haven’t. I told my close friend, Maggie, last year when she was reading it that I had my challenges coming to the work. I asked if she was enjoying it and was happy she said that she was. She resonated with much of the novel because of her background and because of her experience growing up a white woman in the South. I celebrated the book. I loved that she could find the portrayal in it credible when gauged by her own personal story. But I was off center.
I told Maggie and David and Dawn (we were all together at the time) that my conflict with the novel was with my desire to support and celebrate books in general and fiction in particular with my learned-over-the-years suspicion that my story–that story that I own collectively with all other black folks in this country–can so readily be accepted, supported, purchased, and promoted when it’s written by non-black folks. I continue to experience that conflict as the movie is now being promoted.
I’m careful not to take these conflicts too far on this blog. But my conflict is my conflict. In fact, I’m very thankful for the humility Ms. Stockett exhibits on her website when responding to the question, “Were you nervous that some people might take affront to you…writing in the voice of two African American maids?” She says,
…I was very worried about what I’d written and the line I’d crossed. And the truth is, I’m still nervous. I’ll never know what it really felt like to be in the shoes of those black women who worked in the white homes of the South during the 1960s and I hope that no one thinks I presume to know that. But I had to try. I wanted the story to be told. I hope I got some of it right.
Having not read the novel, conflicted man that I am still, I appreciate the author’s hope. I share it. And I also hope that the success of her novel continues to grow in relation to her posture around the issue of telling someone else’s story. Indeed, novelists always tell another character’s story. I hope she’s done that well.
That said, the other day I read the comments from Rosetta Ross, a religious studies scholar at Spelman, over at Religion Dispatches. I share some of her biographical experiences, reactions to The Help, and sentiments about the acceptance of African American culture when its ushered to the wider world through the pen and hands and submission processes of white publishing professionals in this case. Now, to be clear, I love white folks. Some of you all are white, and I hope you know I love you. And I hope you have a comment or two about this, especially if you’ve read the novel or seen the screening. And still, I’m intrigued by how often and constant black authors or, more pointedly, African American authors, try to tell stories that cannot be accepted and embraced as cultural stories, as stories for the wider reading public.
Dr. Ross identifies three messages from the embrace of The Help. Three reasons she won’t see the movie. She says,
The first false message says: The real agents of the world are white….This message is false because black women, from a variety of stations in life, have voices and live and demonstrate to the world fulfilled lives every day—without the assistance or interference of white people.
The second false message is this: The really important point of all cultural production and activity is for white agency and dignity to be actualized. The overarching plot of this book presents the narrative of a young white woman finding herself and her voice amidst cliches, circumscriptions, traditions of the South during the 1960s. Against this background, the black women are instrumental in Skeeter’s journey into adulthood. Skeeter’s journey is the more prominent message of the book, and, I suspect, of the film as well. I will not go to see the movie The Help because I do not wish to view yet another production that tells me, a black woman, it is all about whiteness.
…the third, and most detrimental false message: Black persons—perhaps people of color, generally—exist primarily to serve of enhance the lives of white people….A predominant element of the Western imaginary, the idea that black persons ultimately exist as servants for white life, has long been supported by rhetorical constructions of Christianity. The most obvious examples, of course, were rituals such as catechisms about the necessity for [black] servants to obey [white] masters…
What do you think about Professor Ross’s comments? Have you noticed some of the biases and patterns she speaks of, some of the messages she’s read and heard in the buzz around the novel and the film? What experience have you had around hearing your story told through someone else’s lips?
Finally, I hope you read the novel. One day I may. I’ve read many representations of black people written under the hand of non-blacks, and this novel may join that shelf. And, again, my conflicts aside, I can support the work of an author reaching the world with a good story–and upon the great experience my good friend had of the work. I can easily separate my experience of the novel (or my perspective of the novel as I approach it from a distance) from my hearty suggestion that it should be read by others.
By the way, if you’d like to see Professor Ross’s full essay at RD, click here.
Michael Washington 