How the word is passed
I’ve just finished reading Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. The author travels to various historical sites – plantations, prisons, graveyards, slave markets. He goes on tours. He talks to the guides and to fellow tourists. All through the book, he repeats how important it is to immerse oneself in the history of racism in the USA and beyond.
I say “immerse oneself in,” not “study,” because the process is experiential. The guiding idea of the book is that there’s a difference between merely reading about racist oppression and (for instance) standing in cramped, dark slave quarters or sitting for a few moments in the electric chair at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
The goal is to feel the atrocities, or, at least, to approximate the feeling.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
This isn’t to downplay the importance of also reading about the atrocities and conversing with those who witnessed or experienced them. The author welcomes these things. He practices them throughout the book.
(Of course, we, the book’s readers, are reading about another person’s experiences – the author’s – which are experiences of approaching others’ experiences. So, we are doubly removed; still, in reading, we come closer.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
How does the book’s guiding idea fare? How does the author’s quest turn out?
Well, in some chapters, he responds viscerally to the site he happens to be touring. These are the most stirring chapters to read.
In other chapters, while the author’s response isn’t insincere, he does have to try harder to make meaningful connections between the place, the past, and the present.
And in the trickiest passages, he considers whether he ought to distance himself emotionally from how the site is presented to him. For example, he visits a Senegalese slave port, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is commonly said that from this port were shipped millions of slaves (or “enslaved persons,” as the author is always careful to write). Having done his research, however, the author knows that the site was a point of departure for only tens of thousands of slaves. He asks whether this kind of discrepancy should influence the lessons we draw about the past.
He doesn’t quite answer this question, though it’s one that any serious student of history would need to grapple with.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Rightly or wrongly, “anti-racism” is sometimes categorized as a form of religious devotion. The anti-racist person – at least, the privileged anti-racist person – corrects his or her beliefs, confesses his or her sins, renounces his or her self (or former self), and pursues rectification through evangelism or through social justice work.
I can’t assess this categorization. I am no expert on the recent anti-racist movement, or on what makes a movement religious; and whatever my attitude toward racism is, it doesn’t encompass all these religious elements. But, when it comes to interpreting this book, I think religious categories can be fruitfully deployed.
For all that the book appeals to historical fact, it’s really about affective transformation.
Some transformation is an immediate response to what the senses gather in, in the way that Paul was transformed on the road to Damascus. But, the reasoning goes, lasting transformation is aided by certain (sometimes rather contrived) disciplines. Just as one might pray; serve; sing; read all of the Bible over and over again (even all of First Chronicles); observe the holidays; and take the sacraments – all because these systematic exercises change one’s heart more profoundly than merely reviewing one’s favorite passages and doctrines would do – the pious anti-racist person reads many books; talks to many people; polices his or her utterances and thoughts; recites a common liturgy; and, as in this book, goes on pilgrimages. And not only for the sake of a quick emotional payoff (though it is always tempting to reach for that). The deliberate (“intentional”) anti-racist person strives after a more comprehensive, more lasting, cumulative effect.
Read as a record of this sort of discipline, the book is interesting. Even the passages that drag or overreach serve a purpose, just as a saint’s record of spiritual doldrums and false starts would serve a purpose.
But, I must emphasize, none of this is to say whether the recent anti-racist movement really should be understood as a religion; or, if it should be so understood, whether it is a religion worth practicing. As I remarked, I am not competent to answer the first question. And whether anti-racist religion, if it is a religion, might be understood as an aspect of the Christianity I embrace, and not as an idolatrous or Manichaean rival to Christianity, is not something I can now discuss.
I say “immerse oneself in,” not “study,” because the process is experiential. The guiding idea of the book is that there’s a difference between merely reading about racist oppression and (for instance) standing in cramped, dark slave quarters or sitting for a few moments in the electric chair at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
The goal is to feel the atrocities, or, at least, to approximate the feeling.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
This isn’t to downplay the importance of also reading about the atrocities and conversing with those who witnessed or experienced them. The author welcomes these things. He practices them throughout the book.
(Of course, we, the book’s readers, are reading about another person’s experiences – the author’s – which are experiences of approaching others’ experiences. So, we are doubly removed; still, in reading, we come closer.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
How does the book’s guiding idea fare? How does the author’s quest turn out?
Well, in some chapters, he responds viscerally to the site he happens to be touring. These are the most stirring chapters to read.
In other chapters, while the author’s response isn’t insincere, he does have to try harder to make meaningful connections between the place, the past, and the present.
And in the trickiest passages, he considers whether he ought to distance himself emotionally from how the site is presented to him. For example, he visits a Senegalese slave port, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is commonly said that from this port were shipped millions of slaves (or “enslaved persons,” as the author is always careful to write). Having done his research, however, the author knows that the site was a point of departure for only tens of thousands of slaves. He asks whether this kind of discrepancy should influence the lessons we draw about the past.
He doesn’t quite answer this question, though it’s one that any serious student of history would need to grapple with.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Rightly or wrongly, “anti-racism” is sometimes categorized as a form of religious devotion. The anti-racist person – at least, the privileged anti-racist person – corrects his or her beliefs, confesses his or her sins, renounces his or her self (or former self), and pursues rectification through evangelism or through social justice work.
I can’t assess this categorization. I am no expert on the recent anti-racist movement, or on what makes a movement religious; and whatever my attitude toward racism is, it doesn’t encompass all these religious elements. But, when it comes to interpreting this book, I think religious categories can be fruitfully deployed.
For all that the book appeals to historical fact, it’s really about affective transformation.
Some transformation is an immediate response to what the senses gather in, in the way that Paul was transformed on the road to Damascus. But, the reasoning goes, lasting transformation is aided by certain (sometimes rather contrived) disciplines. Just as one might pray; serve; sing; read all of the Bible over and over again (even all of First Chronicles); observe the holidays; and take the sacraments – all because these systematic exercises change one’s heart more profoundly than merely reviewing one’s favorite passages and doctrines would do – the pious anti-racist person reads many books; talks to many people; polices his or her utterances and thoughts; recites a common liturgy; and, as in this book, goes on pilgrimages. And not only for the sake of a quick emotional payoff (though it is always tempting to reach for that). The deliberate (“intentional”) anti-racist person strives after a more comprehensive, more lasting, cumulative effect.
Read as a record of this sort of discipline, the book is interesting. Even the passages that drag or overreach serve a purpose, just as a saint’s record of spiritual doldrums and false starts would serve a purpose.
But, I must emphasize, none of this is to say whether the recent anti-racist movement really should be understood as a religion; or, if it should be so understood, whether it is a religion worth practicing. As I remarked, I am not competent to answer the first question. And whether anti-racist religion, if it is a religion, might be understood as an aspect of the Christianity I embrace, and not as an idolatrous or Manichaean rival to Christianity, is not something I can now discuss.