B(l)ack in the Kitchen: Food Network

by Lisa Guerrero
 

Introduction by David J. Leonard

The conversation surrounding Paula Deen and her use of the “N word” has simultaneously erased the accusations of job discrimination and harassment all while ignoring the larger issues of race and Food Network. In fact, Deen’s ultimate firing by the Food Network has allowed the network to position itself as anti-racist, as America’s moral conscience. Refusing to allow prejudice to stain its airwaves, the Food Network has situated itself as a progressive force of accountability and justice.

Deen, however, is reflective of their brand—one that normalizes and operationalizes whiteness all while reimagining the world of food as racially transcendent. Revelations regarding Deen burst that illusion. With this in mind, we are sharing an excerpt from Lisa Guerrero’s brilliant chapter from our recent book, African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings

. . .

In all of its programming, even within programs where race is undeniably apparent, either because of the celebrity or the cuisine, food is presented as a race-neutral cultural object.  Unfortunately, in a race-based society, as the United Statesis, “race-neutral” invariably gets translated as “white.”  Food Network trades in the notion of the “racelessness” of food to create a commodified sense of neoliberal inclusion and equality, wherein the focus is placed on individuals and not on systems. Food is portrayed across the network as a “universal language;” but as discussed above, it is definitely constructed as a specifically class-based language, as well as a language constructed in specifically racialized terms.  To be fair, Food Network is no different from most other cable television networks where whiteness is predominant and becomes easily normalized and rendered invisible to most viewers.

Ironically, the relatability that Food Network carefully crafts around its personalities is almost completely belied by the “everyday” lifestyles many of the network celebrities are show to have as they are strategically integrated into their respective shows, most notably with Ina Garten, Giada DeLaurentis, and Bobby Flay.  While the wealth and whiteness displayed in these, and much of Food Network’s other programming is conspicuous, they are treated as commonplace, the effect of which is twofold:  1) it creates a socioracial standard when it comes to the act of food consumption; and 2) it suggestively endorses the idea of food as a racial and economic privilege. 

Through its successful erasure of race and class, Food Networkperpetuates certain understandings about the social landscape in which people think about food consumption and commodification as being generally equal amongst various populations, even as statistically and programmatically most people can see that food equality isn’t a reality.  But Food Network is able to maintain this profitable food fantasy by constructing its food narratives in a very particular sociohistorical vacuum that allows audiences to distance themselves from not only certain tediums surrounding daily food habits, but also the sociohistorical and socioeconomic systems of food production and preparation in the United States.  The strategic use of blackness on the network is one of the primary ways in which this distancing is enabled.

The relative absence of blackness on Food Network, while not unlike the relative absence of blackness on network television generally speaking, succeeds in denying the significant place African Americans have, both historically and contemporaneously, in the creation of American food culture and foodways.  This erasure, while creating an amputated impression of American food backgrounds, does so in deliberate ways that are in keeping with long histories of using whiteness to signify notions of expertise, virtuosity, superiority, propriety, and polish.  In other words, in order to cement the network’s guiding narrative of elevating food to a craft, an art, an aspiration, it needs to simultaneously elevate whiteness, usually white maleness. 

 Not surprisingly, the programming on Food Network frames American food in very Eurocentric terms, tracing food origins and traditions to primarily Western, European nations, while periodically recognizing the “exotic” fare of Latin America or Asia.  There is little to no recognition of African cuisines within programming, despite the growing popularity of African food and restaurants among American consumers sparked by growing numbers of African immigrants to the United States, and probably represented most notably by the often tokenized celebrity chef, Marcus Samuelsson, who was born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden.  Neither is there much linkage drawn between the specificity of African American soul food and the development of much of what is considered American “southern food.”  The erasure of these African and African-American cultural linkages to American food habits and histories effectively reimagines a significant portion of American food architecture as almost exclusively white, a reimagining not supported by history. 

Now certainly Food Network isn’t The History Channel, and viewers aren’t necessarily expecting to be provided with critically accurate or developed histories of food origins, routes, or social significances.  Nonetheless, its lack of wider, more representative narrative frames within its programming results in two things:  First, there is a barely perceptible, encompassing whitening of both the network itself, as well as the perspectives it creates about food relationships within American populations.  Secondly, when racial “diversity” and representation do occur, they have the effect of “tokenism” rather than inclusion.  Nowhere is this latter effect more apparent than in the network’s small club of Black cooking personalities.

 The framing of Food Network and The Cooking Channel break down into simplistic terms as “The U.S.” and “The Global,” respectively.  As such, The Cooking Channel does appear to embrace diversity in a larger, more transparent way than Food Network.  However, the apparent differentials of framing are really only on a cosmetic level.  There are more people of color that appear regularly on The Cooking Channel, but only slightly more, and considering the overbearing whiteness of Food Network, it really wouldn’t take much to have “more” racial diversity.  But the neutralized by emphasizing the notion of  “the exotic.”  The people of color on The Cooking Channel are, by and large, not of the United States, creating a comforting distance between U.S. audiences and any troublesome considerations about racism. 

In scholarly terms, it wouldn’t be far off the mark to think about Food Network as “the colonial” and The Cooking Channel as “the postcolonial.”  In other words, Food Networkdenies race and its systems by trying to devalue and/or erase race altogether, while The Cooking Channel denies race and its systems by putting race on display in almost exhibitional terms so that audiences don’t relate to it as a “real” thing.  In both cases, whiteness is positioned as the fulcrum of food experiences and knowledges.  And ultimately, blackness, especially American blackness, is relegated to becoming the specialty ingredient that gets used sparingly in the recipe of televisual food programming for fear that its flavor won’t be palatable to American consumers.

 

Postscript: 

As we’ve seen over the last few days not only with the vociferous response by Deen supporters, but also with SCOTUS gutting the Voting Rights Act, Texas scrambling to capitalize on that decision by pushing through a Voter ID bill, the dehumanizing tactics of the defense counsel in the George Zimmerman trial, and the countless racist microaggressions the accounts of which we are bombarded with daily, Paula Deen’s words and behaviors are, in themselves, unsurprising and relatively unremarkable, but rather indicative of the banality of American racism.  As several scholars have articulately pointed out in response to the Deen controversy, (including David J. Leonard), and as I have tried to address in this piece in broader ways, while Deen should certainly be held responsible for the ways in which her actions contribute to the continuation of systemic and ideologic racisms in the United States, the problem is much bigger than her use of racial epithets and her disturbing bucolic nostalgia for the racial order of the antebellum South. 

Perhaps the biggest problem of which Deen is but one very small symptom, is a problem which will, in all likelihood strangle equality and freedom for allAmerican citizens; it is the problem of the United States’ misguided belief in its own magnanimity of race; the delusion that we have remedied our racial illnesses and no longer need to be vigilant about the sickness, and in fact, can be prideful about the “past tense” of our racial struggles.  This blind hubris (which Justice Ginsburg so aptly identified in her dissension to the Voting Rights Act decision), allows for people like Paula Deen to sincerely dislocate their actions from the insidiousness of racism…since racism has been fixed, (so it goes), then certainly what people do and to whom they do it can’t be considered racism. 

Unfortunately, this racist psychosis, the inability to see racism even as you are enacting it, supporting it, contributing to it, benefitting from it, is one of many deleterious side-effects of our post-racial nation, and is sure to kill us quicker than a Paula Deen recipe.   

. . . 

Lisa A. Guerrero is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University Pullman.  She is the editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and co-editor of African Americans onTelevision: Race-ing for Ratings (Praeger Press) with David J. Leonard.

Video Discussion with the Authors of African Americans on Television: Racing for Ratings

African Americans on Television: Racing for Ratings

David J. Leonard, PhD, is associate professor and chair in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. Leonard has written Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema.

Lisa A. Guerrero, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. Guerrero is the editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Teachers Talk about Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards.

Martin Luther King Jr. - A Brief History

Martin Luther King Jr. led the African American struggle to achieve full rights of U.S. citizenship and showed how mass peaceful action could solve intractable social and political problems. He eloquently voiced the hopes and grievances of African Americans, persuading the majority of them to take him as their leader.


King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of an assistant pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and the grandson of a reverend. Martin's parents, the Reverend King Sr. and Alberta Williams, had an older child, Christine, and a younger, Alfred Daniel ("A. D."), who also became a minister. When Reverend Williams died in 1931, the Reverend King Sr. succeeded him and was pastor for more than 50 years, until his death in 1984.


The young King went to segregated public schools and then to Booker T. Washington High School, which he left after two years when he qualified to enter Morehouse College, now part of Atlanta University. As he pursued a major in sociology, his concern with social betterment was aroused. King received his degree in 1948, but the year before, he had been ordained a Baptist minister and had become assistant pastor to his father.


In 1948, King went north to Chester, Pennsylvania, where he entered Crozer Theological Seminary as one of six African-American students among some 90 whites. At Crozer, he first became acquainted with the Social Gospel movement of Walter Rauschenbusch and the works of Mohandas Gandhi, who had been assassinated in early 1948. He graduated with a bachelor in divinity degree in 1951, having been president of the senior class, the top student, and winner of a graduate fellowship.


The Crozer fellowship enabled King to enter Boston University, which he had chosen over an offer from Yale University because of his desire to study with its philosophy department. By 1953, he had completed the course requirements for the Ph.D., and he had met Coretta Scott, who was studying voice at the New England Conservatory. They married that summer and returned to Boston, Coretta to finish her work at the conservatory, her husband to write his Ph.D. dissertation on the concept of God in the thought of Paul Tillich and H. N. Wieman, while taking courses at Harvard University in Plato and existential philosophy and preaching in local churches. In 1955, Boston University awarded him the Ph.D.


The previous year, however, King had been called to his first ministry at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a strictly segregated city like any other in the South. King was beginning to be known for his preaching when, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress, was arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her action, coming after the Supreme Court declared the segregation of schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), indicated the electrifying effects that decision had on African Americans, who henceforth would not tolerate situations they had long endured. The consequence was the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), formed by the ministers of the African-American churches, chose King as its president to lead the protest. As the nonviolent boycott and the violence of the white community went on during 1956, national and international attention focused on Montgomery, and King became prominent for his eloquence and his personal courage in the face of attacks on his home and himself. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Alabama's laws segregating buses unconstitutional.


Some 60 Southern African-American leaders met in January 1957 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to form a larger organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to lead the struggle against segregation. King, elected its president, emphasized Gandhi's teaching of nonviolence and made the winning of African-American voting rights the first goal. His career was transformed as his fame and dedication grew. In March, he was invited to attend the ceremonies for the independence of Ghana, in West Africa. In May, he led a prayer pilgrimage of 25,000 people in Washington, D.C., demanding federal action on civil rights. In June 1958, he met with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to urge stronger federal protection of civil rights, and in September, his book Stride Toward Freedom was published, giving his account of the Montgomery protest. In February 1959, he and his wife went to India at the invitation of the Gandhian National Memorial Fund. In January 1960, he left his Montgomery pastorate for Atlanta, where the SCLC headquarters had been established, and he became cominister of his father's church.


The Gandhian techniques of civil disobedience that King and the SCLC supported included not only the boycott but the sit-in, the protest march, and the Freedom Rides. The action of the Freedom Riders, traveling across state lines, was an effort to force the federal government to protect the rights of Southern citizens. In that and other aspects of his work, King gradually gained the support of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general.


The struggle to integrate Birmingham, Alabama during the spring of 1963 involved King's most strenuous and courageous action. The city's police, under Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, used brutal means—dogs, cattle prods, fire hoses—against the demonstrators. The American public witnessed horrifying scenes on television and in newspapers, bringing home the reality of the violence. King was arrested and thrown into a solitary cell, where he wrote a stirring "Letter from Birmingham Jail," defending nonviolent protest in answer to a statement by a group of local clergymen objecting to his tactics. Though sporadic violence continued, the Birmingham campaign was finally successful, and black and white leaders agreed on a gradual procedure of desegregation. King gave his account of the Birmingham struggle in Why We Can't Wait (1964).


The March on Washington in August 1963, organized by King and the SCLC, was attended by a quarter of a million people, at least a fourth of whom were white. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King gave his most famous speech, with its repeated words "I Have a Dream." In the fall of 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and in his laureate address in Oslo, Norway, he saw the award as an affirmation of nonviolent protest. "The Movement," he declared, "seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people." His movement's efforts compelled Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964), which committed the federal government to eliminating racial discrimination from American life.


In the spring of 1965, King organized two marches of many thousands from Selma to Birmingham to emphasize the need for a federal voting rights law. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6 in King's presence. His support of Johnson began to waver, however, and in 1967, he declared his opposition to the Vietnam War and became cochairman of an organization concerned about the war. He further broadened his concerns from racism to include unemployment and poverty. An attempt to improve slum conditions in Chicago was a failure. Some of his younger, more radical followers fell away as they found King unacceptably moderate. Riots in the ghettos of Newark, Harlem, Detroit, and Los Angeles challenged his nonviolent teaching.


To highlight the problems of the poor, both black and white, King planned a Poor People's Campaign in the form of a march and campground in Washington during April 1968. In March, he led protesters in Memphis in support of a strike of sanitation workers. "I've been to the mountaintop . . . and I've seen the Promised Land," he told his followers shortly before, on April 4, he was shot by a sniper, James Earl Ray, as he stood on the balcony of his motel room talking with Jesse Jackson and other followers. In 1999, his death was declared the work of a conspiracy rather than that of a lone gunman.


King's work is carried on at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. In 1986, his birthday, January 15, became a national holiday.


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"Martin Luther King Jr." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2012. Web. 16 Jan. 2012.


Read some quick facts about MLK Day from American Holidays and National Days here.


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Additional Resources:


The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia by Clayborne Carson, Tenisha Armstrong, Susan Carson, Erin Cook, Susan Englander
Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Biography by Roger Bruns
The Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. by Lee W. Eysturlid, Jeremy Gypton, Chris Mullin, and Brett Piersma

Dance and Music in African American Slave Culture

Dance and Music  
Jurretta Jordan Heckscher
Excerpted from World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States

Dance and music were activities of life-sustaining importance to the people enslaved in the American South. From the 1620s to the 1860s, on small farms and great plantations, in village workshops and city factories, from southern Delaware to eastern Texas, slaves made music and danced. They sang songs to pace their grinding agricultural labors, remember their ancestors, mourn those who had died or been stolen from them, mock their oppressors, and worship the divine; they danced to strengthen the bonds of kinship and community, to find love and pleasure, and to experience their bodies in ways that did not belong entirely to someone else. To understand what slavery meant to slaves means to understand their dance and music and to understand American dance and music means understanding how much these art forms owe to those who were enslaved in the United States.

To learn more, check out World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States edited by Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice. This two-volume encyclopedia is the first to focus on the material life of slaves. Check out the New York Times article recently published on this important and unique work.

Be sure to take a look at The African American Experience database for regularly updated content on African American history and culture. Over 1,000 slave narratives were just added. Sign up for a free 60-day subscription today!

Black Experience in the Civil War South

The muscle and sweat and skills of black people of African descent helped build the Old South, but they reaped few rewards from their labor. By 1860 they numbered 4,200,000, spread unevenly across the South (the 15 U.S. states where slavery was legal) but comprising, over all, one-third of the region’s population. Some were artisans such as carpenters or blacksmiths, some were maids or butlers or cooks or carriage drivers, but most were field hands whose labor produced the bulk of the South’s great cash crops of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco. Some lived in towns or cities, some on small farms, but most lived on large plantations among 20 or 50 or even 100 or more other black men, women, and children. A small proportion, 6 of every 100, were free, but all the rest were slaves who could be, and frequently were, bought and sold just like cotton or cattle.

Southern slavery was a harsh system — cruel is a better word — that was now and then tempered by acts of kindness on the part of paternalistic whites. As far as most slaveowners were concerned, slaves existed solely to make a profit for them and to ease the burden of housework and other chores. Slaves were expected to obey their masters without question, and few masters hesitated to punish misbehavior. Such punishment was usually corporal: the sound of a whip lacerating a black back was common in the Old South. The more serious forms of slave resistance were answered not only with the whip but sometimes with the gallows.

The vast majority of enslaved people hated slavery and longed to be free. But faced with whites’ determination to subjugate them and with the array of laws, institutions, and sheer physical force that gave whites the power to do so, slaves rarely dared to challenge the system. Outright rebellions were very few and never successful. Some slaves ran away from their masters, but almost all were soon recaptured. The only sort of resistance that most slaves could get away with was the quiet sort: feigning sickness or stupidity, “accidentally” breaking tools or dishes, and laughing at their masters’ foibles behind their backs.

Most slaves just resigned themselves, reluctantly, to getting along in the cruel and unjust system that held them captive. They did what their masters told them to do and accepted whatever kindness was extended to them, but without the cheerful willingness and gratitude that their masters expected. Moreover, they softened the rigors of bondage and made their servitude endurable by embracing and nurturing family life, community life, and spiritual life. In the slave quarters of the plantations, and elsewhere throughout the rural and urban South, enslaved men and women fell in love, married, had children, and gathered with others whenever they could to gossip, sing, celebrate, and worship. Often joining in this fellowship were free blacks, who, although they answered to no master and could not be bought or sold, were so hemmed in by racially restrictive laws and customs that they enjoyed only a quasi-freedom.

Few white Southerners in 1860 had any qualms about slavery, and most gave little thought to how the slaves felt about it. But by that time many Americans outside the South had turned against the institution. Some, stirred by sympathy for the slave and hatred of the “sin” of slaveholding, were outright abolitionists, demanding that the South do away with its “peculiar institution.” Many more were free-soilers, content to let slavery continue in the South but determined that it not spread into the developing western frontier. In the four decades prior to 1860, American politics was repeatedly shaken by clashes between antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners. Compromises smoothed things over time and again, but in 1860 further compromise became impossible.

In November of that year, Abraham Lincoln, a Northerner who stood immovably on the free-soil platform of the Republican party, won the presidential election. Facing the prospect of an administration hostile to slavery, most whites in the seven Deep South states concluded that leaving the Union was the only way to ensure slavery’s survival. By February 1861 those states had seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. In April, following President Lincoln’s refusal to give up the U.S. Army’s Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, Confederate military forces bombarded the fort. Lincoln immediately declared his intention to put down the Southern “rebellion” and called on the loyal states for troops. Four Upper South states subsequently seceded and joined the Confederacy. On both sides, men volunteered for military service by the tens of thousands and began massing into great armies. And so the war came.

Most blacks, even in the remotest parts of the South, on the most isolated farms and plantations, were aware of these momentous developments and followed them intently. Much of what they learned, however, was filtered through the perceptions of whites. John Majors, a slave in northern Mississippi, listened during the secession crisis whenever his master chatted with friends in the marketplace or outside the courthouse in Oxford. Often the talk was about the possibility of war; as Majors recalled, the consensus was that “hit wont be much of a war if dey has any at all, jes take two or three months to whip de damn Yankees an’ teach dem to tend to dey own business an’ let de folks down South alone.”   Once the war was under way, many slaves went with their masters to watch the volunteers muster and drill and to hear the patriotic speeches at flag-presentation ceremonies. Some masters simply told their slaves what they thought they ought to know. Late in 1861, for instance, all 350 slaves on one of the huge estates in the South Carolina lowcountry assembled in the plantation church at their master’s beckoning and listened as he warned them that the evil Yankees were invading the South bent on mayhem. 

There were many things going on that masters did not want their slaves to know, and they did their best to suppress or censor or distort such dangerous news. It helped that almost all slaves were illiterate. But slaves had always had ways of gaining forbidden knowledge and communicating it among themselves, and in the tumultuous months of secession and war this “grapevine telegraph,” as they called it, was humming. [...]


As they eagerly but quietly gathered news about secession and war and talked it over among themselves, most slaves developed the very convictions and aspirations that their masters feared most. They quickly came to believe that Northerners were their friends and allies, that the North was fighting to free the slaves, and that a Northern victory would shatter the chains that bound them. Ironically, they got these impressions
not from the words or actions of President Lincoln or other U.S. officials (who in the early part of the war made it clear that they intended only to restore the Union and had no intention of meddling with slavery) but from their own masters and other Southern whites, who scoffed at Lincoln’s public denials and insisted that his armies were advancing southward to make war on slavery. Young William Robinson, listening at the keyhole that night in April 1861, distinctly heard one of his master’s friends say hat “if the Yankees whipped [us], every negro would be free.”  The 350 South Carolina slaves who gathered in their plantation church later that year were told by their master that the Northern invaders “ would try and induce them to desert.” 

These early rumors that the Yankee invaders were brandishing the banner of emancipation struck a special chord in the hearts of many slaves. Millennial expectations, encouraged especially by their understanding of the Old Testament, had long buoyed the spirits of the black men and women of the South. Freedom would come one day, many devoutly believed — if not for this generation then perhaps the next.  Jacob Stroyer of South Carolina remembered hearing, as a little boy during “ the dark days of slavery” in the 1850s, his father comforting his mother with the words, “ the time will come when this boy and the rest of the children will be their own masters and mistresses.” The Civil War seemed to many to herald that long-awaited Year of Jubilee. In wartime Richmond, Thomas Johnson, one of the rare slaves who could read, met secretly with other slaves and read to them from the Bible to try to make sense of the uncertain times. [...]

Quietly slaves prayed for Northern victory. Their prayers grew more fervent as the war went on and Union policy evolved to embrace emancipation. By 1863 it was certain that a Yankee triumph would usher in the Year of Jubilee; it went without saying, of course, that a Rebel triumph would postpone it. In Athens, Georgia, a woman sat, Sunday after Sunday, with her fellow slaves in the gallery of the First Presbyterian Church. As the white minister prayed aloud “that the Lord would drive the Yankees back,” she prayed silently, “Oh, Lord, please send the Yankees on and let them set us free.”

[...]

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From the "Introduction" to The Black Experience in the Civil War South by Stephen V. Ash

The first book of its kind to appear in a generation, this comprehensive study details the experiences of the black men, women, and children who lived in the South during the traumatic time of secession and civil war.

Black History Month - Voices from Slavery

The theme for the 35th anniversary of Black History Month, "African Americans and the Civil War," was chosen by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History to commemorate "the efforts of people of African descent to destroy slavery and inaugurate universal freedom in the United States." By the end of the Civil War, African American soldiers comprised about 10% of the Union Army and had participated in dozens of major battles. Nearly 40,000 died throughout the course of the war. Sixteen were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and many others carried out unheralded acts of bravery that led to the eventual downfall of the Confederacy.

 Notably, the experiences of many African Americans during this period were documented by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This New Deal program recruited unemployed writers to conduct interviews with thousands of former slaves, several of whom witnessed the events and consequences of the Civil War firsthand. An estimated 100,000 former slaves were still living in the United States during this period and the federal government employed mostly white writers to write down, and in some cases make audio recordings of, former slaves' oral histories. Many of the interview subjects were in their eighties and nineties when the WPA Slave Narrative Collection of the FWP was conducted. While many of their memoirs discussed their myriad experiences under the Civil War, many of them also discussed their folk beliefs, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the establishment of the Jim Crow South.

Decades later, these WPA narratives were compiled for the first time by scholar George P. Rawick, which resulted in the definitive 41-volume work The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, published by Greenwood Press during 1972–1979. The series' introductory volume, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, was groundbreaking in that it was one of the first books to show that slaves did not play passive roles during the era of slavery and the Civil War, but rather functioned as primary actors in shaping their own history.

Find out more about African Americans during the Civil War and browse through more than 1,000 newly added WPA slave narratives on ABC-CLIO's African American Experience database. If you are not already a subscriber, click here for a free trial.


Excerpted from "Black History Month Marks 35th Anniversary: Background." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience. ABC-CLIO, 2011. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.

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Additional Resources

World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States

Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, Editors
Greenwood, 2010

World of a Slave was recently featured in The New York Times in an article titled "The Everyday Lives of American Slaves". Read the article here.

What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives

Herbert C. Covey and Dwight Eisnach

Greenwood, 2009

The powerful, long-neglected testimony of former slaves places African American slave foods and foodways at the center of the complex social dynamics of the plantation South.

Black History Month Spotlight: Toni Morrison

"Introduction" excerpted from Toni Morrison: A Biography by Stephanie Li

Novelist, editor, scholar, teacher, public intellectual, mother, and contemporary griot for the African American community, Toni Morrison is one of the most influential writers in American history. Though nearing eighty years old, Morrison continues to produce eloquent, groundbreaking novels. Her wide-ranging additional pursuits—which have included decades of teaching, editing key African American texts, organizing collaborative artistic projects, and publicly commenting on important national issues—supplement a collection of novels that the Swedish Academy, which bestowed the Nobel Prize on Morrison in 1998, described as “characterized by visionary force and poetic import.” Despite her varied projects, Morrison insists that all of her work is united by a single concern. As she explains, “I know it seems like a lot, but I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It's one job.”

 
For Morrison, who began writing novels in her thirties, writing has become essential to her very existence. She has stated that “the only one thing that I couldn't live without is the writing.”  This fundamental need to write highlights Morrison's deep commitment to the African American community as well as to the radical possibilities of narrative. She has explained that it is through story that we best understand others and hence recognize our role in and responsibilities to society. Stories nurture and enliven us, providing us with ways to make sense of both our world and ourselves.

Despite having published nine remarkable novels, Morrison continues her commitment to charting the contours of African American life through fiction. On days that she devotes to writing, Morrison gets up very early, often before dawn. In the dark, she makes coffee, drinking a cup as she watches the light come. Although this habit developed as a practical necessity when she was a single mother raising two boys and thus often needing to steal a few hours of her own, she later discovered that this practice complements her natural tendency to think best in the morning. She has observed that she is “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.”

This ritual of watching the arrival of the light is crucial for Morrison to enter the state of mindfulness necessary for writing. Because she has penned most of her books while holding a nine-to-five job, Morrison has learned to work through and around interruptions. Continuous time for writing is a luxury she has rarely enjoyed. Consequently, she learned to adapt to the demands of her work and family life, perfecting a sentence or an image while washing dishes, preparing lunch for her children, or tending the garden. Morrison works her language carefully so that “the seams don't show.” In fact, this labored process of revision is the secret joy of Morrison's writing process:

I love that part; that's the best part, revision. I do it even after the
books are bound! Thinking about it before you write it is delicious.
Writing it all out for the first time is painful because so much of the
writing isn't very good. I didn't know in the beginning that I could
go back and make it better; so I minded very much writing badly.
But now I don't mind at all because there's that wonderful time in
the future when I will make it better, when I can see better what I
should have said and how to change it.

Morrison still starts to write by using yellow legal pads and sharp number two pencils. Because she does not actually like the act of writing, meaning the formation of letters, using pen and paper encourages her to be more economical in her writing; in order to limit tiresome handiwork she must capture an image or idea as succinctly as possible. Eventually, she transfers her work to a computer. Although she does not write every day, she thinks about her characters and their experiences constantly. She has stated that her fictional personalities become real for her at the point in which she falls in love with them. While she does not always agree with their choices, her love for them is absolute.

Though Morrison may not know where she will begin a novel, she always knows where it will end. Unlike many writers, she does not draw upon personal experience to write her books; as she explains, “I will use what I have seen and what I have known, but it's never about my life.” The imaginative process is key to her fiction, especially the way in which a single description can capture the complexities of human relationships. She frequently uses images to trigger an entire dramatic episode and to highlight essential qualities of certain characters; Pilate's lack of a navel illustrates her powerful will, Pecola's delight in drinking milk from a Shirley Temple doll reveals her desire to imbibe a new persona, and Sethe's black eyes suggest a woman who has seen far too much.

However, while images enliven and ground her writing, questions fundamentally drive her prose; she writes in order to understand certain dynamics or the nature of specific relationships—how does a child come to hate herself? What will a mother do to protect her child? How does a man achieve self-understanding? What is required to make paradise a livable reality? For Morrison, storytelling and the process of writing are ways to explore the central challenges of human existence—how individuals both flourish and hurt one another, how oppression operates, how communities sustain generations. Despite these myriad concerns, Morrison insists that her novels are unified by one central issue:

All the time that I write, I'm writing about love or its absence. ...
About love and how to survive—not to make a living—but how
to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure,
victims of something. Each one of us is in some way at some
moment a victim and in no position to do a thing about it. Some
child is always left unpicked up at some moment. In a world like
that, how does one remain whole—is it just impossible to do that?

Morrison's novels may be read as a sustained exploration of the nature of love, for it is love that motivates both her characters and her writing. In her work, love is never a simple matter of romance or familial commitment, but is instead composed of all the weaknesses and beauties of human need. Love can damage and heal, can nurture and destroy. Such too is the nature of Morrison's fiction; its power lies in language that moves readers to evaluate and even change their own lives. She has created a body of work that has inspired both sharp criticism and high praise, while also fundamentally transforming the American literary landscape.


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Additional Reading

For more information and titles in the Greenwood Biographies series, click here.

African American History Month

February is African American History Month! Throughout the month, we will be honoring African American History on the ABC-CLIO Blog.

African American History is an important topic to ABC-CLIO. We have hundreds of books on the topic, ranging from health to popular culture to politics and government titles, as well as an online database devoted to the African American Experience.

This year's theme is "African Americans and the Civil War".

Check back for weekly updates, excerpts, guest blogs, and more.

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NEW RESOURCES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture

Jessie Carney Smith, Editor 
12/2010

This four-volume encyclopedia contains compelling and comprehensive information on African American popular culture that will be valuable to high school students and undergraduates, college instructors, researchers, and general readers.

Encyclopedia of African American Music

Emmett G. Price III, Executive Editor
Tammy L. Kernodle and Horace J. Maxile, Jr., Associate Editors
12/2010

Providing a lyrical history of our nation, this groundbreaking encyclopedia, the first of its kind, showcases all facets of African American music including folk, religious, concert and popular styles.

DNA Evidence Frees Cornelius Dupree: A Look at Texas Exonerations

On January 4th of this year, Cornelius Dupree Jr. was freed from a Texas prison after serving more than 30 years of a 75-year sentence for a crime that he didn’t commit. In 1979, Dupree, now 51, was convicted of rape and robbery in Dallas and would have (with the exception of an unlikely appeal or parole) spent at best the majority of his life behind bars. Although his story seems an implausible miscarriage of justice, it is in actuality a story that has become a recurring narrative in the state of Texas. Dupree is the 41st inmate that has been exonerated in the state since 2001, due in large part to a crime lab with preserved DNA evidence and District Attorney Craig Watkins’ (the first African American D.A. in Texas history) passion for justice that overreaches his passion for convictions. Included in Watkins’ efforts has been the creation of a “Conviction Integrity Unit”, that not only scrutinizes hundreds of DNA cases for consistency, but also examines additional cases with multiple, potential perpetrators. While these efforts can certainly bring a measure of justice to those that have been improperly imprisoned, the enduring constructions of race and class suggest that accuracy in prosecution remains a distant reality.

Despite the narratives by some of a “post-racial society”, race still matters in America and arguably, the matters are greatest within the criminal justice system. African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans — particularly those of a lower socioeconomic status, experience overrepresentations in the criminal justice system that are incomparable to almost all other forms of disparate treatment in our society. From policing, to the courts, to sentencing, these groups bear (justified or not) the brunt of the system. And although there are numerous ways to examine these overrepresentations, the presentation of McClesky v. Kemp (1987) seems appropriate to understanding enduring prison exoneration.

In short, McClesky v. Kemp was a Supreme Court case where McClesky argued that his death penalty conviction was unconstitutional due to its administration and application in a racially discriminatory manner. In his attempt, he utilized a study by David Baldus that found a racially charged application of the death penalty in Georgia. The Supreme Court, while recognizing the findings of the Baldus study, stated in the majority opinion “as this Court has recognized, any mode for determining guilt or punishment ‘has its weaknesses and the potential for misuse.’" In other words, while the Court recognized the desire for a color-blind justice system, it also recognized a reasonable expectation of race and class-based discrimination as an expected consequence within the system.

The idea of a post-racial society, coupled with the optimistic presumption of the Supreme Court, should indicate that the influence of race and class on the criminal justice system is minimal. However, racial attitudes — both in and out of the criminal justice system — point to a system that will inevitably continue to incarcerate poor Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans based more upon how they are constructed than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” 

For example, race and class-based implicit associations — inherent biases and social constructions that individuals carry about groups and cultures — are the potential starting point for prosecuting the innocent (regardless of the race of the person with the implicit associations). It is how poor, racial and ethnic minorities are implicitly constructed that will determine perceived guilt. In an article entitled “Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain”, Jennifer Richeson is cited as proposing that strong cultural stereotypes linking young African American men with crime, violence and danger can cause the brain to automatically give preferential associations to African American men in situations that support these associations. More important, additional research suggests that implicit associations can directly affect behaviors. Therefore, when criminal justice researchers examine race and class-based overrepresentations in racial profiling, use and excessive use of force, sentencing lengths, and death penalty application, the implicit associations are the potential gateway to discriminatory outcomes and are far stronger an influence than the Supreme Court argues. It should be noted that the examples provided above are of criminal justice professionals, who are trained in the philosophy of a color-blind justice system. The possibility of poor, racial minorities being constructed as guilty when they are in fact innocent is the primary responsibility of jurors — the defendant’s peers.

Jurors as individuals not only have the potential for uninhibited, implicit biases in their judicial verdicts, but also carry the potential for more overt race and class-based biases. Although Whites are neither the sole jurors in the criminal justice system, nor the sole race of people that construct implicit attitudes towards poor minorities, there is a measure of increased accountability as the majority population and the highest likelihood of juror service. In general, attitudinal research suggests that views of Whites regarding poor minorities are less than favorable. Generally, Bobo and Kluegel found in 1997 that Whites rate Blacks relatively lower in terms of intelligence (54%), laziness (62%), a preference to live on welfare (78%), and a proclivity to violence (56%). Specifically regarding views of the criminal justice system, a 2008 Gallup Poll research suggests that 55% of White Americans believe that racial discrimination in prison rates are either a minor factor or no factor of racism (compared to 17% of Black Americans) and that 46% of Whites say that blacks are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than Whites (compared to 72% of Blacks). Consequently, there are similar findings for Hispanics and Native Americans. Overall, seeing jurors as individuals with perceived views of a color-blind system and constructed views of poor Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans as “potential criminals” that fit the constructed stereotypes, can only produce outcomes where truth is second to perception.

Until we as Americans, regardless of race, address our views of poor Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans (many of which predate our existing criminal justice system) we can expect to see more Cornelius Duprees exonerated from the criminal justice system. In the spirit of a criminal justice system that is philosophically rooted in blind fairness, it must have higher standards of accuracy for its courts and jurors.

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Scott Bowman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, Texas State University, San Marcos. He received his PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University. His research focuses on the intersectionalities of race and class, the influences of race and class on criminal behavior, and race, class, and juvenile justice.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday


The establishment of a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King grew out of the numerous localized efforts to honor King in the aftermath of his assassination. During the months following King’s death on April 4, 1968, many communities reacted by naming streets, schools, and other public landmarks after the slain leader. In Chicago, the major avenue on the city’s south side became Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. At colleges and universities throughout the nation, campus buildings and new programs were named in King’s honor.


Some Quick Facts about the Holiday

• Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday, observed on the third Monday of every January (King was born on January 15, 1929).
• The holiday honors famed 1950s and 1960s African American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
• It was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on November 3, 1983.
• The first national celebration of the holiday was held on January 20, 1986.
• Illinois was the first state to declare Martin Luther King Jr. Day a state holiday, in 1973.
• New Hampshire was the last state to officially observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, doing so for the first time in 1999.
• Federal Martin Luther Jr. King Day observation was strongly opposed by North Carolina Senators Jesse Helms and John P. East, based on FBI reports of King’s association with communists and adulterous activities.

Excerpted from American Holidays and National Days, edited by Len Travers.

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Additional Resources

 

The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia
By Clayborne Carson, Tenisha Armstrong, Susan Carson, Erin Cook, Susan Englander
Greenwood, 2008

Based upon the papers of Martin Luther King Jr., this encyclopedia provides fresh and revealing insights into Dr. King's life, work, family, associates, and opponents.