The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  The justifications for enslavement became accepted wisdom and a whole race of people became criminalized. This criminalization is as old as the republic and stems from, among other things, the outside-the-law status imposed on slaves—and the dishonor that accompanies enslavement. Its modern formation is the residue, the assumption of criminality flash-signaled by skin color. People who say this is not so, that there is a disproportionate percentage of crime committed by blacks, miss something: the unconscionable, immoral, and dangerous treatment of blacks by the justice system and the press. It is unconscionable because it is racist disinformation. Unless, for example, you can intelligently use the phrase “white on white crime,” you cannot use the phrase “black on black crime.” It has no meaning and no use other than exoticizing blacks, separating the violence blacks do to one another into some nineteenth-century anthropological racism where the “dark continent” was understood to be violent, blank, unpeopled (the people were likened to nature), an easily available site of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where whites went for self-realization, self-discovery, and loot. Is that white on white crime in Northern Ireland? Bosnia? World War II? (Dan Rather in Somalia.) In this mythic construct it should not be a shock, as it was to me, that the only allegedly raped victim whose face was ever shown in the newspaper and on television to my knowledge was an underage black girl. I have never seen another one. Why? Because there is no honor or privacy due black women when they claim or protest sexual misbehavior, as recent Senate deliberations regarding Clarence Thomas will support.

  This treatment is immoral because it proceeds from corruption—the corruption of accuracy, information, and even truth in the interests of sensation and sales. And it is dangerous because it has nothing to do with the real world of whites or blacks. It has everything to do with mystifying the world—rendering it incomprehensible and assuring the insolubility of its real problems, such as reducing the attraction to and the means of executing crime; such as employing and educating “they, the people”; such as domestic disarmament; such as the health of our communities.

  When the mystification of everyday life is complete, there is nothing new or contemporary in the news. It will be, in spite of its up-to-the-minuteness, as archaic, moribund, and unreal as a quill pen, lagging behind the future in order to enshrine deprivation—making the absence of commodities (poverty) the only despair worth discussing. If poverty and criminality can be off-loaded to blacks, then the illusion of satisfaction and the thrill of the hunt might keep the public still and obedient. But for how long? How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject—advertisement.

  The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy. Otherwise it will be not out of commerce, but already out of business. When the spectacle becomes “public” in the narrowest sense of the word—meaning available to purchase—the world can buy you, but it can’t afford you.

  Now I have been talking to you as though you were a single organism that took shape and grew by some immutable natural law outside human decision-making. When in fact, you are people, human individuals with a stake in being so. You have public-spiritedness and dreams of a secure democracy, as well as prejudices that seep through and shape the tools at your disposal. Boards of directors, owners, and editorial managers are made up of people trying to get profitable, stay profitable, and increase profitability. That must be tough. But if your industry becomes socially irrelevant, it will be impossible.

  I suspect that a nonracist, nonsexist, educating press is as profitable as one that is not. I suspect that clarification of difficult issues is just as entertaining as obscuring and reducing them is. But it will take more than an effort of the will to make such a press profitable; it will take imagination, invention, and a strong sense of responsibility and accountability. Without you, by ourselves we can just pull raw data off of our computers; shape it ourselves, talk to one another, question one another, argue, get it wrong, get it right. Reinvent public space, in other words, and the public dialogue that can take place within it. The generations of students that I teach (and my own sons, for that matter) do it all the time.

  But, irrespective of the internet’s CompuServes, nodes, bulletin boards, Lexus—whatever makes the information highway work—there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You’ve done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

  Moral Inhabitants

  IN The Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 right after “rice” and just before “tar” and “turpentine” are the humans. The rice is measured by pounds; the pitch, tar, and turpentine by the barrel weight. There was no way to measure by pound, tonnage, or barrel weight the humans. Head count served the purpose of measuring. This reference book is full of fascinating information, not the least of which is Series Z 281–303, which documents, in chronological order and by point of destination, the import and export of humans in the United States from 1619 to 1773. Every effort seems to have been made to assure the accuracy of the tables. Below the neat columns of figures, footnotes seem to apologize for the occasional lapses from complete information. “We are sorry,” the Bureau of the Census seems to be saying, “that better records were not kept or available to us. The country was just getting itself together, you understand, and things were less than efficient.”

  One senses reasonableness and gentlemanly assertion everywhere in these pages. But it is reasonableness without the least hope of success, for the language itself cracks under the weight of its own implications. Footnote 3, for example, under “Slaves” clarifies the ambiguity of its reference with the following words: “Source also shows 72 Indian slaves imported; 231 slaves died and 103 drawn back for exportation.” “Died”…“drawn back”—strange, violent words that could never be used to describe rice, or tar, or turpentine. Footnote 5, by far the coolest in its civilized accuracy, is as follows: “Number of Negroes shipped, not those actually arrived.” There was a difference, apparently, between the number shipped and the number that arrived. The mind gallops to the first unanswered question: How many? How many were shipped? How many did not arrive? Then the mind slides toward the next question—the vital one that withers all others: Who? Who was absent at the final head count? Was there a seventeen-year-old girl there with a tree-shaped scar on her knee? And what was her name?

  I do not know why it is so difficult to imagine and therefore to realize a genuinely humane society—whether the solutions lie in natural sciences, the social sciences, theology or philosophy or even belles lettres. But the fact is that the Historical Statistics of the United States is pretty much like what the contours of academic scholarship are now and have always been: the equating of human beings with commodity, lumping them together in alphabetical order—when even the language used to describe these acts bends and breaks under that heavy and alien responsibility. The gentle souls, those dedicated civil servants of the Census Bureau do not create facts, they simply record them. But their work, I believe, reflects the flaw that obstructs the imaginative and humane scholarship and the realization of a humane society. Such scholarship would be one in which the thrust is toward the creation of members of a society who can make humane decisions. And who do. It is a scholarship that refuses to continue to produce generation after generation of students who are trained to make distinctions between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor but not between rice and human beings. To make distinctions between an expendable life and an indispensa
ble one, but not between slaves and turpentine. Trained to determine who shall flourish and who shall wither, but not between the weight of a barrel and the sanctity of a human head.

  That is what indices are like, of course. Not the fan-shaped spread of rice bursting from a gunnysack. Not the thunder roll of barrels of turpentine cascading down a plank. And not a seventeen-year-old girl with a tree-shaped scar on her knee—and a name. History is percentiles, the thoughts of great men, and the description of eras. Does the girl know that the reason that she died in the sea or in a twenty-foot slop pit on a ship named Jesus is because that was her era? Or that some great men thought up her destiny for her as part of a percentage of national growth, or expansion, or manifest destiny, or colonialization of a new world? It is awkward to differ from a great man, but Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.

  The matrix out of which these powerful decisions are born is sometimes called racism, sometimes classicism, sometimes sexism. Each is an accurate term surely, but each is also misleading. The source is a deplorable inability to project, to become the “other,” to imagine her or him. It is an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the imagination, and reveals an ignorance of gothic proportions as well as a truly laughable lack of curiosity. Of course historians cannot deal with rice grain by grain; they have to deal with it in bulk. But dependence on that discipline should not be so heavy that it leads us to do likewise in human relationships. One of the major signs of intelligence, after all, is the ability to make distinctions, small distinctions. We judge an intellect by the ease with which it can tell the difference between one molecule and another, one cell and another, between a 1957 Bordeaux and a 1968, between mauve and orchid, between the words “wrest” and “pry,” between clabber and buttermilk, between Chanel No. 5 and Chanel No. 19. It would seem, then, that to continue to see any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance so vast, a perception so blunted, an imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can penetrate. Except the large differences: who shall flourish and who shall wither, who deserves state assistance and who does not. Which may explain why we are left with pretty much the same mental equipment in 1977 that we had in 1776. An intelligence so crippled that it could, as a white professor did in 1905, ask W. E. B. Du Bois “whether colored people shed tears” is also crippled enough to study the “genetic” influences on intelligence of a race so mixed that any experimental data similarly performed on mice would fall apart at the outset.

  If education is about anything other than being able to earn more money (and it may not be about any other thing), that other thing is intelligent problem-solving and humans relating to one another in mutually constructive ways. But educational institutions and some of our most distinguished scholars have considered the cooperation among human beings and mutually constructive goals to be fourth- and fifth-rate concerns where they were concerns at all. The history of the country is all the proof one needs that it is so.

  Now no one can fault the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his point of view. But we can fault him for not owning up to what his point of view is. It might prove a useful exercise, in this regard, to look at some of the things our conquerors (our forefathers), our men of vision and power in America have actually said.

  Andrew Jackson, December 3, 1833:

  “Indians have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”

  Theodore Roosevelt (to Owen Wister) 1901:

  “I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass the [blacks] are altogether inferior to the whites.

  “I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”

  General Ulysses S. Grant:

  (to) General Webster

  La Grange, Tenn.

  November 10, 1862

  “Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”

  Holly Springs, Miss.

  December 8, 1862

  General Order

  “On account of the scarcity of provisions all cotton speculators, Jews, and other vagrants having no honest means of support, except trading upon the misery of the country…”

  Sam Houston, U.S. Senate, 1848:

  “The Anglo-Saxon [must] pervade the whole southern extremity of this vast continent….(The) Mexicans are no better than the Indians and I see no reason why we should not take their land.”

  Freeman’s Journal, March 4, 1848:

  “Our object is to show, once more, that Protestantism is effete, powerless, dying out though disturbed only by its proper gangrenes, and conscious that its last moment is come when it is fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth.”

  Richard Pike, Boston, 1854:

  “Catholicism is, and it ever has been, a bigoted, a persecuting, and a superstitious religion. There is no crime in the calendar of infamy of which it has not been guilty. There is no sin against humanity which it has not committed. There is no blasphemy against God which it has not sanctioned. It is a power which has never scrupled to break its faith solemnly plighted, wherever its interests seem to require it; which has no conscience; which spurns the control of public opinion; and which obtrudes its head among the nations of Christendom, dripping with the cruelties of millions of murders, and haggard with the debaucheries of a thousand years, always ambitious, always sanguinary, and always false.”

  New York Tribune, 1854

  “The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the barest order.”

  General William Sherman:

  “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case. The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they will all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper.”

  Benjamin Franklin, 1751:

  “Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?”