It was beautiful this morning so I walked the three miles to work. My path took me through the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. I chose to walk through its small historic African American section. I passed the newly installed monument remembering those in unmarked graves who, in the engraved words of an enslaved poet, “like birds, retreat / To groves, and hide from ev’ry eye.”
The stone is a welcome addition to this section of the old graveyard. A normal cemetery doesn’t need such a marker. The many individual gravestones and obelisks are there to do the work of memory. The Old Chapel Hill Cemetery has plenty of those where the Aycocks and the Mannings and the Phillipses are buried. But at a certain point as you move back from Ridge Road the gravestones disappear and the ground goes bare. A marker, perhaps lopsided or decapitated and certainly illegible, leans here and there, but the uneven ground is mostly moss and branches and last fall’s unraked leaves.
The new marker helps us populate the barren burial ground in our mind’s eye, helps us imagine the dignity of the many enslaved people laid to rest there and the sorrows of those gathered in small groups as their friends and loved ones went into the ground.
But I prefer to remain in the present. I want to experience the absence of stones and tombs and benches for mourners to rest. I want to pay attention not to the time the people beneath me passed, but to the time since then, the time when, through penury and neglect, presence dissolved to absence. I want to sense my own role in their disappearance. There are people here, but where exactly are they? We don’t know, and the ground keeps its secrets. All cemeteries are homes to ghosts, souls rendered invisible by the passing of the flesh. In the African American section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, the ghosts are doubly invisible, vanished first from life and then again from memory.
These might seem like morbid musings for a sunny morning walk, but what put them in my mind was the controversy about HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s recent comments about enslaved people coming to America, “the land of dreams and opportunity.” Dr. Carson said they were “immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships [and] who worked even longer, even harder” than other immigrants, and “for less,” because “they too had a dream -- that one day their sons, daughters,” and other descendants “might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Immediately there was an uproar against the new HUD Secretary: the enslaved were not “immigrants!”
And immediately there was a defense: President Obama said the same thing! “Life in America wasn’t always easy for new immigrants,” he said in 2015, certainly “those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily and yet in their own way were immigrants themselves.” These people faced “discrimination and hardship and poverty,” but “were able to muster faith that here in America, they might build a better life.”
To me, standing in the African American section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery this morning, both statements seemed obscene. What mars them is not that they call enslaved people “immigrants.” It is that they had the audacity to plant optimism and patriotism in those people’s minds. They ignored the actual things that a malnourished, possibly sick person, ripped from home and family for a miserable voyage to auction in an unknown place across the sea, might reasonably be imagined to think and feel. They put a second yoke on those people, hitching them to a sunny story of American progress and opportunity that we love to tell ourselves about ourselves but has nothing to do with them.
I can’t pretend to know exactly what would be in the mind of an enslaved person on a translatlantic voyage into the unknown. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been a dream of prosperity and happiness for themselves and their progeny. The “American dream,” the narrative of relentless progress and endless possibility of which others would make a national identity, didn’t exist for just about anyone at that time. It certainly didn’t exist for people coming to the American colonies in chains.
Slavery, America’s original sin, was not a hopeful or inspiring thing. It was violence at an institutional level. Nowhere was that violence more evident than in the circumstances of an enslaved person’s transportation to and arrival in America. There is nothing nice to see there, nothing to feel good about.
That is the true affront in Dr. Carson’s and President Obama’s words. They help us feel a little better about something that we have no business feeling better about. They deny the real human experience of the people they purport to honor and recast that experience as something we can take a measure of comfort from. They use those people as a means to someone else’s end in death just as in life.
Let us leave the enslaved people be. Let us stand in the African American section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery as it is today. Let us not fill the dead’s unmarked graves with our own stories.
A thoughtful and beautifully written post, Eric. Thank you.
--Bernie
Posted by: Bernie Burk | March 08, 2017 at 08:57 PM
As usual, an ideologue tells only part of the story, here, the disturbing and pessimistic part, and refuses to see any good anywhere anytime if the good might conflict with the ideologue's Manichean view of things.
This reminds me of AL Brophy, whom I truly respect. A black man is wrongly convicted by an all white jury. His appeal goes to an all white appeals court in a prejudiced state at a prejudiced time, and he is granted a new trial. He is again convicted by an all white jury. this time, his case goes all the way to the SCOTUS. ANd, at this very early time, not so long after the war, his conviction was AGAIN reversed, based on the selection of the jury. He was convicted again.
In debating the good and true nature of the all white appellate courts, Brophy REFUSED to acknowledge anything but the injustice of the all white juries. He repeatedly and stubbornly could not see the good that honest men did to try to afford a possibly (probably?) guilty man justice.
Obama and Carson weren't talking about people on the ships! Can't you see that? When you write your value signaling pieces about how dear you are to justice, how about writing a piece about the "all white" armies that clashed, with so much blood, to free the people who you say never had any hope in America? Write a piece about the years of tears that so many white people have poured out, and their constant efforts to try to see some sort of better conditions for those descended from persons so brutally seized who came here in slavery. And on and on.
Nah. When you see the graves of the dead, you think only of the ships that brought their ancestors here.
How sad.
Posted by: anon | March 08, 2017 at 10:46 PM
anon, thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate them. And Eric, thanks for this terrific post. I'm sorry I have been so quiet of late.
anon is referring to at Jess Hollins debate that began some years ago when I posted a picture of the courthouse where he pled guilty in Oklahoma. (Little aside here, I had an awesome time on that trip. Hope to get back to Oklahoma some time.). The most recent round in that debate appears here: http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2016/06/birth-of-a-nation-the-book.html
As a quick reminder of the case, Hollins pled guilty to assaulting a white woman, then that plea was overturned by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, then he was tried before an all white jury and that conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, then tried again and convicted but sentenced to life in prison and he refused to appeal this because he feared that on retrial he might be given a death sentence again. He died in prison some years later.
One very positive result of that debate was that I investigated the case further and came across Karl Llewellyn's lost forward to an NAACP brief opposing lynching: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619895
Posted by: Al Brophy | March 09, 2017 at 12:47 AM
Having read Eric Muller’s posts since he started blogging, I’m quite surprised to see him described as an “ideologue,” a characterization that could only be made by someone unclear about the meaning of the term or in the habit of misusing it when confronted with information, knowledge or wisdom that they find politically and psychologically unsettling for one reason or another, perhaps because it challenges presuppositions, assumptions, or explicit beliefs of their worldview. The endeavor to understand the nature, history, and consequences of slavery in this country and elsewhere is not burdened with the unrealistic if not absurd obligation to seek out “feel good” material for people unable or unwilling to confront the extent or depths of evil, structural violence, or the systematic racism and inhuman exploitation intrinsic to slavery. And it is absolutely ludicrous to make a grandiose generalization (a conspicuously small sample size, is it not?) to the effect that this post is somehow emblematic or representative of a “refus[al]to see any good anywhere anytime if the good might conflict with the ideologue’s Manichean view of things.”
To appreciate the ideologically rhetorical employment of “the American Dream” in this case is important if only because we live in a time and place when so many Americans are steeped in a debilitating but consoling psychology of self-deception, wishful thinking, and states of denial, evidenced, for example, in the fact that so many of these people who should, as we say, “know better,” recently voted against their true (or ‘enlightened’) self-interests insofar as they favored a presidential candidate who believes populist economic nationalism and protectionist (or mercantilist) trade policies will perform an economic miracle, bringing about socio-economic security and the realization of middle-class dreams, thereby reviving the “Golden Age” of Keynesian and neo-Keynesian “economic nationalism” (as the term is used by the economist Meghnad Desai) that has long been buried (since the late 1970s and early 1980s) by the latest iteration of capitalist globalization. It is further evidenced in the fact that they voted for a political party wedded to and chock full of members identifying with the regnant political and economic plutocracy (as are not a few members of the other major political party), one conspicuously marked by kleptocratic pretensions. Furthermore, they voted for a President afflicted with narcissistic megalomania (and a Midas complex), pubescent character traits and authoritarian propensities in conjunction with a dispositional aversion to truth (quickened by a paranoid penchant for conspiracy theories), which only serves to amplify the already alarming degree and scope of danger that suffuses a political climate of irrationality and unpredictability and a cultural ethos saturated with apocalyptic-like apprehensions. Indeed, this is ample prima facie evidence of the sociological mechanisms associated with an authoritarian character structure and a population narcotized by ideologies that either directly or indirectly promote or permit the regressive and aggressive socio-cultural and political materials found in this country’s history: conformism, homophobia, (white and ‘Christian’) ethno-nationalism, militarism, parochialism, racism, sexism, conspicuous consumption and acquisitiveness, unbridled ambition, celebrity worship and fame-seeking, the will to dominate others, in short, the “false consciousness” well-captured in Erich Fromm’s clever locution, “the pathology of normalcy.” That so many from the working and middle-classes voted against their enlightened self-interests suggests the power of ideologies that preclude the ability to properly conceptualize and understand the nature of capitalism, including its endemic “[c]ycles, with their mania, crashes, and panics.” It reveals a failure to appreciate a fundamental fact of this economic system in our world:
“The influence of capital—either as portfolio finance or as direct investment—the hegemony of financial markets, the increasing penetration of trade, have been experienced by all the worlds: First, Second, and Third. Indeed, this numerical categorization is now otiose. The benefits and costs of capitalism fall symmetrically—though not equally—on all parts of the world. For the first time in two hundred years, the cradle of capitalism—the metropolis, the core—has as much to fear from the rapidity of change as does the periphery.”
The working and middle classes in the U.S. voted as if punch-drunk on a cocktail that could assuage if not soother their fears, anxieties and anger, voted, in other words, for candidates devoted to the privatization of public goods, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the evisceration of remnant unionized workers, a policy prescription that will only deepen their misery, prolong their suffering, and increase their vulnerability.
In short, Professor Muller has shown us how people from both sides of the political aisle can be adept at ideological manipulation of “American Dream” rhetoric, a rhetoric increasingly belied by the social and economic reality on the ground for all but the very wealthy or fortunate few outside their ranks. When “anon” writes that “Obama and Carson weren’t talking about people on the ships! Can’t you see that?,” it’s clear that not even the most generous or indulgent form of hermeneutic charity will not help us, for Carson explicitly cited “immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships,” and when Obama spoke of “those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily and yet in their own way were immigrants,” how does anon think most of these slaves arrived on our shores (not forgetting those who died during the journey), by walking on water? And until emancipation, most of their descendants were no less slaves, a condition and status that is the topic at hand, so it is emphatically the case that the words of both Carson and Obama before him were indeed “obscene,” yet another illustration of ideological deployment that obscures far more than it reveals, hence their “audacity to plant optimism and patriotism in those people’s minds,” hence their avoidance of “the actual things that a malnourished, possibly sick person, ripped from home and family for a miserable voyage to auction in an unknown place across the sea, might reasonably be imagined to think and feel,” hence the impropriety of placing yet “a second yoke on those people, hitching them to a sunny story of American progress and opportunity that we love to tell ourselves about ourselves but has nothing to do with them.” The “American dream” for slaves was a nightmare, the obverse of the “sunny story of American progress and opportunity that we love to tell ourselves about ourselves.” It seems ideological obfuscation can also be blinding in its effects, for how else can we account for anon’s repugnant attempt to tar and feather Professor Muller with a vulgar and fallacious ad hominem argument, for a maddening and pathetic failure to appreciate what was indeed a “thoughtful and beautifully written post.”
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 09, 2017 at 10:32 AM
erratum (4th para.): "...soothe their fears...."
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 09, 2017 at 10:42 AM
sorry, another typo (last para.): "it’s clear that not even the most generous or indulgent form of hermeneutic charity will help us"
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 09, 2017 at 10:45 AM
Where's the reading list?
Posted by: anon | March 09, 2017 at 11:18 AM
I make it my practice not to respond to anonymous commenters, but I'm glad Patrick O'Donnell has a different practice.
Posted by: Eric Muller | March 09, 2017 at 11:27 AM
Incidentally, there is no doubt that main post above is sprung from an "integrated [set] assertions, theories and aims ...." i.e., an ideology. "[T]hey had the audacity to plant optimism and patriotism in those people’s minds." Hmmm ... care to bet whether this author has condemned his political enemies' "dark vision" of America?
The rambling diatribe below the main post in the comments section reflects an even deeper commitment to a self acknowledged, more radical ideology.
What is strange is the notion that this observation is inaccurate or demeaning. Wear that ideologue label proudly, I say! It fits!
Posted by: anon | March 09, 2017 at 11:36 AM
There is no one "reading list" in this case, although I do have several bibliographies (all found on my Academia page, which I'm permitted despite the fact that I am not an academic) that should provide sufficient background material and knowledge to those genuinely interested in a few of the topics broached in the original post and my comment:
• After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, Freedom, and Equality in the U.S.
• Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Slavery
• The World of Work and Labor Law
[This is my last comment on this thread.]
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 09, 2017 at 11:44 AM
False equivalency yet again. Obama's statement qualifies appropriately; Carson's does not. That a huuuge difference.
Posted by: Marilyn Elkins | March 09, 2017 at 07:30 PM
The former: "Life in America wasn’t always easy for new immigrants ... [certainly] those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily and yet in their own way were immigrants themselves."
The latter: "immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships ..."
Yes, I can see the HUUUUGE difference in the way the term "immigrants" was applied. In the former case, it was by one who is always right. In the latter case, by one who must, by definition, always be wrong.
I AM OUTRAGED BY THE LATTER USE OF THE TERM! I AM HEARTENED AND COMFORTED BY THE FORMER!
Oh, yes, we are better than those others, are we not?
Posted by: anon | March 09, 2017 at 07:49 PM