Giving A Damn

Racism, Romance and Gone with the Wind

Patricia Williams

• Publisher: TLS Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008404512
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

‘I cannot help but see the bodies of my near ancestors in the current caravans of desperate souls fleeing from place to place, chased by famine, war and toxins. Ideas honed in slavery – of the otherness, the boorishness, the inferiority of thy neighbour – have continued to travel through American society.’

The story of slavery in America is not over. It lives on in how we speak to one another, in how we treat one another, in how our societies are organised. In The Ethical Reader, the legal scholar Patricia Williams finds that when you begin to unpick current debates around immigration, freedom of speech, the culture wars and wall-building, beneath them lies the unexamined history of enslavement in the West. Our ability to dehumanize one another can be traced all the way from the plantation to the US President’s Twitter account.

Williams begins in the American South with Gone With the Wind (still the second most popular book in the USA after the Bible), that nostalgic tale full of the myths of the Southern belle, Southern culture, ‘good food and good manners’. The scene is seductive, from a distance. How nice it is to paper over the obliging slavery at the novel’s core, and enjoy the wisteria-covered plantations, now the venue for weddings.

But Williams’s maternal great-grandmother was a slave, her great-grandfather a slave-owner, and papering over has left us in a world that has never been more segregated, incarcerated or separated from each other. Williams wants to know which ideas brought the richest and most diverse nation on the planet to the brink of resurgent, violent division and what this means for the rest of the world. And she finds that most of those ideas began in slavery.

Notes

I. ‘The Battle of Love’

1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1957. Citations refer to the 1957 edition. Hereafter referred to as GWTW.

2. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, translation by James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. p. 7.

3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

4. Michael Kimmelman, ‘Charleston Needs That African American Museum. And Now’, The New York Times, March 29, 2018.

5. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905.

6. Ibid., p. 67.

7. Ibid., p. 149.

8. Laura Isensee, ‘Why Calling Slaves “Workers” Is More Than An Editing Error’, National Public Radio, October 23, 2015; see also, Margaret Biser, ‘I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery’, Vox, August 28, 2017.

9. Gillian Brockell, ‘Some white people don’t want to hear about slavery at plantations built by slaves’, Washington Post, August 8, 2019.

10. GWTW, p. 54.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., pp. 17–18. Quotation from Pat Conroy’s Preface to the Scribner edition of Gone with the Wind (New York: Scribner, 2011). All subsequent citations from Pat Conroy’s Preface refer to the 2011 Scribner edition.

13. Ibid., p. 678.

14. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.

15. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. Georgia: Brown Thrasher Books, 1863. Reprint, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

16. See, ‘The 1927 Slave Auction at Monticello’, https://www.monticello.org/slaveauction/

17. ‘Recollections of Peter Fossett’, The New York World, January 30, 1898.

18. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, London: H. G. Collins, 1851, p. 45.

19. James Baldwin, ‘The White Man’s Guilt’, in Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. p. 723.

20. Laura Vozella and Gregory Schneider, ‘Gov. Northam refuses to step down, despite flood of calls for his resignation over racist photo’, Washington Post, February 2, 2019.

21. Adeel Hassan, ‘Virginia’s First Lady Apologizes for Handing Cotton to Black Students on Tour’, The New York Times, February 28, 2019.

22. ‘Kevin Beasley’s Raw Materials’, Art 21, February 6, 2019.

23. ‘Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam Draws Scorn for “Indentured Servants” Remark’, The Daily Beast, February 10, 2019.

24. Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: The New Press, 2018. p. 170.

25. GWTW, pp. 679–680.

26. Peter Sblendorio, ‘Sportscaster Warner Wolf arrested for taking the word “Plantation” off sign at his gated community’, New York Daily News, February 8, 2019.

27. Teo Armus, ‘St. Louis lawyer who waved gun at protesters says he was “victim of a mob”’, Washington Post, July 1, 2020.

28. Walter Johnson, ‘The Revolution at the Gate’, Boston Review, July 7, 2020.

29. Ibid.

30. Teo Armus, ‘St. Louis lawyer who waved gun at protesters says he was “victim of a mob”’, the Washington Post, July 1, 2020.

31. ‘Central West End couple explains why they pointed guns at protesters who demanded Krewson’s resignation’, KMOV4 News, June 29, 2020.

32. GWTW, p. 439.

33. Donald Trump has claimed that there are seventy-seven walls worldwide, researchers say that ‘seven such barriers are not expected to materialise any time soon and are still in the planning stage’ as of 2019. Palko Karasz, ‘Fact Check: Trump’s Tweet on Border Walls in Europe’, The New York Times, January 17, 2019.

34. Nadja Sayej, ‘Ai Weiwei launches controversial public art project focused on immigration’, Guardian, October 17, 2017.

35. Jessica Kutz, ‘Triumph and tragedy: Trump’s border wall expands’, High Country News, April 20, 2020.

36. Gus Bova, ‘Audio: Border Patrol Plans to Light Up Butterfly Refuge Like a “War Zone”’, Texas Observer, January 16, 2019.

37. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942–1944, edited by Hana Volavkova. New York: Schocken Press, 1994.

38. Josh Begley, ‘Prison Map’, http://prisonmap.com/

39. Nicholas Mirzeoff, ‘Ghostwriting: working out visual culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 1(2): 239–254, 2002.

40. Nicholas Mirzeoff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Duke University Press, 2011.

II. ‘The Supreme Test’

1. GWTW, p. 651.

2. GWTW, p. 16.

3. Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, The Politics of Imagination, Birkbeck Law Press, 2011, p. 3.

4. GWTW, p. 18.

5. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905. p. i.

6. Ibid., p. 74.

7. Helen Klein Ross, ‘Hatred Endorsed by a President’, Lapham’s Quarterly, November 8, 2018.

8. Alex Horton, ‘A Latina novelist spoke about white privilege. Students burned her book in response’, Washington Post, October 11, 2019.

9. The white students who burned the book seemed to be saying that Crucet had dumped on all white people when she mentioned the flow of white tears. In this instance, however, it might appear that ‘white tears’ and ‘white privilege’ were displaced by an intense and seemingly contagious ‘white rage’ at being asked to look around and interrogate where all the people of colour might be.

10. ‘Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Ban’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’, April 2, 2012; see also, Rebecca Huval, ‘Updates from the Tucson Unified School District’, Independent Lens Newsletter, Public Broadcasting Corporation, April 18, 2012.

11. Ibid.

12. ‘Federal judge tells Arizona it can’t ban Mexican American studi...

Table of contents

• About the TLS
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• I. ‘The Battle of Love’
• II. ‘The Supreme Test’
• III. ‘Across the Chasm’
• IV. ‘The Snare of the Fowler’
• V. ‘The Eyes of the Jungle’
• VI. ‘The Great Heart’
• VII. ‘Vengeance Is Mine’
• VIII. ‘The Fiery Cross’
• IX. The First Lady of the Land
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Enjoyed the book?
• Also from TLS Books
• About the Publisher