BOOK REVIEWS
Susan Abulhawa, author of THE SCAR OF DAVID, human
rights activist and founder of Playgrounds for Palestine
will have two book readings and signings on
Saturday, July 7 at 2PM in Dallas/Frisco TX and
Wednesday, July 11, 7PM at Borders Bookstores in
Langhorne PA.
http://www.scarofdavid.com/events
DALLAS/FRISCO,
TX -- THE Bookworm / 3245 Main Street Frisco / Sat.
July 7 2PM (972) 712-1455.
Susan will also be participating in panel
discussions/debates to present the realities of
Israeli occupation in Palestine. LANGHORNE PA ---
Borders Bookstore / Directions Below /
Wed
July 11 7PM (215) 943-6600 We are
proud to announce The Wisconsin Humanities Council will
be presenting Susan Abulhawa and THE SCAR OF DAVID at The
Wisconsin Book Festival this fall. WBF is one of the top
five book festivals in the country, and the nation's
largest free event, hosting nearly 20,000 attendees and
staging over 100 events. Please plan to
attend a reading near your home. For directions
http://www.friscobookworm.com/
http://www.bordersstores.com/events/event_detail.jsp?SEID=173010
Susan
Abulhawa - PfP Founder - Upcoming Events for July 2007
Press
Release:
May 24, 2007, Bayside, NY -- Barnes and Noble
Booksellers of the Bay Terrace Shopping Center
hosted author Susan Abulhawa to give a brief
talk about her book The Scar of David,
which was first published in December, 2006. After the
talk attendees brought their copies to her to sign.
Earlier in the day, Ms. Abulhawa had attended a Kingsboro
Community College class, whose professor had made the
book assigned reading this semester. According to a
Kingsboro College spokesperson, such attendance did not
constitute a college-sponsored event. The
originally B scheduled event was to have included a
reading from the novel, but Rabbi Bruce Goldwasser of
Temple Beth Sholom in Flushing encouraged a call-in and a
boycott of the bookstore as intimidation. He
claimed, "It's an historical novel based on made-up
stuff. The made-up stuff is that Israelis were forcing
the Arabs out of their homes." Temple
Beth Sholom is taking part in the Terror Free Oil
campaign of Joe Kaufman, who is the Chairman of Americans
Against Hate and CAIR Watch. CAIR is the Committee
on American-Islamic Relations, whose "mission is to enhance understanding of Islam,
encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower
American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote
justice and mutual understanding." The
incitement against Ms. Abulhawa and her book
started approximately three weeks ago when Queens
Jewish Community Council President Jan Fenster and
Executive Director Cynthia Zalisky circulated a
memorandum throughout the Queens Jewish Community that
stated the following.
QJCC values freedom of speech, recognizing that
this right is accompanied by responsibility. QJCC
does not want to add to the publicity of this book
with rallies or newspaper articles/letters to the
editor, but suggests a letter writing/phone calling
campaign to the Bayside Barnes and Noble stating
displeasure with this author's appearance and the
lack of balance of Israel's point of view. The
issues of the Middle East are complex and require a
thoughtful presentation. If Banes and Noble still
wishes to have this woman appear then it behooves
them to invite an author that relates Israel's point
of view such as Michael Oren or Dore Gold.
Please inform your congregations of this unfair and
biased presentation.
According to a Barnes Noble spokeswoman the
store received about 15 phone calls a day, many
negative, and four Queens rabbis faxed a joint letter of
condemnation. CAIR faxed a complaint about the pressure
tactics and asked that the scheduled reading take place.
When the Ms. Abulhawa and her literary agent Mark
B. Miller arrived, they found that the space for
an audience had been filled with display
tables. Between 7:15-7:30 PM as attendees
arrived, many police officers stood in front of the
building. One policeman stated that they were
taking their lunch break Mr. Miller told the
audience that not everyone is so afraid to address the
crimes committed against Palestinians. "The French
publisher will release the French version in 2008 on the 60th
anniversary of Israel's formation to make sure that the
Israeli version is not the only version the public
hears."
Ms. Abulhawa remarked that the central idea
of the book was not hers but originates with
Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, who presented the
idea of an Arab child raised as an Israeli Jew in
"Return to Haifa." Israeli agents
assassinated Kanafani in 1972. Kaiss al-Zubaidi directed
a movie version of Kanafani's story. The film was
released in 1982. Ms. Abulhawa's book is a
page turner and tear jerker in which the metaphor of the
scarred stolen child stands for the theft of
Palestine. Ms. Abulhawa wanted to "show the
Palestinian narrative in a human light." She said,
"Art is about finding common human ground and making
the connections."
View full size
When asked why CAIR attempted to intervene, she pointed
out that she cannot speak for CAIR but noted, "I am
a Muslim and a big supporter of CAIR. They are a civil
rights group. They saw a violation."
Ms. Abulhawa told the audience, "Barack Obama gave
an abominable cowardly speech to AIPAC. None of the
candidates take a moral stance. We fought a civil war
against racial subjugation. We should not support that
crime in another country. Israel is founded on the
concept of entitlement of one people at the direct
detriment of another." Ms. Abulhawa added
that the historical backdrop of her novel was accurate,
but all of the characters are fictitious even if
some of the story like the orphanage chapter was drawn
from her experiences. She said, "My
friends cursed me for making them cry so
much." Then she added, "Anytime you
humanize Palestinians, you get shut up." But perhaps
not this time. Mr. Miller disclosed that a Dutch studio
has shown interest in producing a movie based on the
book. Action memorandum from Queens Jewish
Community Council, Inc. to organize pressure on
Barnes and Noble: http://members.aol.com/ThorsProvoni/JewishPolit
*********************************
'END THE WAR
IN IRAQ' BY TOM HAYDEN
ZNet Commentary
Tom Hayden's War June 04, 2007
By Vijay Prashad
Tom Hayden is a veteran of peace. A pioneer of the
anti-war movement in the 1960s (including as one of the
Chicago 7), Hayden is now, after a hiatus in California
politics in the 1990s, a central figure in the current
anti-war movement. His range of experience, both in terms
of time spent in the struggle and institutions struggled
with and against, make his counsel important. This is why
his new book, Ending the War in Iraq (Akashic Books,
2007) should be compulsory reading not only for anti-war
activists, but for all Americans who are interested in
making something of the country.
Hayden's horizon for this book is that the U. S. needs to
withdraw from Iraq. That is a necessary first-step for
any progressive agenda. But to engineer the withdrawal,
the American public needs to grasp at least three things:
(1) that the war and occupation are a fiasco for the
interests of the American and Iraqi people, and that they
have only exacerbated the insecurity of both; (2) that
the Iraqi resistance has a popular base among the
majority of the Iraqi people, and therefore it cannot be
defeated by a conventional or counter-insurgency military
operation without an immense loss of life; (3) the
anti-war movement in the U. S. does not march to the tune
of a single drummer but it is nonetheless powerful and
effective, and has had an honorable lifespan since 2002.
Having established these three points in the first three
chapters, Hayden then takes us into the fourth, the one
which is of great importance: how we, as progressives, as
people, can end this war.
Hayden starts his analysis by pointing to the eight
pillars of the Bush strategy in Iraq: Iraqi support;
American public opinion; American media; Political
support; U. S. military capacity; U. S. financial
capacity; Moral reputation; U. S. global alliances. He
spends a few hundred words showing how each of these
works to shore up the Bush strategy, and then offers a
few hundred words to show what U. S.-based activists can
do to undermine that pillar. Each of these pillars is
significant, and he offers very useful methods to deal
with them. Two of them, for instance, are already
important places where our movement intervenes: at the
pillar of U. S. military capacity, the
counter-recruitment movement and the anti-contractor
campaigns have made and continue to make a significant
dent; at the pillar of U. S. financial capacity, the work
of the National Priorities Project to unravel the costs
of war is central as is the use of this data in
localities to point out how, for instance, schools are
being under funded to pay for the war.
But there is one pillar that does not get much notice or
take much of our effort: the pillar of Iraqi support. It
is related to another important pillar, the American
media. The American, or to give it its correct name,
capitalist media (cap media as it was once called) has
effectively blocked off from the U. S. public the erosion
of Iraqi public support for the war and occupation.
Whereas right after the actual invasion ended in 2003, a
substantial number of Iraqis, for whatever reason,
claimed to support the new dispensation. Now, 61% of
Iraqis support the resistance and two-thirds of the
population wants an immediate withdrawal of U. S. troops,
regardless of the consequences. These facts are not
discussed in the capitalist media, and therefore don't
often make it to the tablogoids or the water coolers.
Apart from the facts, there is no sense of the people
behind them. The capitalist media does not meet average
Iraqis who are part of the 61% and ask them why they
support the resistance, what this means for them, and
what they would like the Americans to do? Without such
stories, the resistance, and so the majority of the Iraqi
people, is demonized by the capitalist media, who then
feed us a story that the resistance is comprised of
ex-Ba'athists, fundamentalists and others who are
historical anachronisms.
The activist media needs to refute this picture, and
reveal to our public and to our elected representatives
that true extent of Iraqi public opinion in depth as much
as in these statistics. We need to gather the stories of
suffering that constitute the basis for the Iraqi
people's opinions.
We must show our public that the U. S. occupation is
playing a very dangerous game, of supporting a sectarian
government while paying lip service to being against
sectarianism. What we have is not a Civil War (which
assumes that there are two relatively co-equal parties in
conflict within a nation); we have an Occupation taking
the side of one political force that wants to inflict
damage on other (Sunni, but also secular and
secular-nationalist) political forces. The venomous
Bernard Lewis approvingly predicted this state of affairs
in 1992, "If the central power is sufficiently
weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the
polity together. The state then disintegrates into a
chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes,
regions and parties."
Much of the groundwork for the destruction of Iraqi civil
society happened during Saddam Hussein regime (1978 on),
but the appalling destruction of the Gulf War
(1990-1991), the brutal sanctions regime (1990-2003) and
the early years of the Occupation (2003-2005) certainly
devastated civil capacity. This internecine conflict in
Iraq is buttressed by the U. S. military presence, whose
support of the Shi'a-alliance contributes to the problem
without posing any solution to it. As Hayden points out,
if the U. S. public was taken to war through
fabrications, it is being stopped from withdrawal by an
equal dose of fabrications (that chaos will ensue with
the withdrawal, as if chaos is not already Iraq's
reality). One of our tasks should be to take the measure
of Iraqi public opinion and bring that to the living
rooms and streets of the U.S.
The Democratic Congress, despite a spirited move by the
Out of Iraq Caucus, could not cut off funding for this
unpopular and criminal Occupation. Hayden gives those
within Congress who are yet in the fight a very useful
way to shift U. S. public opinion. We could, in our
localities, "hold hearings on taxpayer funding for
Iraqi ministries filled by militias and death squads.
Cutting off all congressional funding will be more
palatable when people and politicians fully grasp the
dysfunctional, repressive, and sectarian nature of the
Iraqi government, and realize that American troops are
supporting the Shi'a-Kurdish side in a civil war."
This is a very valuable way to bring Iraqi public opinion
to the U. S., and thereby to sharpen U. S. public
discontent with the Occupation.
Tom Hayden's book is a very useful primer. It needs to be
read and to be drawn from. Our movement is powerful, and
now it needs to be pointed in the right direction. There
are some good signposts in this book.Prashad
Tom Hayden's War Jun 04
Book Review by Joachim
Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
[Originally published on
Monday, Nov 3, 2003 -- republished because
of the debate over the proposed UK boycott of Israeli
academia]
Even if The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology,
Theory, Ideology and Identity by Uri Ram is somewhat
dated, this book remains useful because it surveys a
lot of the important English and Hebrew sociological
literature about the State of Israel. Non-Hebrew readers
can thus gain some access to otherwise inaccessible
scholarship. Because Zionist censorship for the
most part controls US public discourse, the ability to
cite genuine Hebrew sources can protect against attempts
to silence discussion by means of accusations of
anti-Semitism.(*)
I now understand more why so many Israeli sociologists
write history books and articles. So much of Zionist
social activity connects to various (mostly false)
conceptions of Jewish history that Israeli sociologists
need to develop a historical perspective in order to do
sociological research.
Because Uri Ram is a post-Zionist, he tries hard not to
act as a Zionist propagandist. He is aware of the
complete fabrication of modern Zionist identity. If I am
not mistaken, his earliest important work describes how
Ben-Zion Dinur and colleagues created the educational
system in the 1950s that constructed the Zionist national
consciousness first among Israeli Jews and then among
American Ashkenazim.
Before this propagandization, normal Rabbinic Hebrew
terminology describes the Jewish community with
phrases like klal yisrael, the community of
Israel. Thanks to the efforts of the Zionist
educational establishment, ha`am hayyehudi (the
Jewish nation or people in the Central and Eastern
European voelkisch racist sense) has gradually
replaced klal yisrael or similar idioms in
popular usage and in the dominant
consciousness of Israeli Jews, Ashkenazi Americans,
non-Jewish Americans and many Europeans. While Ram
even correctly labels the 1967 Israeli aggression as a
preventive war and not as a preemptive war, he like all
other Israel-trained sociologists occasionally shows the
effects of the indoctrination of the Zionist educational
system.
Even though this relatively short book (207 pages)
is quite lucid in comparison with sociological papers,
the text is probably tough reading for the
non-sociologist. The first chapters that discuss the
initially dominant functional school of sociology are
probably the hardest, but they contain useful
information. In particular, the discussion supports the
contention that Israeli academia does not constitute a
system of higher learning in any real sense but plays the
role of a system of higher propaganda. The material
in these chapters provides support for the boycott of
Israeli academics because they are mostly not scholars
but serve Zionist aggression and racism on the
intellectual front.
The chapter on the sociology of elitism identifies the
intellectual origins of the Israeli polity in Eastern
Europe and bolsters the contention that Israel is a
formal democracy that combines characteristics of interbellum
Poland and other Eastern European states of that time
period with aspects of the Soviet organizational
model. Americans often have difficulty grasping
this point that Israel is only an apparent democracy
because they are unfamiliar with Eastern European pseudodemocratic
posturing.
The reader must approach some of the material in the
discussion of elitism cum grano salis because Yonatan
Shapiro, the creator of the Israeli sociology of elitism,
was himself an unrepentant Labor Zionist and consciously
or unconsciously confused the distinct ideologies of
Fascism and Nazism. Shapiro has no problem
identifying the authoritarian nature of Herut (Begin's)
politics but is blind to the Leninist authoritarian style
of the politics of Labor and its predecessors even though
Ben-Gurion and most of the founders of Ahdut ha`Avodah
were open and frank admirers of Leninist political
techniques. Shapiro's prejudices make it difficult
for him to understand of the fall of Labor from power in
1977 or to relate it to similar developments in Eastern
Europe.
The following comment (p. 72) in the chapter on elitism
has qualified relevance to the politics of family values
in the USA: "As for the role of 'values,' Shapiro
insists that they are mere derivatives of strategic
interests and instruments of domination, which cannot in
themselves explain much about any social structure."
Sami Smooha introduced the school of pluralism to Israeli
sociology. I have not read much of his work, but if Ram
describes it correctly, Smooha was daring by the
standards of Israeli academia. Yet Zionist
indoctrination has distorted his work, for he appears to
view the accidentally fabricated Mizrahi (oriental
Jewish) identity as comparable to Eastern European Ashkenazi
ethnic identity.
Shlomo Swirski introduced the Marxist perspective to
Israeli sociology, but if Ram's description is accurate,
he has not read much of Katznelson's, Arlosoroff's or Jabotinsky's
writings, for he is unable to identify Labor Zionism as
fascist and fails to perceive the abstract Nazism in
Revisionism (Jabotinskian or Likud ideology). Swirski
needs to investigate more about the behavior of Zionists
in the pre-State period toward `edothammizrah
(oriental communities).
The actions of pre-State Ashkenazi Zionists toward those
few Oriental Jews, who wanted to assist the Zionist
movement, shows that Ashkenazi Zionists had no genuine
interest in Jewish Arabs or Persians and only worked to
bring them to Israel when they realized
1) that there were not enough Ashkenazi settler-colonists
to hold Palestine and
2) that the Zionist state needed a class of native
collaborators as raw manpower and cannon fodder.
Swirski believes that Israel needs a "second" Mizrahi
Zionist revolution to achieve social equality. The
point of view looks confused to me but was so offensive
to the Israeli establishment that Swirski was driven from
the Israeli university system. He is probably
better off.
The discussion of Israeli sociologists of feminism is
interesting, but these researchers apparently do not know
enough about Eastern European Ashkenazi gender roles or
relations to provide much useful information about
gender-related developments either among Israeli Jews or
among American Ashkenazim.
Nordau's concept of Muskeljudentum, which is
superficially a call for Jews to be come athletic but at
a deeper level proposes to remake Judaism into
a religion or ideology of conquest and violence, is
probably a direct reaction to the traditional Central and
Eastern European perception of Ashkenazi males as weak
and effeminate. The gratuitous violence that the IDF
commits on all Palestinians as well as the gross
vulgarity of IDF soldiers toward Palestinian women and
girls is probably a form of psychological compensation
for historic European attitudes toward Ashkenazi males.
In Ram's book, the best comes last. The Israeli
sociology of colonization is closest to the reality of
the State of Israel and Zionist crimes against the native
population. Colonization sociologists have
developed some interesting euphemisms and linguistic
distinctions, but to their credit they have made more
progress in bringing their analysis into public
discussion than comparable American academic
investigators and researchers of Israel have achieved.
I liked the phraseology on page 176.
"The Israeli economy is unique in that it does not
rest either on a profit economy or on the accumulation of
debt, but rather on unilateral capital transfers.
This enables the Israeli ruling bureaucracy to maintain
an enormous military establishment and simultaneously to
guarantee a reasonable standard of living to the
population."
I would have bluntly stated that Israel has no genuine
economy but serves purely as a racist Jewish garrison
colony in the Middle East for its colonial motherland,
the USA.
Either formulation suggests the following obvious
questions.
1. What possible reason could Israeli leaders have to
work toward a reasonable modus vivendiwith
Palestinians? And
2. what possible reason could Neoconservatives have to
work for the stabilization of the ME?
If there were no conflict over Palestine and if the Middle
East became stable, the US-to-Israel capital transfers,
which are directly or indirectly the major source of
funds for the Zionist and Neoconservative leaderships,
would end, for the American political leadership would no
longer be able to justify the massive US economic support
of the State of Israel.
Israeli colonization sociologists are unfamiliar with the
Czarist colonization enterprise in the Caucasus and Southwest
Asia although it provides the template for Zionist
efforts in Palestine (think Chechnya). These
researchers also seem to lack an understanding of the
collectivist nature of traditional Eastern European
culture and in particular of traditional Eastern European
Ashkenazi culture.
Israeli sociologists have generally failed to relate
modern Israeli culture (and modern Ashkenazi American
culture) to traditional ethnic Ashkenazi culture because
they are so entranced both by Zionist sloganeering for
the negation of the Diaspora and also by Zionist myth of
a single Jewish Volk -- even those researchers
like Ram, who intellectually know that `am yehudi
is purely a Zionist nationalist construct.
The book itself provides inadvertent evidence that the
traditional Eastern European Ashkenazi social mechanisms
for the control of deviance are still operative (albeit
weakened) among Israeli Jews just as they continue to
exist among Ashkenazi Americans. Even
though Ram is oblivious to the obvious need for a
unified sociology of traditional Eastern European Ashkenazi
culture in its Eastern European context and of the
evolution of this culture both in the American and
Israeli context, reading his book is well worth the
effort, for gaining an understanding of the historical
and current flawed state of Israeli sociology helps the
reader to understand the Zionist enterprise and provides
him with much data necessary to inform the American
public of the truth and to combat Zionist propagandists
in the USA.
(*) Zionist control of public discussion in the USA about
Israel is particularly obvious in the current murderous IDF
rampage. I have yet to see any English media source
connect the ongoing killing of Palestinians with the
accusations of corruption against Sharon and his
family. When Israeli leaders run afoul of the law
or into trouble at the polls, they invariably order the IDF
to slaughter Arabs as a distraction because killing Arabs
is very popular with Israeli Zionists as Israeli polls
have shown since the 1950s. Yet, no hint of the
connection of Israeli domestic politics to Israeli murder
of Palestinians appears anywhere in the US media.
Thomas Agonistes
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
SUPREME DISCOMFORT
The Divided
Soul of Clarence Thomas
By Kevin
Merida and Michael A. Fletcher.
Illustrated. 422 pp. Doubleday. $26.95.
After all the twisted racial history of
the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was
confirmed by the Senate with the smallest margin of
victory in more than 100 years, with little professional
scrutiny and with a level of manipulative political
rancor that diminished everyone directly involved. The
effect on Thomas, we learn from this impeccably
researched and probing biography, was to reinforce the
chronic contradictions with which he has long lived.
Thus, although he seriously believes
that his extremely conservative legal opinions are in the
best interests of African-Americans, and yearns to be
respected by them, he is arguably one of the most
viscerally despised people in black America. It is
incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative
action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces
the policy and has persuaded himself that it played
little part in his success. He berates disadvantaged
people who view themselves as victims of racism and
preaches an austere individualism, yet harbors
self-pitying feelings of resentment and anger at his own
experiences of racism. His ardent defense of states
rights would have required him to uphold Virginias
anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated
education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He
is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the
legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his
numerous poor relatives. He frequently preaches the
virtues of honesty and truthfulness, yet there is now
little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his
confirmation hearings not only about his
pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about
his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v.
Wade.
Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher
conducted hundreds of interviews with Thomass
friends, relatives and colleagues for Supreme
Discomfort, in addition to doing extensive archival
research. Although Thomas refused to be interviewed, this
was not a serious handicap, given his vast paper and
video trail and his volubility about his feelings. The
authors superbly deconstruct Thomass multiple
narratives of critical life-events the accounts
vary depending on his audience and it says much
for their intellectual integrity that though they are
clearly critical of their subject, their presentation
allows readers to make their own judgments. Thomas is
examined through the prism of race because, they argue,
that is the prism through which Thomas often views
himself, and their main argument is that he
is in constant struggle with his racial identity
twisting, churning, sometimes hiding from it, but never
denying it, even when hes defiant about it.
The first third of the book assiduously
assembles the shards of his life from his birth in Pin
Point, Ga., to his nomination to the Supreme Court by
President George
H. W. Bush in 1991, and it
casts new light on the social and psychological context
in which Thomas fashioned himself. Pin Point, where he
spent his first six years, comes as close to a scene of
rural desolation as is possible in an advanced society.
This is black life in the rural South at its bleakest, in
which the best hope of the law-abiding is a job at the
old crab-picking factory. It is in this sociological
nightmare that a 6-year-old boy, by some miracle of human
agency, discovers the path to survival through absorption
in books. Born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his
father when he was a year old, plunged into the even more
frightening poverty of the Savannah ghetto, Thomas, along
with his brother, was eventually rescued by his
grandparents.
Thomas has made a paragon of his maternal grandfather,
Myers Anderson, an illiterate man who, through superhuman
effort, native intelligence and upright living, was able
to provide a fair degree of security for his family.
Anderson cared deeply for the downtrodden, and the hard
turn in Thomass adult individualism cannot be
attributed to him. Indeed, it turns out that the man
Thomas reveres disapproved strongly of his conservative
politics.
Three other important forces shaped
Thomas. In addition to white racism, he suffered the
color prejudice of lighter-complexioned blacks. This
dimension of black life has been so played down with the
rise of identity politics that it comes as a shock to
find a black person of the civil rights generation who
feels he was severely scarred by it. Thomas says that
growing up, he was teased mercilessly because his hair,
complexion and features were too Negroid and
that his schoolyard nickname was ABC:
Americas Blackest Child. The authors seem
inclined to believe contemporaries of Thomas who claim
that he exaggerates and has confused class prejudice with
color prejudice, as if class prejudice were any less
execrable. On this, Im inclined to believe Thomas,
although, given where he now sits, the wife he sleeps
with, the child he has custody of and the company he
keeps, it might be time to get over it.
But Thomas bears the scars of yet
another black prejudice: not only was he too black, he
was also culturally too backcountry. Coastal Georgia is
one of the few areas in America where a genuinely
Afro-English creole Gullah is used, and
Thomas grew up speaking it. In Savannah he was repeatedly
mocked for his Geechee accent and was so
traumatized by this that he developed the habit of simply
listening when in public. That experience, Thomas claims,
helps explain his mysterious silence on the Supreme Court
during oral arguments. This seems a stretch, since Thomas
is now an eloquent public speaker and an engaging
conversationalist who, like most educated Southerners
north of home, erased his accent long ago.
Another revealing aspect of
Thomass upbringing is his difficult relationship
with women. He is now reconciled with his mother, but for
much of his life he resented and disapproved of her. She,
in turn, acknowledges that she preferred his more
compassionate brother, who died in 2000. The event that
most angered the black community was Thomass public
rebuke of his sister for being on welfare. The person
most responsible for adopting and raising him was his
step-grandmother, yet it is his grandfather, who
initially spurned him and had abandoned Thomass own
mother, who gets all the credit. His first career choice
was to be a Roman Catholic priest, and he actually spent
a year in a seminary, presumably anticipating a vow of
chastity. For all his bawdy humor, he was extremely
awkward with women, and his bookishness did not help.
This hints, perhaps, at one source of his later troubles.
Up to the point of Thomass
confirmation hearings, this book is a finely drawn
portrait that surpasses all previous attempts to
understand him. The remainder of the work is more
wide-angled. Merida and Fletcher, who are journalists at
The Washington Post, take us through the tumultuous
hearings, then examine Thomass career and personal
life up to the present: his complete embrace by the
extreme right (he is a friend of Rush
Limbaughs); his
performance on the court; his relationship with Antonin Scalia, an
ideological ally who some people think heavily influences
Thomass thinking; and his secluded private life. We
learn interesting things about him for example,
the stark contrast between his sometimes unfeeling legal
opinions and his often compassionate personal
relationships; the fact that he has quietly facilitated
the confirmation of very liberal black judges, often to
their amazement; and that he is probably the most
accessible of the justices and enjoys the admiration and
abiding loyalty of his clerks.
The treatment of Thomass legal
doctrine, however, is pedestrian. Whatever ones
reservations about his originalist philosophy
notoriously, he has held that beating a prisoner
is not unconstitutional punishment because it would not
have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers
recent evaluations of his opinions by scholars like Henry
Mark Holzer and Scott Douglas Gerber indicate that they
should be taken seriously. Well, by lawyers anyway. We
have also gone beyond the question of who
lied in our assessment of the hearings. Of greater
import would have been a critical examination of the
bruising politics behind these hearings, the way both
sides manipulated Thomas and Anita
Hill, and the questionable
ethics and strategic blunder of the left in focusing on
Thomass sexuality, given Americas malignant
racial history on this subject, instead of on his suspect
qualifications for the job.
Nonetheless, the book remains
invaluable for any understanding of the courts most
controversial figure. It persuasively makes the case that
the problem of color is a mantle Thomas
yearns to shed, even as he clings to it. In
doing so, it brilliantly illuminates not only Thomas but
his turbulent times, the burden of race in 20th-century
America, and one mans painful and unsettling
struggle, along with his changing nations, to be
relieved of it.
Orlando Patterson is a professor of
sociology at Harvard and the author of The Ordeal
of Integration: Progress and Resentment in Americas
Racial Crisis.[TheBlackList] Orlando Patterson Reviews
Clarence Thomas Book
mEMORIAL
OF NOVELIST
Dorothy West
(1907-1998)
Dorothy West. the child of Rachel Pease Benson and Isaac
Christopher
Westt, a freed slave and successful businessman that
owned a wholesale
fruit company and became known as the "Black Banana
King" of Boston.
West's formal education began at age two under the
tutelage of Bessie
Trotter, sister of Monroe Nathan Trotter, editor of the
Boston Guardian.
As a result, West was capable of doing work well ahead of
her age and
grade level when she entered the Farragut School at age
four. West wrote
her first story, "Promise and Fulfillment,"
which was published in the
Boston Globe at age seven. She completed her elementary
education at
Matin School in Boston's Mission District. In 1923, West
graduated from
the Girl's Latin High School and continued her education
at Boston
University and the Columbia University School of
Journalism.
In 1926, her story "The Typewriter" tied for
second place with a story by
Zora Neale Hurston in a contest sponsored by the New
Yorkbased
Opportunity, the National Urban League journal. After
attending the
awards dinner in New York City, West decided to move to
Harlem, where she
became part of the Harlem Renaissance. Because of her
youth, West was
nicknamed "The Kid."
In 1927, West' small role in the original stage
production of Porgy made
possible her trip to London with the production company.
During the
1930's, she was involved with producing Black and White,
a documentary
about racism in various cultures. The film's production
entailed
traveling to the Soviet Union. While the film was not
completed, West
extended her visit for another year.
On returning to New York in 1934, West founded Challenge,
a literary
magazine that published works by many writers on a wide
range of social
and political issues. She co-founded New Challenge in
1937. Only one
issue was published, but the magazine reflected West's
increasing interest
in class issues and the struggles of black people. West's
magazines were
among the first to provide a venue for black American
literature.
Unfortunately, her efforts lacked financial support and
both magazines
quickly folded.
In 1940, West landed a job writing for the New York Daily
News. She was
among the first black American women to receive a byline
in a large
publication. West also worked as an investigator for the
New York City
welfare department before joining the Federal Writers
Project of the Works
in Progress Administration (WPA) until it ended in the
mid-1940s. West
continued to write, publishing several short stories,
including "Hannah
Byde," "An Unimportant Man,"
"Prologue to a Life," and "The Black
Dress,"
during this period. She was also a frequent contributor
to The Saturday
Evening Quill.
After the Federal Writers Project closed, West moved to
Martha's Vineyard,
where she wrote for the Martha's Vineyard Gazette and
completed her first
novel, "The Living Is Easy" (1948), a
semi-autobiographical novel that
critically explores racism and class-consciousness among
black Boston's
bourgeoisie. West also published a collection of essays
"The Richer, The
Poorer: Stories, Sketches and Reminiscences" in
1994.
While she began her second novel, The Wedding, in the
1960s, West did not
complete it until after her Doubleday editor and Martha's
Vineyard
neighbor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis encouraged her to do
so. Similar to
her earlier novel and many of her short stories, which
dealt with the
"white racism echoed in black society's obsession
with gradations of skin
color and the possibility of passing,' The Wedding
(1995) examines issues
of race and class among upper-middle class black
Americans in the Martha's
Vineyard community of Oak Bluffs. The Wedding was adapted
for television
by Oprah Winfrey; it starred Halle Berry.
Dorothy West died August 16, 1998. She never married nor
had children.
(Sources: www.aaregistry.com, www.pw.org/mag/West.htm and
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0764341.html)The DISH Vol. 10 No 22
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