Category / Racism

by Edward Champion

The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Modern Library Nonfiction #70)

The great C. Vann Woodward not only offered a vital and far more sophisticated view of Jim Crow and the South than most of the historians who came before him, but he also demonstrated the dangers of how unjust laws and corrupt institutions can galvanize the most repugnant qualities within Americans when their natural instincts lean into the very reverse.

(This is the thirty-first entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: The Rise of the West.)

All historical reconsiderations have to start somewhere. And before C. Vann Woodward combed fastidiously through newspapers to change our perception of Jim Crow, he had to unseat a formidable (and wrongheaded) standard.

In 1941, a journalist by the name of W.J. Cash published a strange book called The Mind of the South and then hanged himself. This volume, aloof and offensive by 2020s standards, nevertheless reflected a good faith effort to attempt to document the Southern region of America: namely, the strains of thought and sensibilities that contributed to its distinctive character.

The problem was that Cash, more seduced by the filigree of writing in the assumed voice of a racist Southern white man rather than offering a coherent, inclusive, and well-sourced anthropological breakdown, was keen on wrapping the unruly region in a mighty blanket of generalizations. Cash believed that the South had no mind, was driven by a romantic instinct boxed into an inflexible historical continuity, and that this was all largely fueled by hedonism and paralogia. This is obviously extremely inaccurate when one considers, oh say, the birth of the blues, the fiction of Jesmyn Ward, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner, the fact that you will find some of the world’s best gumbo in Louisiana, or, even more importantly, the evolution of civil rights. Cash conveniently elided a great deal of the odious imperialism that jumpstarted the Civil War and, perhaps most criminally, he glossed over slavery (“a vastly wasteful system,” focusing on “the white victims of slavery” rather than Black people, lip service to the aristocrats occasionally huffing about “moral indefensibility,” et al.).

While Mind serves up occasionally smart insights into farmers and class loyalty, it is a largely unsatisfactory volume when it comes to the class and race divides. It is a bit too pat and conveniently poetic for Cash to say that the dominant mood of the South was “one of well-nigh drunken reverie — of a hush that seems all the deeper for the far-away mourning of the hounds and the far-away crying of the does” (and I could quote more from this ridiculously prolix passage, but you get the picture).

Cash’s most unpardonable characterization of the South is his failure to consider the origins and nuances of systemic racism. Black people are nigh invisible through large sections of the book. Yet his highly flawed study became the textbook tendance for postwar intellectuals because there were few other Mencken-endorsed volumes measuring up Southern identity at the time.

* * *

That’s when C. Vann Woodward — a Southern historian who had established himself as an expert on naval history and who quietly wrote recommendation letters for more Blacks to be appointed into academic positions — entered the picture with his excellent volume The Strange Career of Jim Crow. He introduced a vital thesis that was to challenge understanding of racial integration in a deeply important way: In the immediate decades after the Civil War, there were natural moments of social inclusion in which Blacks and whites lived and intermingled together. But these vital steps forward were completely overturned by a group of 19th century white supremacist “influencers” turned lawmakers who ensured that the evils of Jim Crow, which separated public facilities by race, were on most of the state law books south of the Mason-Dixon line and enforced by sinister men perhaps best epitomized by the likes of Bull Connor unleashing German Shepherds upon Black protesters in 1963.

It’s extremely important to understand that there were moments in the 19th century’s waning years in which Jim Crow legislation (which actually originated in the North) was mocked and ridiculed in major Southern cities. One can, in fact, make a persuasive argument that Southerners, in some cases, were willing to put aside their bigotry. Prior to Woodward, the dominant view held by historians was that racial segregation emerged rapidly as Reconstruction began to implode. But a close examination of the sources dredged up by Woodward reveals that his thesis of racial integration emerging in unanticipated spots, which was by no means Panglossian and certainly didn’t erase the repugnant racial violence of that postbellum epoch, holds up in 2026.

* * *

Woodward observed that, as late as 1885, T. McCants Stewart, a Black lawyer and journalist and a close friend of Booker T. Washington, journeyed to his homestate of South Carolina to see how life was shaking out after not stepping foot there for ten years. (Stewart’s extraordinary reporting, published on April 18, 1885 and April 25, 1885 and titled “Rambles in the South,” can be read in its entirety at the Library of Congress.) As he was traveling by rail, Stewart discovered much to his surprise that the car was full and white people were sitting on their luggage and he had a seat. But he was not asked by the conductor to give it up. If anything, the conductor had been gentle and courteous to Stewart when requesting him to move his luggage to accommodate a white passenger. He sat in a dining car in the same room as whites.

Perhaps most remarkably, Stewart said that he actually experienced more racism in Wilmington, Delaware than he did in Virginia and South Carolina. Indeed, white Southerners — in 1885 — made small talk with him. Stewart wrote (and this is not quoted by Woodward): “In the South it is no unusual thing for a man to ask the distance to the next point, to borrow your paper, to remark about the weather, to enter into conversation.” Stewart further remarked, “I feel about as safe here as in Providence, R.I. I can ride in first class cars on the railroads and in the streets. I can go into saloons and get refreshments even as in New York. I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New York.”

* * *

On January 25, 1898, the Charleston News and Courier published an item of devilish satire in response to a Jim Crow law then under consideration by the South Carolina Legislature. Much like people in 2024 never believing that ICE would become a massively budgeted paramilitary force randomly shooting American citizens and kidnapping taxpaying immigrants without due process, it then seemed unthinkable to call for railroad cars to be segregated by race. And so a shit-stirring editor by the name of James C. Hemphill, who had an extremely impressive mustache and who had written many editorials against lynching, had this to say (Woodward quotes some of it, but when I found the entire piece on Newsbank, I couldn’t resist offering more of it):

There should be a Jim Crow section in the jury box, and a separate Jim Crow deck and witness stand in every Court — and a Jim Crow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss. It would be advisable also to have a Jim Crow section in county auditors’ and treasurers’ offices for the accommodation of colored taxpayers. The two races are dreadfully mixed in these offices for weeks every year, especially about Christmas, and just afterward, when the time for making returns and paying taxes, without penalty, is about to expire. The cars are provided with seats, so that everybody can sit down and keep separate from everybody else. It is not so in the county offices. There the crowd stands together in a bench, or is strung out in a waiting and highly variegated line. There should be a Jim Crow “department” for making returns and paying for the privileges and blessings of citizenship.

Unfortunately, the Charleston News and Courier was taken over by a different editor (Robert Lathan, who did not have an amazing mustache or a sense of humanism), where the Jim Crow stance shifted from high 19th century snark to bona-fide xenophobia.

On September 26, 1906, in response to a massacre in Atlanta, one that was as vile and as forgotten as the 1921 Tulsa riots, in which whites murdered dozens of Black people because the Georgia gubernatorial race between then candidates Hoke Smith and Clark Howell stoked racist fears about a Black upper class, the News and Courier blamed racial integration on this:

As long as the negroes [sic] persist in the commission of the crime which caused the terrible outbreak in Atlanta this week, so long will the mob do its fearful work. Separation of the races is the only radical solution of the negro problem in this country. There is nothing new about it. It was the Almighty who established the bounds of the habitation of the races. The negroes were brought here by compulsion; they should be induced to leave here by persuasion. There is no room for them here, living on terms of political and social equality with the white people.

The item also notes that the “problem” “is worse now [1906] than it was ten or twenty years ago.” Never mind that only eight years before, the same newspaper roundly ridiculed any application of Jim Crow laws. But Lathan had no problem leaning into racism, concluding, “[The problem] can be settled effectively only by the separation of the races. The sooner it is settled the better for both races and for the sake of all humanity.” Fortunately, Lathan had the decency to drop dead at the early age of fifty-six before he could blow more racist dog whistles.

Woodward’s salient point still resonates today. Would some of these Jim Crow laws have been abandoned if the people had stood up to the racist lawmakers? Would some of the terrible violence in the aftermath of the Civil War and extending into the 20th century — the East St. Louis riot in 1917, the “Red Summer” of 1919, et al. — have been mitigated? Then and now, it takes only a handful of hateful demagogues delivering repugnant sermons from the mount to make a terrible idea stick.

* * *

Like any pithy historian with his finger firmly on the pulse of institutional ills, Woodward has had a few scholars challenge his thesis. In Bind Us Apart, Nicholas Guyatt observed that some abolitionists in the early 19th century (notably William Short) stumped for racial segregation (what Short called “amalgamation”) because they feared interracial sex. Interracial love could only be tolerated by covertly racist Jacksonian Democrats like President Andrew Johnson if it involved non-whites passing as white. Some ostensible “liberals” even argued that freed slaves should be sent off to Africa. (Lincoln himself was keen on sending freed slaves to Liberia in 1854. He also tendered famously abhorrent remarks against racial inequality in his 1858 debates with Douglas.)

These are all fair and unsettling observations, but it doesn’t entirely overturn Woodward’s thesis, particularly since Guyatt is vague about the timeline in his book. Woodward was explicitly talking about how Jim Crow laws were put onto the books and how this codification galvanized more whites to endorse what they had previously either disregarded or countered with high-caliber badinage, not hypocritical whites who professed to stick up for Blacks even as they simultaneously promoted versions of segregation. Unlike Woodward, Guyatt mentions “segregationist Jim Crow laws that had swept through southern legislatures after the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877,” but never cites the states, the dates these laws were passed, or, perhaps most importantly, the severity of these statutes. Woodward, by contrast, is far from ambiguous about what states did what:

Up to 1900 the only law of this type adopted by the majority of Southern states was that applying to passengers aboard trains. And South Carolina did not adopt that until 1898, North Carolina in 1899, and Virginia, the last, in 1900.

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson created the conditions for these “separate but equal” iniquities to flourish at the state level until Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka overturned this interpretation in 1954, leading to what Woodward fairly describes as a volatile time.

Racism certainly did flourish after the Civil War. But Woodward’s more important point is that laws helped to enable white supremacy — to give Southern racists who were on the fence some terrible ideas about accepting Black people into their regular lives. It’s not unlike the way that Trump emboldened racists with his false claims that Haitian immigrants were “eating cats and dogs” during the September 2024 debate with Kamala Harris. And people, who often long to be law-abiding citizens, are more inclined to believe such racist malarkey, capitulating their natural ability to get along with each other, if an institution or a significant person in power tells them that bigotry is not only okay, but very much something enforced by malevolent legislation. This was why Martin Luther King adamantly declared in Why We Can’t Wait that “one has the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

But it isn’t just statutes we need to worry about. If there is no accountability for the manner in which well-meaning institutions operate, then these can also become enablers of regressive policy. Historian Eric Foner, in his great and massive volume on Reconstruction, noted that Woodward later observed that postbellum “progress” was, much like most of the Democratic Party in the 2020s, “essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative.”

Foner cited two later Woodward volumes — (1) 1960’s The Burden of Southern History, in which Woodward proposed that a “third war aim” (that is, racial equality) had been practiced by Union soldiers and (2) 1971’s American Counterpoint, in which Woodward retracted this. The Freedmen’s Bureau — a federal agency which existed from 1865 to 1872 to help integrate nearly four million formerly enslaved Blacks and poor whites — became a pale shadow of its lofty intentions. Union General Oliver Howard, in cahoots with President Andrew Johnson, went well out of his way to subvert the radical policy that had initiated the bureau. Howard sought to remove “virtually every subordinate who sought to fulfill the original mission of the Bureau and help the freedmen.”

C. Vann Woodward didn’t confine his studies to how the tyranny of law encouraged racism to triumph over equality and decency. He was also deeply worried about how well-meaning federal agencies become corrupted, neutered of their original purpose. Various editions of The Strange Career of Jim Crow became less optimistic with every new revision. Perhaps this is because a great historian always remembers that, even when he exhumes the vital scholarship revealing a more sophisticated understanding of the past, we are always contending with odious loudmouths in the present manipulating a potentially more humane population to settle for the worst.

(Next Up! Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions!)

by Edward Champion

Lucy Ellmann and Galley Beggar Press Are Racists

Lucy Ellmann is the latest example of a white author cleaving to casual racism to hawk a book.

I’ve heard from three people — privately and confidentially — about what a narcissistic monster Lucy Ellmann is. I was crazy about her novel, Ducks, Newburyport — so much so that I even put together a list of all the music cues contained in the massive book. But the stories about her put me off. I was prepared to ignore Lucy Ellmann for the rest of my life, possibly reading future volumes of hers once my animus towards her had died down a bit or, ideally, after she herself had kicked the bucket (one should try to separate the art from the artist and, let’s face it, there’s no better time to untangle such a thorny moral predicament than one year after a repugnant author has died). But on Monday, some of Ellmann’s ugliness bubbled up to the surface in a vile, racist, and anti-intellectual 256 tweet vomit that she posted under the Galley Beggar Press Twitter feed.

The “essay” — if it can be called that — was unaccomplished penny-ante postmodernism, reading almost as if Lydia Davis had a lobotomy but was still somehow allowed to publish just after some opportunistic huckster (in this case, Sam Jordison) had learned that there was enough frontal lobe left in the old bag’s head to bang out a few words. The “essay” is an uninventive laundry list of things that Ellmann deems crap. Very obvious targets like Jeff Bezos, macaroons, terrorists, Boris Johnson, et al. In other words, the kind of hacky standup material that wouldn’t even fly on open mic night. Followed by more subjective objects of hate, such as Jeopardy!, Judy Garland, video games, and Tom Jones. At this point, the “satire” extends to nearly every state of existence (dying young, being a kid, being an adult) until it reaches a desperately racist and anti-intellectual crescendo here:

Hilarious! Genius!TM Good Christ, I’m pissing on every pair of pants I own right now!

Hardly. By cleaving to a racist conspiracy theory like this, even under the old hack’s parlor trick of using “satire” as a defense for vile sentiments, Ellmann is clearly siding against science and against intellectualism. The so-called “Wuhan lab leak” theory neatly aligns with other racist conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” theory — a detestable strain of racism that has been used to justify Islamophobia. Moreover, the Wuhan lab leak theory has led to a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. Shall we talk about the man who stabbed three members of an Asian-American family (including two children younger than 6) because he believed that they were “Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus”? Or how about the creep in Boston who followed a Chinese American doctor from a hospital and screamed, “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone? What is wrong with you? Why the fuck are you killing us?”

This is the virulent racism that Lucy Ellmann commits herself to.

Ellmann knew damn well that her bullshit would grab the attention of an audience. Her casual racism aligned neatly with Quentin Tarantino’s racist falsehoods against Bruce Lee. If this was comedy, well, it’s indistinguishable from the vituperative hate that one can finds in a soulless prop comic like Gallagher. The upshot is that Ellmann’s promotional strategy represents a book publicity problem we’re not talking about. White people can spout off anti-Asian sentiments to get attention and sell books. And Galley Beggar Press, being the true cynical fuckwits that they are, can bask in the glory, claiming that anybody who objects to the dissemination of an unproven racist lie in the name of “art” needs to lighten up.

But even if the tweetstorm had not contained the racism, it says quite a bit about Galley Beggar Press’s lack of editorial standards that they would honestly believe that such cartoonish nihilism was the stuff of “boundary-pushing literature.” This indie press is more of a religious cult where a “genius” author can do no wrong. I suppose Sam Jordison fancies himself a Barney Rosset of our time, but Lucy Ellmann is hardly on the level of Ioenesco, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Genet, or even de Sade. There is nothing artistically redeeming about what Lucy Ellmann published on Twitter. It isn’t doing anything innovative like Naked Lunch or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is simply the random spew of a 64-year-old loser who has nothing left in her vestibule of tricks other than cheap “provocative” vacuity.

A number of people pushed back against Galley Beggar on Twitter for publishing Ellmann’s racism. But something interesting happened along the way. Gallery Beggar began blocking critics of the Ellmann who were Asian (such as Bloomsbury marketing executive Wei Ming Kam), but refrained from blocking critics who weren’t Asian. In other words, Sam Jordison went well out of his way to target those of Asian descent and showed very much how he was an upholder of systemic racism.

I want to be clear that Ellmann and Galley Beggar Press should be free to publish whatever they want. But let’s stop rewarding any author who believes that anti-Asian hate is the best way to get attention. Anti-Asian hate crimes have risen 164% from last year. It seems to me that every writer has a duty to be more sensitive to this.

7/6/2021 1:15 PM UPDATE: Galley Beggar’s Sam Jordison and Lucy Ellmann have blocked me on Twitter, proving that they are both top-tier racists:

by Edward Champion

Carlin Romano Is Racist. And So Is The National Book Critics Circle.

The National Book Critics Circle has become a den of privilege and systemic racism, thanks in large part to its unquestioning fealty to the racist Carlin Romano.

On June 11, 2020, Hope Wabuke — a distinguished Ugandan American poet who was on the National Book Critics Circle board — published screenshots from a disturbing internal conversation that involved how the NBCC would respond to Black Lives Matter. At issue here was how a seemingly august body of professional book critics would answer to recent events. One board member — a man by the name of Carlin Romano, who once opened a review expressing his fantasy of raping a woman author — was determined to “speak up” and claimed that he wasn’t the only board member who felt that racism and police brutality didn’t particularly concern him.

Romano took umbrage with the idea that white gatekeeping “stifles black voices at every level of our industry,” declaring this to be “absolute nonsense.” Never mind that The New York Times recently reported that the esteemed author Jesmyn Ward had to fight for a six-figure advance even after winning a National Book Award. Never mind Malorie Blackman sharing details about how a publisher had rejected a novel because a story featuring two black magical siblings wasn’t “believable.” (Meanwhile, Knopf publishes white author John Stephens’s The Emerald Atlas, which features three white siblings engaging in magic, to say nothing of the family-oriented magic contained in white author Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic books.) Never mind that Dorothy Koomson tweeted on June 2, 2020 that her books were rejected because they “weren’t about ‘the black experience'” and how she was asked to make characters racist. No, as far as Romano was concerned, the struggles that African-American writers face to tell their stories was “ridiculous,” despite numerous examples.

Romano got even uglier, claiming that black writers would “never have been published if not for ecumenical, good-willed white editors and publishers who fought for the publication of black writers.” Amber Books? Black Classics Press? Third World Press? Triple Crown Publications? Life Changing Books? Any of the far too few African-American publishers who have stepped up to redress the systemic racism that the largely white-owned publishing industry has failed to remedy? That Romano applies “ecumenical” to his atavistic statement says much about his condescending views of writers of color. Apparently, in his view, any publisher who puts out a worthy novel that happens to be written by an African-American is an act of charity rather than an act of merit. James Baldwin? Toni Morrison? Octavia Butler? Ta-Nehisi Coates? Well, you’re lucky that your ass got through the door because Whitey decided to let one or two of you through the gates. Does Romano’s repugnantly racist sentiment here not reinforce the problems of white gatekeeping and not buttress the need for any and all literary organizations to be more inclusive? As far as Romano was concerned, the fact that countless people of color had to fight to be published — despite the fact that African-American novels have continued to be financially successful (Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren sold one million copies, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple sold five million copies, even Ann Petry’s The Street selling one million copies in 1946, the list goes on) — did not get in the way of his sentiment that black people needed to be fawning and grateful, much in the manner of slaves, to white publishers. Romano doubled down on this racism by writing, “In my 40 years in literary and publishing life, I’ve seen far more of [sic] white people helping black writers than of people black people helping white writers.” In other words, Romano believes that black people should devote their already disadvantaged positions to spending all their time promoting white writers.

In short, Romano articulated in very clear terms just what he wants the system to be. And his deplorable viewpoint here is no different from an antebellum slaveholder. Romano’s despicable vision is this: White editors serving as gatekeepers. Black authors dancing with joy at the honor of having their neutered visions “represented.” Romano’s statement is, in short, a racist screed against literary merit and inclusiveness. That Romano cannot acknowledge any white bias that has prevented great literature from being published, even as he demands that African-American writers jump up and down over concessions that their white counterparts would never have to face, is nothing less than a pompous white xenophobe revealing his true colors.

But Romano didn’t stop at mere racism. It is a common truth that atavistic barnacles like Romano often feel the need to tout their own superiority, irrespective of its shaky foundations. In perhaps the most risible part of his vulgar message, Romano claimed, “I myself have probably written more articles and reviews about Philadelphia’s black literature and traditions in my 25 years at the Inquirer than anyone living, black or white.” Do you hear that, Black Writers Museum? Do you hear that, African American Children’s Fair? Do you hear that, Hakim’s (the oldest Philly black bookstore, since 1959)? Even though all of you have done far more for black Philadelphia than Romano, Romano wants you to bow down at his professed magnanimity! It’s Romano who’s doing the heavy lifting here, not you!

One would think that the NBCC Board of Directors would instantly denounce such atavistic viewpoints. But President Laurie Hertzel, a white woman who would appear to be the NBCC’s answer to Amy Cooper, was nothing less than fulsome about these backwards views. She claimed, “Your objections are all valid, of course.” She also claimed that Romano’s views “shine unlike anyone else’s.”

I emailed Hertzel about her unquestioning support of Romano’s racism. She replied, “Rest assured that I do not and have not endorsed anyone’s racist comments.”

In other words, Hertzel and nearly the entire NBCC board are not so much interested in looking inward as they are gaslighting the narrative entirely. Nor can the NBCC actually name and hold Romano accountable — as was seen in this self-serving and half-hearted announcement posted on Thursday night.

I attempted to contact many of the NBCC Board of Directors — in large part because the only board members to acknowledge the exchange and take something of a stand against this racism were Carolyn Kellogg and Richard Z. Santos.

The remaining twenty NBCC Board Members have said nothing. In fact, shortly after I contacted Michael Schaub about his neglectful duties to stand against racism, this self-serving Texan, who was recently criticized for his insensitivity to trans human rights, blocked me on Twitter.

The NBCC Board has a duty to denounce Romano’s racist remarks. With their silence, one can only conclude that the following National Book Critics Circle board members are more than happy to uphold systemic racism. Systemic racism butters their bread. It ensures that they can continue to get gigs. That these people fail to call out racism and that refuse to do so even as Party City has done a better job firing racists speaks to their willful and open advocacy of white supremacy in the National Book Critics Circle.

Here is a list of the NBCC Board Members who presently advocate racism and white supremacy with their silence:

Laurie Hertzel, NBCC President
Kerri Arsenault, VP Awards
Jane Ciabattari, VP Events
Connie Ogle, VP Communications
Carlin Romano, VP Grants
Michael Schaub, VP Online
David Varno, VP Tech
Marion Winik, VP Treasurer
Jacob Appel
Colette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times
Gregg Barrios
Lori Feathers
Charles Finch
Megan Labrise
Jessica Loudis
John McWhorter
Katherine A. Powers
Madeline Schwartz
Elizabeth Taylor

Should any of the above individuals make a public statement against Carlin Romano and the NBCC’s systemic racism, I will remove them from the list. But I doubt that any of them will.

[6/12/2020 10:15 PM UPDATE: The NBCC Board page has dropped the following names: Laurie Hertzel, Connie Ogle, John McWhorter, and Katherine A. Powers. Presumably, these are the other four Board members who have resigned. Hertzel has also deleted her Twitter account.]

[6/15/2020 12:00 PM UPDATE: This morning, Carolyn Kellogg announced on Twitter that she had resigned from the Board. She cited “microaggressions and delays” in advance of drafting the Black Lives Matter statement. She also noted that the Board, instead of focusing on Romano’s racist sentiments, “focused on Hope’s breach of confidentiality in sharing a damning account of a poetry prize discussion.” Additionally, Kellogg noted that Hertzel called for the board to be dissolved following Wabuke’s leak. Following this call to dissolve the board (and efforts on other members’ part to facilitate discussion), Hertzel and two other members resigned in protest — not because of Wabuke’s concerns about racism, but because of the breach in confidentiality. Three more people — including Kellogg — have now resigned, including David Varno.

The instigator for this imbroglio was Romano. Romano has threatened to sue the NBCC and, according to Kellogg, even “shouted down a new board member on a Zoom call.”

Romano remains on the Board because the current NBCC bylaws, which can be found at this link, prevent the board from removing a member. The only way to do so is through a special meeting, which the bylaws declare can be called upon at the request of the president (for which the NBCC does not presently have one), any vice president (who would presently include Kerri Arsenault, Jane Ciabattari, Carlin Romano, Richard Z. Santos, Michael Schaub, and Marion Winik), or any five directors. As of early Monday afternoon, there has been no movement to call a special meeting. (UPDATE: Santos also noted that genera members can also call for a Board Member’s removal.)

As such, until there is a special meeting, Romano will remain on the board until 2022.

Kellogg concluded her message by stating, “I want to go on to point out that as the sole Black woman on the board, Hope should have been given extra support and liberty in leading our effort to craft an anti-racism statement. She was not.”

Further investigations into Romano have revealed a troubled history of abusive behavior. According to Ellen Akins, a friend of Hertzel’s, Romano went out of his way to target Hertzel, who is not a confrontational person. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2000, Romano was fired from his professorship at Bennington due to an “action of sufficient severity” directed at the president, Elizabeth Coleman. An insider at Ursinus College has also reported that there are numerous stories about Romano’s misconduct there.

Should anyone wish to share any stories about further Romano incidents, feel free to email me at ed@edrants.com and I will offer an update. Unless you specifically give me your consent, any and all communications with me will be kept in confidence.]

[6/15/2020 12:45 UPDATE: Ismail Muhammad, one of the board members who was actively working for diversity within the NBCC, announced his resignation from the board shortly after Kellogg’s announcement. He offered further details about what happened: “We were on the verge of winning a vote to release that statement by a solid majority, when Carlin Romano, at the last minute, derailed the process.”]

[6/15/2020 1:30 PM UPDATE: In an article filed by PW‘s John Maher, some new information has come to light. Anonymous board members noted that of the five members who resigned from the board (Hertzel, Victoria Chang, John McWhorter, Connie Ogle, and Katherine A. Powers), only one did so in support of Wabuke. The remaining four did so because of the breach in confidentiality. We know that this was Hertzel’s reason. So that leaves three inside Chang, McWhorter, Ogle, and Powers who resigned in opposition to Wabuke.

Amazingly, Romano himself is quoted in the article. In relation to the lawsuit threat, Romano said that he “alerted the Board I might sue it if I’m voted off the Board in violation of our bylaws and commitment to free discussion.” He denied shouting down the new board member, merely claiming, “We talked over each other at one point.”

Despite the racist tenor of Romano’s email, Romano claimed, “I’m not racist and I’m not anti-black. Quite the contrary. I just don’t check my mind at the door when people used to operating in echo chambers make false claims. A few Board members in recent years have sought to turn the Board, for decades committed to fair-minded judging of books from every political stripe, into a ‘No Free Thought’ zone, an ideologically biased tool for their own politics. In my opinion, they oppose true critical discussion. Good riddance to any of them who resign—the NBCC will be healthier without them. I’ll attempt to stay on the Board, despite concerted opposition, in the hope that I can help NBCC return to its earlier, better self.”]

[6/18/2020 UPDATE: Michael Riley, President and Editor-in-Chief of The Chronicle of Higher Education, was good enough to confirm with me that Romano is not involved with his august publication: “Carlin Romano has not written for The Chronicle of Higher Education since 2018, and, while he was a critic-at-large for The Chronicle a long time ago, he has not been in that role for many years. He holds no official title or standing with The Chronicle.”]

by Edward Champion

I Was Banned from Twitter for Protesting a Racist Man Named Jon Miller

Twitter has banned me for speaking out against a conservative racist. This sends a clear message that Jack Dorsey is in the business of upholding fascism and promoting hate and racism.

This morning, I learned that my Twitter account was permanently suspended and that I was banned from the social media platform because I had the temerity to express anger and outrage towards a racist.

A man with a blue checkmark by the name of Jon Miller, a conservative “White House correspondent for BlazeTV,” tweeted an insulting, cruelly disparaging, and racist message mocking the great filmmaker Bong Joon-ho after he delivered one of his Oscar speeches in Korean. Miller’s disturbingly xenophobic words, which are still published on Twitter as of Monday morning, proceeded to claim that “these people are the destruction of America.” This is language that echoes anti-Semitism in 1930s Germany and any number of hate groups singled out by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Words that need to be strongly protested. Even conservative Piers Morgan protested it. Miller’s tweet was rightly ratioed, but thousands of people still retweeted and favorited this vile expression. Miller, in other words, willfully promulgated hate.

As someone who is a big proponent of democracy and multiculturalism and as someone who has a number of Korean friends, some who greatly helped me during a time of crisis in my life, it was my moral duty as a citizen to lodge my protest against this in the strongest possible terms. Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar win for Parasite is not only a historical and artistic triumph. It also rightly sends a message to Korean Americans that their dreams are possible. By any objective standard, this is a good thing and a beautiful advancement of humanity. For someone to shit on this — as Miller did — is to besmirch the very purpose of why and how we evolve as a species.

So I got angry on Twitter. One cannot stay silent when anyone is demeaned and stripped of his dignity like this. But as far as Twitter is concerned, calling someone “a xenophobic, anti-tolerance, anti-art fuckface” — as I did — for expressing such hateful language is “abuse and harassment.” Moreover, there is no appeal for Twitter’s decision. The appeal link that I received by email did not work.

On Twitter, I also challenged Miller to a ten round boxing match to see if he wanted to settle this matter like a man. I did this for a number of reasons. First, I’ve been on a fitness kick and it seemed like a playful way of opposing a racist. Second, my challenge offered a corporeal method of resolving a national cancer that needs to see more resolution in the real world. Racism has long been buried underneath the surface of this nation. And if Miller wants to claim that an entire race is “destroying America,” then let us see if he has the stones to say this in public and in the ring. If Miller still wants to take me up on my challenge, then I will be more than happy to sign up for boxing lessons immediately and get in the best shape of my life. That’s how much I care about fighting racism and intolerance. I’m willing to put my body on the line. It is my position that, when you are confronted with racism, you must not stay silent about it and you have an obligation to fight it.

My playful boxing challenge also falls into a great tradition of writers boxing other writers — seen with Craig Davidson challenging Jonathan Ames to a boxing match, a match, incidentally, that I happened to announce. I’m sure that this probably factored into Twitter’s decision. Still, challenging someone to a boxing match does not involve “wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical pain” — the codex behind Twitter’s rules. The decision to engage in a fight is on Miller. I have challenged him. He is free to take me up on the challenge. I’m willing to put myself on the line and in the ring, but my ultimate wish or hope would be to see Miller acknowledging and confronting and sincerely apologizing for his flagrant racism and unacceptable xenophobia. That’s the goal here. Since Miller proved intransigent on Twitter, I was forced to take him up with my boxing challenge. Even if Miller decides not to box me, then the point has been made. Unable to walk back his hateful remarks, he is revealed for the coward that he is.

What all this does tell us is that Twitter is firmly on the side of the fascists and the racists and the doxxers and the misogynists and the Nazis and the authoritarians. Jack Dorsey’s business model is to promote hate and to block anyone who pushes strongly against it. Because hate and sustaining the status quo of hate and racism is very good for Dorsey’s business model. It’s lining his pockets right now. My words to Miller were no different than the words that got the great David Simon (temporarily) banned in 2018. As Simon put it in a blog post shortly after his suspension:

The correct response to racism, to white supremacy, to anti-Semitism, to slander and libel is to:

1. Tell the fucker he’s a piece of shit and should die of throat clap.

2. Block him. And in doing 1. and 2. you have marked the spot for the sane and sentient on Twitter, much as any good infantryman who wanders into a minefield marks the Claymores for the rest of the platoon. It’s just good soldiering, Jack.

My Twitter ban may very well be a blessing in disguise and should give me more time to practice my guitar and the new set of harmonicas I just purchased. But it is still part of a national disease that is silencing and squelching voices who speak out against hate, racism, and fascism. A few friends texted me this morning about what happened and claimed my ban to be “a badge of honor.” But I don’t see this as honorable at all. I see this as a deep stain against social justice and a blow against fighting for what’s objectively right. I see this as Jack Dorsey willfully prioritizing hate before justice and profit before human decency. But then we all know that Jack Dorsey has no soul. We know that this shallow profiteer met with Trump last year. If he possessed any qualities of actual decency and if he was truly invested in true discourse, then he would understand precisely what’s at stake here. If we cannot speak out against racism and human indignity, then how will we be able to speak out against any other significant human ills that crop up in the next few years? Especially if Trump manages to win a second presidential term and the Senate remains under control by the Republicans. You don’t win battles by keeping silent or by staying neutral against a gleeful hate merchant like Jon Miller. You call them out for the repugnant atavists and venal promoters of bigotry and intolerance that they are. You challenge them to boxing matches if you have to.

UPDATE: This morning, Jon Miller celebrated the fact that Twitter ruled his racist tweet as something that did “not identify any violations of the Twitter Rules.” Twitter, in other words, is clearly in the practice of upholding racism.

by Edward Champion

The Rightful End of Roseanne

The end of Roseanne proved that, for now at least, there are limits to American xenophobia expressed through mass entertainment. But the troubling question is whether this is the beginning or the end of network-sanctioned white supremacy.

Roseanne Barr is finished. And it’s about goddam time.

I watched the first few episodes of the Roseanne reboot with an open mind, but the show’s racism and intolerance, well on display within the show and bluntly expressed in Roseanne’s off-air demeanor, demonstrated very conclusively that this was not a contemporary answer to All in the Family, but something more akin to a sitcom version of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. An early scene showing the Conners swapping an insufficient supply of medication due to inadequate American healthcare created the illusion that this was a show like its previous iteration, one aligned with the working class roots that had made the original such a success. But then we saw the Conners casually belittling “all the shows about black and Asian families” and it became very clear that this was a program committed to white supremacy. As The New Yorker‘s Emily Nussbaum pointed out, the show relied on coded language, unrealistic dialogue, and sideways jabs to disguise its bigotry-drenched narrative.

I was not the only viewer to flee. It took only weeks for the reboot to drop from 18.44 million viewers to a mere 10.42 million. This was the show that Trump had said “was about us,” but that “us” shed 44% of its purported unity within months. The cast and crew quickly became unsettled by the Faustian bargain they had bought into. Co-showrunner Whitney Cummings left. Then writer Wanda Sykes left. And as actress Emma Kenney was about to bolt, she was informed by her manager that the show was cancelled. The linchpin was a startlingly racist tweet in which Roseanne declared that former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett was the product of “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes [sic]” having a baby.

For anybody who had been watching this hatred from the sidelines, Roseanne’s vulgar and vituperative racism was there in the unfettered manner in which she tweeted easily debunked alt-right conspiracy theories as if these hurtful falsehoods represented true gospel. She falsely claimed in March that David Hogg, one of the brave kids who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and who went on to become a formidable activist, had offered a Nazi salute, despite the fact that Roseanne herself had dressed up as Hitler for Heeb Magazine.

Barring a pickup from an online streaming giant — an unlikely event, given Amazon’s recent woes with Transparent and the Roy Price scandal, Netflix cutting ties with Louis CK, and Hulu likely not wanting to risk its progressive-minded programming slate given the success of The Handmaid’s Tale — there is little chance that Roseanne will return, unless she decides to produce it on her own dime. And even then, she would probably not have enough clout to convince all the cast members and crew to return. Such a hypothetical reboot, untethered from the manacles of network Standards and Practices, would only amp up the atavism further in the interest of “truth-telling,” perhaps inspiring the Southern Poverty Law Center to include Roseanne Barr amidst its distressingly voluminous list of offenders.

This was the first television show cancelled by a single tweet. And I don’t think it will be the last. What Roseanne’s self-immolation demonstrates, quite rightfully and righteously I think, is that America does have limits to what it will tolerate. There will undoubtedly be Daily Caller-reading banshees writing thinkpieces proclaiming this cancellation as a calumny upon the First Amendment. But the decision to write and produce a show, much less watch one, has not been quelled and the audience hungry for this casual xenophobia has regrettably not been deracinated. There are still ten million loyal Roseanne viewers. And I can easily imagine Roseanne being propped up as an underground comic, recast as an alt-right faux Lenny Bruce or perhaps the American answer to Dieudonné, and making a fortune through a monthly Patreon account.

In an age in which a self-help transphobic huckster like Jordan Peterson is framed by the “Paper of Record” as a “dark web intellectual,” Roseanne will probably not be the last repugnant show airing on American television. I fear that we are only at the beginning of hatred and intolerance marketed as “wholesome entertainment.” And while mainstream media rejects Roseanne, one must now be on the lookout for independently produced offerings cut from the same Klan cloth that are snatched up by television executives in the interest of corporate profit. This is, after all, how Roseanne was rebooted in the first place. The question now is who has the chutzpah to push the envelope further into a fetid swamp of ugliness and whether some network desperate for a hit is willing to pick up such a bilious offering, counting upon the American public to forget how these same gatekeepers helped make Roseanne happen in the first place.