racism – Paola Trimarco

Reading Southern Gothic in the time of Black Lives Matter

While taking the knee is becoming a political statement de rigueur, I’ve been reading William Faulkner’s Light in August, set in America’s south in the early part of the last century.

It was impossible to read this novel without thinking about the stark differences in race relations between then and now. Along with the liberal use of the n-word, discrimination and violence against blacks was the unquestioned norm. Yet, at no point is the reader led to accept or even be dismissive of this world. It could have been written today with a liberal implied reader in mind.

One of the main characters, Joe Christmas, orphaned as a toddler, believes that he is of African heritage – his appearance is ‘white,’ but some characters say he ‘looks foreign.’ When background stories come into the fold, the reader learns that Joe’s biological father was of a mixed African-Mexican lineage. But given some unreliable narration, even this is uncertain. Nevertheless, Joe’s tragic life is shaped by his belief in his ‘tainted’ identity, along with the violence and cruelty of his childhood home, ruled by a staunch Calvinist. As a teenager, Joe runs away and becomes a drifter, unable to fit in with either black or white communities.

In a parallel storyline, another sympathetic character, Lena Grove, has also uprooted herself from her family home, where she was castigated for ‘being a whore.’ In contrast to Joe, she is not drifting but very much aiming for a target – the father of her unborn child with the naïve expectation that they will marry. Lena and Joe’s lives overlap without touching through the character of Joe Brown who works with Christmas (as he is often called) at a planing mill and later shares a house and moonshine business with him. Brown is also the drifter and shady character who made Lena pregnant.

With its interior monologues and experiments with narration, using multiple narrators, broken chronologies and some convoluted subplots, Light in August is categorised as modernist. It is a challenging read. But I found it worthwhile for its depth of characters and the ways it places extremes of human behaviour – racism and fanatical religiosity – side-by-side, exposing the irrationality and ability to destroy lives with hate that they have in common.

Although this story was written in 1932, it only has vague references to that time period and the decades leading up to it, and no precise year is ever mentioned. This helps to make the book feel timeless. Sadly, so too do the explorations of themes like racism.

Metaphors Matter

Following the horrific death of George Floyd, we have witnessed yet another wave of anger and protest. With this some have said that racism is ‘a disease, like Covid 19’. Linguist Elena Semino rightly commented on Twitter: ‘This metaphor may have useful rhetorical functions in context (e.g. to highlight that both kill and are very hard to eliminate), but it backgrounds a central aspect of racism: power.’ Indeed, put simply, racism is about one group of people using race to justify having power over another group. Unlike diseases, there is intention behind acts of racism, whether these thoughts rest in unconscious bias, follow the insidiousness norms of institutions or worse, fester in the venom of white supremacists.

Reading and listening to the anti-racism protesters and news commentators, worthy metaphors have been a bit lacking. The slogan Black Lives Matter, is merely elliptical, short for ‘Black lives matter too.’ The calling out ‘I can’t breathe’ is powerful, a direct reminder of Floyd’s dying words, but it’s not a metaphor. This paucity of metaphors bothers me because firstly because metaphors are powerful tools of communication. Good metaphors, original and sometimes a bit weird, stick with us. Secondly, I’m annoyed that so much of the language of racists is hinged on metaphors – describing the other as ‘vermin,’ ‘invaders,’ ‘pests,’ ‘animals’ etc. Why hasn’t the language of anti-racism these days shown more figurative flare?

In the last century, we had ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,’ Langston Hughes’s dream deferred that stunk ‘like rotten meat’ and sagged ‘like a heavy load’ and the plethora of extended analogies in the oration of Martin Luther King Jr.

Why do we need metaphors to capture the anti-racist experience today?

It is no longer enough to call someone a fascist, a white supremacist or even a racist. These labels are threadbare from their overuse and in some circles worn as badges of honour. No longer are people hiding behind the phrase ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ Even our world leaders are getting away with this. Prime Minister Johnson opposes taking down statues symbolic of Britain’s colonial past and its role in the slave trade. This should be no surprise coming from the man who in 2002 wrote in The Spectator about Africa, ‘The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,’ he wrote. ‘The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore’ (cited from The Independent, 13/06/20). Johnson has in more recent years been quoted as referring to black people as ‘piccaninnies.’ Sadly, I don’t believe Johnson won the last election despite his racist rhetoric – I believe it helped to get him elected.

And then there’s Tr*mp. No, I’m not going there. No need to really.

Metaphors are a way of thinking about our world and expressing the way that we think at the same time. I do wonder if the anti-racist movement has not truly internalised into our thinking enough to give us the metaphors we need. Of course, as a linguist, I could take the counter argument for a moment and tell you that metaphors are ubiquitous in our language, in our lives. But many of these metaphors are used so often they have lost that ability to inspire. Others, like ‘racism is a disease’ miss the mark, and others still lack that stickability to bring about action. Speaking non-metaphorically, I’m weary and worn from viewing scenes of black men dying at the hands of white police followed by angry protests only to see the same scenes again with different people.

Standing Up to Racism and Fascism

Is it a multi-circled Venn diagram or a spider-gram that will best illustrate the connections between Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon, Geert Wilders, Belgium’s racist-right politician Filip Dewinter, current UKIP leader Gerard Batten, Donald Trump and British Nazi Tommy Robinson? It would be too easy to draw circles and lines around the racist and fascist ideas these political figures have come to represent. What also connects these men is far more disturbing. They have all publically endorsed at least two of the names on this list and in doing so have helped to spread each other’s popularity and toxic beliefs. They’ve succeeded in making the hate-filled lone wolves across the West feel and act as members of an international pack.

This wider picture makes a lot of us feel out of control and helpless. Of course, we can always find like-minded people amongst our friends, co-workers and fellow liberal activists. We can choose to read the newspapers and follow on social media those who share our anger and disgust. These things might take the edge off, but it wasn’t until this past Saturday that I found a more satisfying way of confronting this barbarism – by yelling at it.

On a hot Saturday afternoon in Cambridge, a couple thousand protesters gathered to rally and march against another march planned by a group of Tommy Robinson supporters. For my international readers, Robinson is a former leader of the far-right English Defence League who is currently in prison for contempt of court. His supporters, including Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Gerard Batten, want him released from prison on grounds of freedom of speech. (See what I mean about Venn Diagrams.)

A small group (perhaps 200) of Robinson’s lesser known supporters appeared at the march in Cambridge. We easily out-numbered them – which is intensely empowering. Unlike Trump’s visit to the UK earlier that week, these racists/fascists were within earshot and I felt justified in participating. Will our screamed chants of ‘Nazi scum off our streets’ change the minds of these fascists? Of course, not. Will they think twice before they return to Cambridge for another march? Maybe. Just maybe. And that’s worth holding on to. Aside from the obvious therapeutic effects of yelling at these racist/fascists characters, I’d like to think these groups lose some of their influence and power to directly offend each time they’re pushed away.