Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)



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Forgetting to Re-member: "Post-racial" Amnesia and Racial History / Maisha Wester

 

"This is not a story to pass on"

Toni Morrison, Beloved

 

<1> On a recent trip to New Orleans, LA, I visited three notable sites in the city's history: the infamous slave exchange, now the site of the Omni Hotel and its attached restaurant; Congo Square, now the site of Louis Armstrong Park; and the Lower Ninth Ward, still devastated four years after the near miss of Hurricane Katrina [1]. The former two are marked by diminutive plaques noting the historical relevance of the location even as fabulous new buildings and modernist ornamentation overwhelm the site and its sense of significance. In the case of the later, however, there are no plaques or memorials commemorating the terror and momentousness of the event; rather, visitors rely on tour guides, who bus them around the devastation.

<2> Each of these locales – in a city notorious for its rich and complex experience of racial encounter and negotiation – alludes to a particular manipulation and displacement of history that is increasingly problematic in a supposedly "post-racial" America. The choice to commodify but not memorialize in one case, and to begrudgingly memorialize in the others, suggest a desired amnesia in the face of narratives of racial encounter. Morrison's observation, repeated at the end of her text, concerning inheritable narratives of racial trauma proves useful when asking what these narrative mean in and to a "post-racial" society. The line seemingly suggests that certain troubling stories should be forgotten in the cause of progressive society's exorcism of racism and its effects. The rhetoric of the "post-racial," figured in New Orleans's begrudging and absent monuments, happily supports this stance.

<3> Of course, the rise of the term "post-racial" saw the concurrent appearance of criticism challenging its efficacy, especially as the term's applicability seems contingent upon the election of America's first black president. As this essay will show, I agree with the critical dismantling of this term as a suitable descriptor for America's current ideological position. This essay merely hopes to add to the discussion by problematizing "post-racialism" from a new perspective, showing how "post-racialism's" national imperative to re-member America's sense of itself as an idealistic democracy is contingent upon selective amnesia usually wielded against histories of racial strife. The implicit rhetoric governing sites of institutionalized and popular public memory – exemplified here through an examination of national memorial and popular film as tribute – illustrate the various ways that "post-racialism's" rhetoric undoes its own ideological ends.

<4> The "post-racial" imagination seeks to establish a new narrative of racial relations in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century; although this narrative is in part contingent upon defining a new "other" in a globalized context, it at least suggests that intra-national antagonism and violence has seen its end. Thus Time magazine published an optimistic photo essay in May of 2009 which traces the progression and demise of racial conflict in 18 images, beginning with a picture of a young and smiling Emmett Till and concluding with an image of Barack Obama and his family saluting a crowd at Grant Park. The photo essay depicts the central ideology of the "post-racial": "that race matters less than it used to, that the boundaries of race have been overcome, that racism is no longer a big problem" (Lum) [2]. In the least, the "post-racial" imagines the death of segregation, race-based inequity, and the history of racial difference. Furthermore, the attractiveness of the "post-racial" lies in its connection to questions of democracy and meritocracy. Indeed, many supporters of "post-racialism" argue that the racial equality it signifies also means an end to affirmative action policies. The demise of (overt) racism, they imply, signals the achievement of a truly egalitarian society in which economic and social success is dependent upon merit and personal drive, rather than socially-constructed factors, such as race, that are beyond the individual's control.

<5> Yet such hopeful narratives as the one portrayed in Time are unfortunately fragmented. Although the magazine's captions note that racial conflict was the defining issue, particularly in the south, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it limits its portrayal of violence and resistance to the last half of that century, thus failing to recognize the long, complex national history of oppression and rebellion leading up to Emmett Till. Indeed, even emphasizing the regional nature of such violence is a misleading move that imposes artificial limits on racist encounters in U.S. history. Furthermore, the essay jumps from an image of Spike Lee in 1989, with a caption noting the impact and significance of Do the Right Thing and the rise of NWA and Public Enemy to an image of Obama [3]. Such gaps in narrative allude to a failure to mark history as both complex and significant in reading present ideology. The oversight acknowledges the general ideology about history in the postmodern, "post-racial" moment; if Generation O can be defined as "post-everything: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post 9/11" and "post-racial" (Currier), then one of these posts is also post-history.

 

Post-modern, Post-racial, Post-history

<6> The "post-racial" (dis)connection from racial history is evident in its very claims. Firstly, its observation that relationships and oppression in America is no longer "black and white" illustrates a failure to recognize that, in the history of the U.S., racial antagonism and oppression has never been merely black and white, but has always consisted of cross-encounters between black, white, red, brown, yellow, and so on. Secondly, its contention that racist encounter is no longer common because of a general shift in individual psyches ignores how, historically, racial oppression occurs first and foremost on an institutional level which acts to legitimize and enable blatant racial antagonism. Although commentators assume that the lack of laws explicitly bolstering racial inequity is the sign that racism is dying out, they fail to observe the various ways that institutional racism is both invisible and blatant [4]. In "getting over" racial inequity, supporters of America as "post-racial" society seek to create a new ahistorical narrative of racial encounter; this narrative re-silences and re-marginalizes the very cultures that constitute America's new inclusive regime. Such displaced historicity is a misapplication of the postmodern challenge to and dismantling of dominant unified history. While postmodernist ideology about history informs the "post-racial" imagination, "post-racial" rhetoric reveals some of the consequences and perils of postmodernism's deconstruction of history. More explicitly, "Post-racial" culture encourages postmodern readings of race and history as constructed for select (minority) bodies and narratives while indulging in what Jameson terms postmodernism's "nostalgia mode" in other areas of its re-membering.

<7> The denial of metanarrative implicitly highlights the constructedness of history, positing it as much fiction as fact, and History becomes (hi)story [5]. This denial theoretically provides marginalized voices a way of engaging and accessing history, providing narratives that are not counter to but contemporaneous with multiple other (non-)marginalized narratives. Furthermore, the form and structure of history falls under inspection as numerous "texts" prove useful vehicles of cultural history. At the same time, history is denied the profound influence over the present and future in the postmodern rhetoric; the breakdown of narrative structure and pattern means that there is no given logical plot to history linking events and eras or governing the future. Past is no longer prologue in the postmodern world.

<8> The enacted result of the rise of postmodernism (hi)story is the trend towards inclusive memorials such as that at Colonial Williamsburg, which in the 1970s created a (hi)story more inclusive in its representation of "the other half," [6] and more recent memorials, such as the Oklahoma City memorial and the 9/11 memorial, that are created in the name of and for "ordinary" people. Such memorials are also performative and used to "establish and confirm common values, to send messages to posterity about what is significant and worth preserving.... The new memorials are not only educational sites; they are also, at a primal level, burial places – ‘a communal site of memory'" (emphasis added Rosenblatt). Yet, as Barry Schwartz notes in "Postmodernity and Historical Reputation" postmodernism's agenda of collective memory is a two-sided issue: on one side there is the deconstruction of the past; on the other there is the fading relevance of the past. The individual's connection to her / his society and its past is weakened by postmodernism's discrediting of metanarratives, and history becomes disconnected from the individual's lived experience (Schwartz 65).

<9> One of the consequences of such disconnection is the erosion of the identity of the minority voices meant to be recaptured in the disavowal of metanarrative, for part of this disavowal is also an emphasis on the constructedness of culture and tradition, as components of lived history. In discussing the portrayal of the "other half" [i.e. black culture] at Colonial Williamsburg, Eric Gable, Richard Handler, and Anna Lawson encounter and define the problem of postmodern (anti-)history in terms of culture and originality:

Worse yet, our growing understanding of the ongoing construction of all culture can be politically damaging to "native" peoples who are in the process (often juridical) of claiming their collective rights. Such rights frequently must be based on assertions of cultural rootedness and ‘[ab]orginality'—assertions which are vulnerable to deconstructive accounts of the invention of cultural traditions deemed ancient and natural. (791)

As their study illustrates, the very moment of attempting to defy the traditional metanarrative is so wrought with questions of authenticity and "reality" that the traditions and cultures of the "other half" are defined as circumspect and conjectural; the consequence is a representation of black culture that nonetheless absents its details and uniqueness from history.

<10> Another consequence of the postmodern disconnection of past from present is the rise of a misleading nostalgia which is then defined as collective memory. Fredric Jameson's articulation of postmodern "nostalgia mode" proves useful in understanding the uses and problems of memory. According to Jameson the "nostalgia mode" is an "approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, [which] endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. But this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way" (76-7). Jameson's definition articulates postmodern anti-history as a moment that subjects individuals, disconnected from history and experience, to loss and longing; the response is nostalgia, an idealized "glossy" "pastiched" and "stereotypical" fabrication. Consequently, such nostalgic memory "replaces the succession of events that once defined ‘real history' with a succession of aesthetic styles and embellished facsimiles. Not the pain of the Great Depression but its fashions; not the grief of World War 2, but its musical sounds – this is what nostalgia is about" (Schwartz 65).

<11> In terms of narratives of the nation, this nostalgia leads, for instance, to a memory and construction of an American Republic that is innocent of imperial power and its multitude of injustices [7]. In such a narrative, colonizing settlers such as Washington and Jefferson are perceived as only the colonized, and the history of the Native Americans and slaves are all but erased in a national nostalgia that "renders the expansion of European settler colonies after 1783 both natural and imperially innocent" (MacPhee). The "post-racial" exemplifies this nostalgia that creates America as a democratic nation emptied of its imperialist and racially oppressive imperative by marking Civil Rights action as triumphant through refusing to recall events of racial suffering beyond a certain, idealized era. For all of "the depth of our postmodern ‘incredulity' toward master narratives, universal history has not disappeared" (Klein 294); rather Americans are encouraged to disconnect from and view with circumspection only certain select (hi)stories while remaining nostalgic about others. The "post-racial" imagination, in re-writing the narrative of racial encounter in the contemporary U.S., uses such selective postmodern amnesia.

<12> The "post-racial" inherently contains its own destruction because, as M. Shawn Copeland explains it, "Americans don't know enough about our history to develop a more complex alternative story. We remain ignorant of the contribution that different groups have made to our way of life. And because we don't know other stories, we dismiss them as unimportant and instead focus on just ‘getting along' with each other" (emphasis added "Dream On" 19). Significantly, the "post-racial" imagination's relationship to racial history extends beyond the issue of erasure to absolute disdain; in the time of racial utopia, remembering past oppressions re-instills what Stephen Greenblatt calls "tragic difference" (Klein 287) and thus proves traumatically divisive and ultimately destructive. So how, then, does this theoretical question of race and history display itself in contemporary "post-racial" American culture?

 

Memory, Memorial, and Selective Amnesia

<13> The "post-racial" imperative to re-member America through forgetting histories of racial trauma appears in multiple sites of public memory; national memorials and popular film tributes are among the more frequent sites. The rhetoric surrounding institutionalized memorials provides an excellent example of the "post-racial" amnesia surrounding race in collective memory. The national failure to memorialize the devastation surrounding Katrina exemplifies "post-racialism's" refusal to integrate racialized events into its memory. While individuals and New Orleans residents erect temporary memorials and pay makeshift tribute marking the significance of the event, mass American culture is marked by a pervasive refusal to re-member the event and its victims as part of the larger national narrative. Katrina is recent enough to be a part of the "post-racial" cultural psyche and yet distant enough to have entered into historical discourse as and / or through memorial. Like other memorialized events such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings, the post-Katrina, post-levee breech deaths offered the nation public spectacles of death and terror. And the event offered a moment of surprise and mourning that led the country to question its self-image. If a national monument must show "biological, historical or archeological marvels" ("Canyons of the Ancients"), then the natural and socio-political disaster of Katrina should qualify it as a site for monument memorializing loss. Yet the national and institutionalized refusal to recognize the site reveals the nostalgic reflection surrounding non-racial history in contrast to the conjectural dismissal of racial history.

<14> That the event can be viewed as cultural trauma is evident in the very fact that post-Katrina New Orleans has frequently figured in American popular culture years after the event [8]; notably, attempts to come to grips with the tragedy in such moments tend not to memorialize the loss but, rather, to vilify the victims. The House M.D. episode called "Who's Your Daddy" is particularly troubling in this vilification, for its plot circles around an ailing young girl who has lost her family to the storm. The girl convinces House's friend, Dylan Crandall, that he is her father. Unconvinced, House runs genetic tests on the two and reveals the girl as a fraud. In this moment, the show thus posits even the younger members of New Orleans' (black) populace as criminal in their willingness to con innocent, altruistic bodies. Notably, the episodes positions House against this conniving girl; indeed, the plot not only dislocates the suffering body from the scene of suffering, but redefines its trauma as a biological puzzle subservient to a larger, more urgent puzzle: the true motive and character of the Katrina victims. In the end, the child's body at best serves as a foil to re-emphasize House as redeemable hero; House not only proves savvy in his ability to recognize the child as fraudulent, but also conscientious in his determination to weigh his friend's desires against his drive to reveal the truth. Popular shows such as this dismiss the national significance of the victims' suffering by marking the residents as corrupt and thus typically the cause of their own, and usually others', misfortune and suffering.

<15> Admittedly, Katrina also had dramatically different consequences on and for the nation in contrast to other memorialized events [9]. The 9/11 attack on the WTC and Pentagon, for instance, was easily recognized as external foes attacking the nation and its citizens; notably, talk of the "post-racial" began circulating around this time. The devastation of Katrina, however, re-emphasized the very differences seemingly erased by "post-racialism," and presented in terrible clarity the tangible consequences of those differences as citizens were abandoned by their country. Yet much discussion about the aftermath of Katrina is spent actively disavowing that difference had anything to do with who was left behind. Indeed, discussions emphasizing it as a natural disaster often implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, devalued and dismissed politicized readings of the event. Such disavowal relies upon an ahistoric discourse that ignores the ways class has always been particularly connected to and even contingent upon race and ethnicity in the U.S [10].

<16> While the grounds of World Trade Center is now subjected to over-memorialization [11], there is no move to mark New Orleans as a site subjected to extraordinary and nationally significant loss. Though the multiple-memorials that will mark the site of the former WTC in New York is an example of how the "American way of death, which historically has shuttled between the extremes of denial and desire, seems to be tending towards desire...to connect with the ideas of death and the past, no matter how superficial that connection may sometimes be" (Rosenblatt), the treatment towards the Katrina site signifies this over-emphasized connection as selective nostalgia. While Rosenblatt posits denial and desire as two oscillating possibilities in dealing with loss in any given era, the contemporary moment reveals them to be contemporaneous as the nation desires connection with one loss and denies the other.

<17> Significant in this move to deny is the lesson lost in this erased history; if memorials, such as those for the WTC, Pentagon and Oklahoma City, are meant as a "sign that we have not forgotten and will never forget [and]...has real uses" as cautionary tales that teach moral lessons (Rosenblatt), then the refusal to memorialize in New Orleans signifies not only a determination to forget but an implicit designation of its memory as useless. As Michael Eric Dyson notes a mere year after Katrina, "conversations seem to have died down to a murmur. And the questions Katrina raised about the intersections of race and poverty no longer seem as pressing" ("Who's to Blame" 296). Consequently the decision (not) to memorialize in these sites is symptomatic of the "post-racial" drive to become nostalgic and idealize certain narratives and forget other particular (hi)stories. Such histories are, in the process of forgetting, marked as useless and, furthermore, denied their power to raise national moral questions about race. Equally important, gentrification efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans effectively displace the position of memorial, literally covering over the site of black suffering and devastation with structures testifying, instead, to (white) affluence.

<18> Most significant in the questions raised by looking at the treatment of Katrina as memory is the issue of meaning and significance. As Rosenblatt notes, "the idea of public death is also selective. Which events are chosen for memorialization, and which are not? A memorial is the result of the importance the public ascribes to the death " (emphasis added Rosenblatt) [12]. Such questions are all that more important in the face of events like 9/11 and the aftermath of Katrina because they were both moments of literally public death. While memorials allow the public to re-experience and re-imagine deaths they were not present for, the public was visually and experientially present for the deaths in these two events. Furthermore, because of prolonged media presence and the protracted nature of the event, public exposure to death in New Orleans was prolonged and individuated. The decision not to build upon this already present moment of witnessing in New Orleans thus overtly designates those deaths, and the questions they raise, as unimportant and forgettable.

<19> The failure to memorialize also aids in further dehumanizing the victims of the event. Ed Linenthal contends that in the modern memorial, "the memory of the event will be as transforming as the event itself and as humanizing as the event was dehumanizing" (Rosenblatt). Like the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing whose lives are marked by crystal chairs in various locations, the victims of the WTC will be returned to their humanity through multiple gestures that offer visitors a chance to connect with the distinct losses. The Oklahoma City memorial, for instance, re-humanizes the victims by allowing visitors to tangibly interact with them by through walking among and sitting in the victim's places. Even the Vietnam War memorial and the Holocaust memorial in Washington D.C. invites visitors to engage and interact with those lost, connecting with individuals through physically accessible names and visual re-enactments of their experience [13]. I should also note here that the two are significant for other features. The Vietnam memorial is significant in that it is one of few U.S. memorials that does not rise above ground level to pierce the sky with its testimony but rather is essentially a gash in the ground; like other memorials, its form guides visitors on how to view the event amid American history and culture. The Holocaust is significant because it is a memorial to an experience suffered by a minority of Americans on foreign soil, and yet directs visitors to read the event as integral to the American experience. The existence of the Washington D.C. Holocaust memorial, among various other Holocaust memorials across the nation, provides an interesting precedent for national memory of Katrina.

<20> The lack of memorial in the case of New Orleans notably denies the victims and the city this impact and continuous referentiality. Where the tranquility of the 9/11 memorial, for example, will re-humanize and signify upon the life of each individual and invites us to view them as parts of meaningful historical events, the already dehumanized Katrina victims suffer further objectification. Numerous tours of the ninth ward have risen in the absence of a move to memorialize. Anna Harnell, in discussing the kind of "disaster voyeurism" offered by companies such as the Gray Line's "Hurricane Katrina Tour," explains that tourists "guided through neighborhoods still reeling from the impact of both the storm and its deeply politicized aftermath...can experience ‘firsthand' the storm-devastated neighborhoods while being almost entirely insulated from the human beings still suffering the ongoing economic and racial fallout from the hurricane's aftermath" (723). Such tours, and the culture that embraces them, only further reduce the people to objects by turning the signs of their devastation and suffering into commodity. And as commodity, they are denied the position of meaningful event and historical significance; as commodity, they become but the latest trend in the market.

<21> Yet the problematic evaluations that divide these moments are pre-existent aspects of a postmodern philosophizing that feigns towards the sort of inclusive rhetoric bolstering the "post-racial." Thus looking at gestures toward the "other" in U.S. memorials and monuments reveals this gesture is conflictual at best, caught between two histories: one that is invented, conjectural and thus, easily dismissed, and another that is naively objective:

The just-the-facts' history, takes precedence in the stories the institution tells about whites, while a relativizing epistemology is used, even emphasized, in the stories told about blacks...this bifurcation is unique neither to Colonial Williamsburg nor to the discipline of history. It occurs in the academy and in anthropology. In then postcolonial and postmodern world, the tools of deconstruction...have been let loose upon ‘minority cultures' precisely at the moment when those cultures are proclaiming their identities by using for their own end the grammar and the vocabulary of the mainstream...Lost in the deconstructive orgy is the more crucial point that the majority or mainstream traditions are equally invented. Yet some inventions are easier to dismantle than others or, perhaps, easier for audiences to accept as inventions. (Gable et al 802)

Debates over how and why the aftermath of Katrina occurred as it did illustrate a contemporary reduction of experiential event to conjectural history. Having named race as constructed and systematically manipulated, the cultural critic that hopes to define Katrina's devastation through questions of race and class – the storm as an illustration of social policies that undervalue racial minorities and the impoverished bodies, and how the collision of these identities in the bodies of the Katrina "refugees" compounded their suffering – are denied the tools of analysis through a "post-racial" discourse that devalues and dismisses the vocabulary and history of racial difference. Such discourses become "conspiracy theory," yet confronting the faces of the residents leaves few alternative methods for discussing how such a travesty occurred; consequently the Katrina victims are left floundering and unmourned by a culture that reduces their experience to conjecture and thus historical insignificance. Indeed, a comparison between the treatment of the site of devastation in New Orleans, and the practice and meaning of memorials in American Culture reveals that "post-racial" America is not only not beyond race, but that the dismissal of racial history as relevant and significant to understanding the present is a reaction to continued discomfort surrounding the subject and a lack of language to talk about both the history of race and its contemporary meaning.

<22> I conclude this discussion on the question of memory, memorial, and the "post-racial" with a brief discussion of a recent film which testifies to the question of memorialization in a country that is beyond racial divisiveness. The film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009) [14] is curious for a variety of reasons, beyond its manipulation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story or its relocation of the setting from Baltimore Maryland in the mid-nineteenth century to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The story begins in a hospital in New Orleans a few hours before Katrina hits; Caroline sits with her dying mother, Daisy, and reads to her from Benjamin's journal. Daisy begins the narrative journey by relaying the story of a clockmaker who constructs a commissioned clock in memorial to those who have died in the first World War; the clock notably runs backwards "so that perhaps the boys we lost in the war might stand and come home again" (The Curious Case). Benjamin's story, as read by Caroline, follows, and the bulk of the plot takes place in New Orleans. The story concludes as the storm hits, and the flood waters are seen rising around the commemorative clock [15], as the hands again begin to count time in reverse.

<23> The film notably exemplifies the sort of nostalgia and idealism surrounding America discussed earlier in this essay. Benjamin Button touches upon questions of immigration, through the introduction of an Irish tugboat captain and an African pygmy; political history, through placing Button in Russia at the peak of WWI; and cosmopolitan culture, through having Button traverse from New Orleans to New York City to Paris. As such, the movie envisions a mythic America disrupted only by the external strife of global wars as its plot arc and protagonist re-imagine an America of racial and ethnic harmony, for Button moves easily among various marginalized groups throughout the course of his travels. At worst The Curious Case of Benjamin Button accuses American culture of negligent ageism.

<24> The film, which attempts to re-situate the individuality and humanity of New Orleans' refugees in the popular memory, begins with a literal moment of memorialization. This memory of memorial functions doubly, invoking the bodies of citizens lost to war and storm through the collapse of memory told during tragic event and memorial surrounding tragic event. Furthermore, given the release of the film, its shift in timeline, and its overt re-location within contemporary tragedy, one may assume the reference to those lost in war extends beyond WWI to more recent, similar events and losses. The film thus collides two major events in recent American culture: the first moment references the loss suffered through international warfare and thus recalls our most recent losses in 9/11 and the War on Terror, even as the film is a clear testimony and tribute to the devastation of Katrina.

<25> Even so, the film manages to ignore the peculiar racial history of New Orleans, absenting the conflicts and rebellions from its memorial. Nearly all of Benjamin's time in New Orleans is spent amid the aging populace of a retirement home; notably, the staff of this home, including his foster mother Queenie, is all black. This dynamic is paralleled in the pre-Katrina hospital as viewers encounter a number of black staff in the halls and in the midst of nursing Daisy. The doubling suggests that the terror of Katrina is, in part, another moment when the marginalized have been ignored and left behind for generations; furthermore, this group consists solely of black and elderly bodies. Yet the film does not extend its criticism of marginalization beyond this; indeed the film reduces its depiction of black-white encounter to one of kind nurturing, affectionate co-habitation, and shared marginalization. Aside from Queenie posing as a typical mammy figure, the film makes little attempt to render the problematic and violent experience of racial encounter in the city. Indeed, despite its time period, New Orleans' racial history is profoundly absent; incidents such as the Crescent City White League and its racist rule over the city, and the protests surrounding Ruby Bridges and the desegregation of schools, are forgotten in the film's tribute.

<26> One of the few moments in which racial history is implicated occurs when Benjamin accompanies Mr. Oti, a pygmy, on a day trip. The two sit in the back of a trolley car while a group of white passengers sit in front; viewers thus encounter a moment of segregation in the film. Oti, in fact, implicitly defines this otherness to Benjamin: "Plenty of time you'll be alone. When you're different like us, its gonna be that way. But I tell you a little secret. Fat people, skinny people, tall people, white people, they're just as alone as we are" (The Curious Case). In this moment, Oti identifies the isolation and segregation that occurs from being difference even as this difference is imagined because in the end, everyone is alone. Yet race here is reduced to a minor aspect at the end of a line of various ways of being different. Such a reduction is significant given that, as a pygmy who immigrated to America in the 1920s, Oti is subject to both colonization and institutionalized racism, via Jim Crow laws [16]. Furthermore the history of racial division is undercut by Mr. Oti's hyper-otherness for he tells stories of willingly performing as part of a side show act in a zoo. At the climax of the story, Oti lunges at the white children, who are turned around in their streetcar seats listening to his story, and growls at them, baring his row of sharpened teeth. Blacks in the film's memory thus suffer a similar fate as black history in Colonial Williamsburg; reduced to caricature, they become part of fable-like conjectural history, not complex actors in a conflictual and often violent history. Consequently The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though notable for its call to remember the raced and aged population of New Orleans, nonetheless falls subject to and is illustrative of the "post-racial" (dis)connection with history.

<27> While this failure to acknowledge history in the film may seem like a minor point for a fictional text, given the movie's popularity and its attempt to draw the dismissed and displaced black populace of New Orleans back into the national view, one should not overlook how the disconnection short circuits conversations and memories about the event. If memorials, in part, inspire meditation and change through studied response to the remembered event, then failure to represent the complexities of race in Katrina will only engender misguided discourse and response. The problematic result of ignoring history is evident in the very ideology about race in "post-racial" discourse.

 

Conclusion: More to Lose Than Memory

<28> For the "post-racial", difference is equivocated with oppression [17], yet ethnic American history shows that it is possible to maintain difference while being integrated into dominant society. Scholarly work on the construction of whiteness, specifically the whitening of Italian and Irish immigrants in U.S. culture, point to the possibility and precedent of acculturation, rather than the assimilation that results from denying difference [18]. Acculturation allows for the recognition and negotiation of difference in a way that avoids fragmenting and sacrificing components of self. Audre Lorde, for instance, explains that "the need for unity is often mistaken as a need for homogeneity" (119) which is inevitably destructive to the whole group / movement as well as the individual, now-fragmented self. She concludes, "[m]y fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definitions" (Lorde 120-21).

<29> If Juan Williams, in his debate with Michael Eric Dyson, is correct in concluding that "race is part of the American picture" (Dyson 303) then there is little to be gained in disavowing its historical and continued existence in American culture. Rather than reading the mark and memory of racial difference as a moment of tragic factionalizing in the "happy march of progress" towards assimilation into (white) society (Klein 289), a truly "post-racial" society will acknowledge and embrace difference. For instance, Cornell West, recalling Dr. Martin Luther King's dismissal of a color blind society, says that Americans should instead strive "to be love-struck by one another. Being love-struck by your fellow citizens means embracing their humanity—which includes their color, culture, and history" (West 42). In this articulation of the acceptance that leads to a lasting racial utopia, West notably invokes the recognition of racial history as an important component. Similarly, Brett St Louis's critique on the "post-racial" polity on race concludes that the end of prejudice depends upon how society informs and produces "ontologically specific knowledge" (662). The question of production necessarily includes questions of history since production, especially of knowledge, never occurs in a vacuum. Thus the dismissal of racial history as irrelevant to the "post-racial" imagination proves counter productive. Rather such a dismissal assures that the mechanisms of racial oppression will continue to manifest themselves in mechanisms of knowledge production, in the workings of social memory, and in the governing bodies of the country.

<30> I thus conclude where I began, with the question of memory and racial trauma as articulated in Toni Morrison's Beloved. As I have suggested, the "post-racial" reading of the text, which would encourage selective forgetting as useful and necessary for progress, is problematic if not counter-productive. Furthermore, such a reading ignores the rest of the text's repeated evocation of "re-memory" as an imperative to re-member and share narratives. As much as the novel ends with this seeming push to forget, it also ends with Beloved waiting in the wings for the moment that we do forget, for then she can and will return to wreak havoc while demanding to be told the forgotten stories and ancestors she embodies. Consequently Morrison's text does not compel us to forget; rather story comes to signify experience, specifically the experience of racialized trauma, as the characters connect their suppressed past to their current and ancestral sufferings. The imperative not to pass along story is thus really an imperative not to pass along the experience of trauma; significantly, this is done through the (re-)telling of (hi)story [19]. Through homogenizing contemporary Americans, and through denying and ignoring racial history, the "post-racial" imposes fragmenting, destructive definitions upon the unraced subject. It thus re-imposes the consequence of racist gesture even as it is a disavowal of racism and race's significance in contemporary culture [20].

 


Works Cited

"About the Memorial." National September 11 Memorial and Museum at The World Trade Center. 5 June 2009. Web. 5 June 2009.

Burnham, Linda. "Obama's Candidacy: The Advent of Post-Racial America and the End of Black Politics." The Black Scholar 38.4 (2008): 43-46. Web. 7 May 2009.

Copeland, M. Shawn. "Dream On." U.S. Catholic May 2009: 18-22. Web. 7 May 2009.

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Notes

[1]  I say near miss because, as many meteorologists will explain, the storm didn't directly hit the area [^]

[2]  The juxtaposition of images also connects to another post-racial ideal: that depictions of the Barack family will inevitably prevent whites from "indulging in stereotypes in stereotypes that portray blacks as lazy or criminal" ("What a black President"); such stereotypes inherently contributed to the rhetoric that made violence against and the oppression of blacks excusable during much of the twentieth century. [^]

[3]  The essay thus implicitly contends that there were no racial conflicts or protests of note throughout the whole of the 90s, a problematic and telling statement given that the 90s saw a rise in black reconnection to their cultural history of oppression and struggle. [^]

[4]  Essentially, discussions of institutionalized racism lend themselves to the growing discussions of white privilege and whiteness studies. [^]

[5]  Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is the most referenced work on the subject of history as constructed metanarrative; Nancy Fraser's and Linda Nicholson's essay "Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism" provides an excellent examination of Lyotard's theory and extends his discussion of postmodern distrust to consider its ramifications for the female body in patriarchal society. Lastly, Walter Benjamin's Illuminations may be similarly understood to articulate a troubling of history in his now commonplace observations that history is written by the victor. [^]

[6]  This revision to the site was in response to criticism during the mid-1970s that its "excessive focus on colonial elites and its consequent re-creation of a past too genteel to be authentic" (Gable et al 793). [^]

[7]  MacPhee describes this amnesia in detail:

there may have been slavery and genocide, and it may be that the USA has begun to assume a quasi-imperial role, but such historical quandaries do not imperil the authenticity of the American Republic as the uniquely unadulterated expression of political liberty and democracy in the modern world. In this view, it is the fundamentally free and democratic character of the American Republic that must be purified of the historical stain of slavery and genocide, or saved from the impending prospect of imperialism to come. [^]

[8]  Similarly, Katrina victims appear in the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode titled "The Storm" in the form of three kidnapped sisters; however, their suffering is dislocated and de-emphasized by a plot that focuses on the criminal pedophile body, also from New Orleans, and, more significantly, on a larger government-focused conspiracy theory. Katrinians make a destructive appearance on The Boondocks in the episode "The Invasion of the Katrinians;" embodied in a fleeing family notably named "The Blacks," the victims seemingly take over the plot line of the sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, while another HBO show, True Blood, begins with reference to the event. There was even an entire series, K-Ville, that featured post-Katrina New Orleans as its weekly backdrop for the series' buddy-cop plot. [^]

[9]  I should briefly note that, although I recognize that the discourse surrounding the nature of memorials is a rather complex and multi-vocal one, I do not wish to engage in debate about the nature of memorials in terms of the process and discussions surrounding their construction in this essay. It is, I realize, a rather winding and politically vested topic that deserves more attention than I've room to discuss here. Rather, I would like to focus on the very moment of consensus to memorialize, and what such a determination – or lack thereof – means to the question of memory in "post-racial" American culture. Thus I discussion contrasting memorials, such as the 9/11 memorial in New York and the Oklahoma Bombing memorial in Oklahoma city, for their positions as nationalized promises to remember. Though the final form of the memorial is a contested topic, the very decision to memorialize already locates it within a set of memory tropes and sentiments about the position of the event to history. [^]

[10]  Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts comments wonderfully on this connection in terms of New Orleans, noting that it is oddly coincidental that New Orleans has one of the highest populations of black residents – 70% at the time of the storm – in the country as well as one of the highest rates of poverty at 23%. Lee explicitly links race to class when he explains that the reason so many blacks stayed was because the storm hit a few days before state welfare checks were distributed; thus many did not have the funds to escape, having spent the bulk of the previous check on necessities for the previous month. [^]

[11]  The memorial will consist of a Memorial Plaza of over 400 Sweet White Oak and Sweetgum trees – whose leaves will begin to change colors to red and gold each fall around September 11 – a museum dedicated to 9/11, and a train station. There will also be two one acre-sized pools with the victim's names "inscribed on parapets surrounding the pools, within groupings that will allow for family members, friends, and co-workers who shared life's journey and perished together to have their names listed side by side" ("About the Memorial"). Additionally, the lighting is such that, at night light will shine up through the letters. [^]

[12]  Further, when we ask "what gets memorialized" we are also implicitly asking "what is significant in the nation's stories about itself and its people." [^]

[13]  In terms of visitor interaction, the Vietnam War memorial features towering wall with the names of soldiers stencil cut into its surface; the Holocaust memorial exhibits railcars that recall those used to transport the Holocaust victims. [^]

[14]  Although Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke (2005) and Alicia Michelle Morgan's Trouble the Water (2009) also memorialize new Orleans, these two were notably documentaries released on HBO and thus not as mainstream as Benjamin Button. Furthermore, the latter film, as nominated for 13 Academy Awards and winner of 3 Oscars, received critical acclaim and thus merits further attention. [^]

[15]  The film notes that the clock is displaced from the train station by a digital clock a few years earlier. [^]

[16]  These are particularly significant issues in New Orleans where Plessy v. Ferguson was brought to trial and defeated to uphold segregation, and where, in 1877, the Crescent White League overthrew the local government to dismiss the state governor and seize control of the city. [^]

[17]  For example, John McWhorter exclaims that "Post-racialism is a good direction because if there's some separation between Blacks and Whites, it's as if some unpleasantness is going on" (Lum). [^]

[18]  M. Shawn Copeland explains the post-racial as a homogenizing impulse, noting that "We need to get away from homogenizing what it means to be American. It just perpetuates the notion that the dominant white culture is the standard that others need to blend into" (19).[^]

[19]  Furthermore, consider Morrison's choice of the phrase "pass on" instead of tell; the phrase implies an uncritical transmission that does not engage its recipient or sender. In contrast, telling story in the text becomes a way of engaging the narrated event, dismantling it and re-membering it. [^]

[20]  Although this essay has focused on post-Katrina New Orleans and its black populace to exemplify "post-racialism's" process of actively forgetting in the cause of re-membering America, I do not wish to repeat the very crime of reduction which I noted "post-racialism" commits. My choice to focus on Katrina stems largely from the scale of its tragedy and the place it has occupied in national consciousness. Yet even this and other discussions of the event absents other minorities from the scene as blacks are made to signify all minorities. [^]


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