Continuing the Race Conversation, and We're Bringing it to the US

Dear Ms. MEHness,

Unfortunately, I could not find a radio report on bi/multiracial identity in Europe, but this is a good start: Farai Chideya's interview with Lise Funderburg. Although this report mainly deals with "combinations" of black and white, the themes discussed are universal for people identifying as racially plural. Naturally, the exact historical context of racial pluralism would be different in Europe, perhaps drastically; in Spain, for example, the proximity to northern Africa and the long presence of the Moors made racial and cultural pluralism a reality early in its history. Although there was discrimination against people who had Moorish blood, the Spanish part of these people was also recognized, which was rare at the time. (They were still considered inferior.) Germany, on the other hand, was a purist state despite its decidedly "impure" background. It will be interesting to see where racial development goes from here.

Internalization vs. Globalization

Dear Classier Hoeing,

I, too, love Goodbye, Lenin! and agree with your point about the internalization of oppression that occurs among the people of totalitarian governments. I think an interesting question to consider on this subject is how such internalization works in a rapidly globalizing society. In Europe it is more difficult for any country to achieve the kind of isolation needed to sustain a totalitarian government; with the establishment of the EU and the enduring political suspicion of many European governments, an outright dictatorship would be taken down pretty quickly. However, in North Korea, the country with the least personal and political freedom in the world, the people reject offerings of knowledge from the outside world. On NPR recently, there was a story of a man who went to North Korea in order to persuade Kim Jong-Il to have a national rock concert. He showed a woman on the bus a newspaper from South Korea, and she looked at it to be polite but did not read it. This incident is an example of the internalization you speak of, but one must wonder how long it will be until the information bug is caught by those who have forced out the desire to know.

Visions of the Future: Post-Racialization

Dear Ms. MEHness,

Years after the publication of this issue of Time Magazine, there was a news program about the amazing technology used to generate the face of the woman on the cover. At the time, I was about eleven or twelve years old and just beginning to understand my own complex racial identity. I looked at the report, the computer generated face on the cover, and the sensationalized accounts of the (apparently modern) occurrence of racial mixing in this country. Idly, I wondered why Time Magazine never thought to hire a multiracial human model--they exist. In fact, that racially plural, digital face does not represent the people of the future; we're here right now, and guess what? We've always been here.

I'm strangely flattered, in a way, that Time Magazine groups me with the pluralistic, racially revolutionary people that will supposedly change the face of our country and the world. I feel as though I must be experiencing first-hand "futuristic living" as it is defined by Time Magazine. On standardized tests, I bubble in a different race every year; on my college applications, I checked up to five boxes under "Racial Makeup." (In case you were wondering: White, African-American, West Indian, European, Other.) In interviews, I receive such intrepid and sometimes well-intentioned questions such as, "What are you?" or "What's your mix?" If people are uncomfortable with the word "mix," they will usually substitute "nationality," and then when I explain, I get slapped with the "exotic" label. I must say, the life of a person of the future is fairly difficult to convey.

The most interesting conversation I've had about my race in a long time happened a few days ago, when an Orthodox Jewish man asked me how I stay grounded intellectually. According to him, one's personality is formed mostly through the adherence to tradition, and my racial multiplicity worried him because he thought I had no solid cultural base to grow from. His concern for my cultural and spiritual well-being was kindly, so I expressed to him the same Pollyanna vision of the future I envisioned for Europe in MEH:

One day, far in the future, our concept of race will become so dilute that racial discrimination will be virtually impossible.

Tradition will be maintained, but culture individually innovated.

Conflict will come of material, intellectual, and emotional disputes. Xenophobia will be too confusing to entertain.

Then, he shared a picture of his Japanese-Irish-Polish niece and nephew with me. His family's contribution to racial plurality, he said. The people of the future who are the here-and-now.

The Synthetic Sound: Further Mooging

Dear Elizabeth,

The moog, despite its clunky design and now dated technology, is perhaps the most influential musical tool of the electronic movement. Developed by the American Robert Moog, the instant popularization of the analog synthesizer in Germany marked a distinct shift in the way Germans viewed postwar technology. (To learn more about the heavy industry and military technology prevalent in WWII, I suggest checking out the research of fellow MEH bloggers JED, Natewozere, and Sam.) The moog is far from militant; it is, simply, a machine for synthesizing and innovating sounds. The Berlin School's extensive use of the moog was not only a method of expression but also a way of emphasizing technological nonviolence after WWII. Tangerine Dream, especially, used the moog to produce peaceful, ambient sounds--sounds which no one could have imagined coming from a machine.



Naturally, the moog was quickly replaced by digital synthesizers; the Trip Hop movement centered in Bristol skipped the moog completely. However, the idea of spreading a philosophy through innovating sound persisted and allowed for future artists to expand the impact of electronic music throughout Europe (and the world).

If You're Smart, Go Die Now

Dear Comrade Elizabeth,

Intellectuals have an odd habit of stating their opinion. (Trotsky is a good example of such brazen behavior. I doubt he ever imagined his outspokenness would merit an ice pick in his cranium.) The intellectuals who supported the USSR may have been highly influential, but they also lived the most dangerous lives of any of the comrades. When the Bolsheviks first identified the educated, wealthy class as a threat, they began to mobilize against them immediately. There were only two courses of action: either openly support communism or get the hell out of the country, and fast. (Fortunately, an escaping intellectual could use their incredible mental faculties to evade the policemen at the border.) Great-great grandfather on my mother's side was a professor at the University of St. Petersburg and the owner of the Ural Gold Mining Company in Tsarist Russia. Once the Bolsheviks began a series of non-proletariat killings, he realized the urgent need for smart people to flee the country. He split his family in two; my great-great grandmother escaped through Europe with her two eldest children, and he escaped through China with all the young ones, eventually making his way to the United States. Right after they left, there was an attack on St. Petersburg elite. Few survived to see the USSR, although those that did played a huge role in shaping it; in order to enforce the success of the communist state, there couldn't be enough intellectuals to constitute a dissenting class. (God forbid that there would be communist leaders other than Stalin gathering support in the USSR. *cough*Trotsky*cough*)

PS: Our family still doesn't know what came of the people that escaped into Europe. it is possible that we have relatives in France descended from the eldest son, the only member of the family to survive the ordeal.

Lenin's Legacy Continued, or Killing People

Dear Esteemed Partner in Crime AKA Elizabeth,

It's true that the kulaks and Russian intellectuals were not treated as the same kind of population. Stalin would eventually put Kulaks into concentration camps, a measure that was never taken for the educated, noble elite. The elite were still dealt with harshly, in fact, the Bolsheviks adhered to a strict policy of quick arrest and quiet execution. However, both groups proved to be opposition for the new communist regime. This opposition meant that in true communist style, little distinction was made between them. Intellectualism and resources often generate the same sort of power for the lucky holders, so the government's violent course of action seemed quite straightforward. The groups had to be removed. Out of this apparent need came organizations such as the Checka and KGB; such organizations would be most effective after the Kulaks and intellectuals were disposed of because they specialized in picking off dissenting individuals/budding groups. Thus, the communist regime annihilated entire classes without giving the least thought to what distinguished them--in this they accomplished their goals.

Raging Hard for Counter-Imperialism

Dear Classier Hoeing,

I largely agree with your argument. To a certain degree, imperialism has allowed us to lead a "first world" lifestyle in the United States, Europe, and other "select" parts of the globe. Economies stagnate without new markets, raw materials, and resources; imperialism allowed Europe to jump start the long process of globalizing. However, I don't believe that standards of living would be less had the invisible hand not extended itself over the "unoccupied" territories of Africa, the Orient, and the Americas. Every region of the world had experienced the flux of empire. China, Egypt, the Aztecs and Incas. I think that had the natural rise and fall of isolated empires continued, new technology would gradually emerge, and the process of forming the so-called "global village" would arise from the integration of these disparate technologies.

This counter-imperialistic theory is by no means all about flowers and peace signs and cute furry animals living together in uninterrupted harmony. There is no way to avoid the violence that would inevitably come of power play. In fact, without European imperialism, some attempt at integration and conquer would most likely be made, and the world's wealth would still become heavily concentrated on select regions. (If Africa stayed in control of its plentiful resources, they would prove to be a major power in the world market, perhaps even an imperialist one.) So would much change? Perhaps there would be an equalization of world power. Perhaps there would be less oppression, racism, and debt. Regardless, allowing the rise-and-fall cycle of empires to continue without intervention would not drastically alter the contemporary standard of living. We're not eating the cake that we somehow have. This is just the way things happened.

Blame it on Napoleon

Dear Mr. Conroy,

The lack of a woman's suffrage movement in England actually goes all the way back to the Terror during the French Revolution. Although English development politically, socially, and economically has progressed at its own rate through much of history, the losses sustained in France at the time set back collective European feminism by about 20 years. First, the execution of the playwright-polemic Olympe de Gouges deprived women of an authoritative advocate of gender equality; Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth within two years, thus depriving the movement of a calculative supporter of equal education. Without the two strongest women of the era, no one advocated powerful representation of women as Napoleon drew up his Codes. In the Codes, women were expected by law to occupy a very specific role in the private sphere. Thus, the revolutionary spirit that allowed women to come into the public sphere was dissipated, the remaining women repressed. Had France taken a revolutionary stand and granted women (at least) some of the rights outlined in de Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, then perhaps the rest of Europe could have followed suit. Unfortunately, nothing happened. Women were denied, and the movement would not start up again until the early 20th century. Who wants to give the vote to those people who are occupied with housework?

That is not to say that women had no advocates in post-Napoleonic Europe; in England, the utilitarian Mill was an uncommon male ally, publicizing his belief that the education of women would embody "the greatest good for the greatest number." However, Parliament was wary of working class men voting, let alone an entire "domestic" population. Why was this the case? Wasn't the prospect of wealthy women voting better than granting the vote to a poor, uneducated man? The 19th century answer would be that women are only suited for the private sphere and should have nothing to do with the public one their husbands occupied. In the 1970s, feminists would develop a theory that the so-called domestic/public spheres that were thought to separate men and women actually related to genital structure. In short, a claim was made that women were denied the vote based on "biological discrimination." A woman's reproductive system is internal, so she shouldn't be bothered with politics and the world and human rights. Naturally, it's all Napoleon's fault for throwing woman's rights out the window in 1800.

Let's just say that we're lucky to have moved on from all that.

Further Contemplations of Modernity

This post is a continuation of the discussion here.

This is where we could start getting into an argument about modern vs. contemporary. I disagree that the term "modern" is empty when separated from the modernist movement. Not every age is modern in the scope of history, nor does modernist doctrine make this claim. (Although according to the Cult of Postmodernism, it is possible that every era since the beginning of time has been postmodern.) Classicism, for example, was in no way modern. It was a reversion to a previous artistic period, and the fact that it came to be in a revolutionary climate does not make it any more avant-garde than the technique merits. However, classicism at the time of its conception was contemporary--momentarily modern. Of course, in the scope of history, such contemporaneity is cast aside, and the more enduring traits of an era become its defining points, traits that determine the objective modernity of a time.

Modern vs. Modernist

Dear Classier Hoeing and Natewozere,

I would first like to make the important distinction between "modern" and the modernity implied by "modernism." In my previous post, "The Mean Nurse Returns," I assert at the end that Romanticism can be considered the first modern period in the long progression of European history. By calling Romanticism "modern," I was not relating it in any way to the subsequent modernist movement; as you both have pointed out, Modernism and Romanticism are completely different animals, and any relationships between them are most likely due to the fact that one happened to follow the other chronologically. To conflate the two is a mistake, but should they have to be related to rationalize Romantic modernity?

I agree that Romanticism was not the pinnacle of artistic and social individualism; one can identify the so-called Romantic art and poetry with practiced ease. In some ways, the Romantics have become the well-known cliches of the present day--which would not be the case if Romantic artists were radically different from one another. (Perhaps the contemporary conception of the Romantic cliche is also what impedes our understanding of Romanticism as a form of the avant-garde or the modern.) Despite the inadvertent homogeneity of Romantic technique, the irrevocable shift in attitude towards the nature of the individual is ultimately what labels it as a modern movement. Prior to Romanticism (even during the Enlightenment), a philosophical assumption was made that humans are fundamentally good, rational creatures. With the advent of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud in the 19th century, the perception of the individual emphasized the irrational and animal in us--hence, the Id. Romanticism may not have artistically demonstrated the full potential of individualism, but the simple reconsideration of the nature of the individual pegged Romanticism as a heterogeneous movement. A modern movement, even, since it was more experimental than those that had preceded it.