Trump’s supporters applaud his effort. Legions of insecure white men and the white women eager to be subservient to them proudly wear and display Trump’s MAGA drivel. If ignoring diversity, equity, and inclusion once made America great — at least in their intellectually challenged minds — mandating the end of DEI now should restore this nation to its prior greatness. Right? What’s the point of understanding others’ history and perspectives if all those others should do is be white as God intended?

Maybe, assuming there is a God who created us all, we should make note of the fact that he created a damned diverse world full of people the MAGA crowd consider “other.” Our civilization was not created solely by dead white men — they just had the most effective flacks promoting their product. Many rivers lead to the sea that comprises our world.

To better understand the diversity of ingredients added to the human gumbo, let us consider the following questions: Why do I study (and enjoy) African American literature? Why is study of African American Literature—and, by extension, other minority literature—important for all, including the MAGA minions?

My answers to both questions have a lot to do with the two women in the above photo, and with one man who died before the photo was taken.

The young woman on the left is my grandmother, Yut-Seul Yee[1]. The older woman on the right is my great-grandmother, Myrtle Mae (Robinson) Yee. The missing man in the photo is my great-grandfather, Yee Jock Leong.[2]

My great-grandfather is Chinese. His family name is actually 余, which is typically pronounced like “Yee” in Taishanese and “Yu” in Mandarin. He was born in San Francisco in 1884, just a couple of years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Even though he was an American citizen according to the Fourteenth Amendment, he constantly had to justify his right to live in the United States to the white majority who didn’t want him here—and who, through the powers vested in the white majority via the Chinese Exclusion Act and its successors—prevented him from bringing his original family over here.

In time my great-grandfather gave up and started a new family in Dayton, Ohio, with my great-grandmother. They had three children, two of whom died in infancy. He died in 1936 from complications of tuberculosis. He and the two children are buried in unmarked graves in Dayton.

My grandmother was the only child to survive. Shortly after she graduated from high school, she was wooed by a man who got her pregnant. He was not at the time interested in the responsibilities of fatherhood and was soon out of her life—and never in my mother’s life. When my mom was born, she was born into a very confused environment. I might have had a chance to clear up some of the confusion had my grandmother not died in 1979 before I knew there were many questions that needed to be asked.

This is where my great-grandmother comes to the fore. My great-grandmother seemed inclined toward alternate histories. When my great-grandfather died, she burned much of his belongings, which—unfortunately—destroyed pretty much every shred of evidence my mom and I could use to find family in China or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora. When my great-grandmother remarried—to an Irish World War I veteran named Patrick Mitchell—she presented herself to the world as white. (More later.) When my mom was born, she launched a scheme to tell my mom that she was the mother and that my mother’s actual mom was her sister.

Now, my great-grandmother, like some of her aunts and uncles and their children, in time told others she was white.

She told my mom she was half-Chinese and half-Spanish, and that she was born in Santa Barbara, California.

My mom, not knowing any better, in her DD-398 (Statement of Personal History) for the U.S. Air Force in 1959, repeated the Chinese-Spanish-Santa Barbara story.

—

OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here …

At this point in the narrative, we’ve had many problems. With more to come.

My great-grandmother was not white … well, maybe a little.

She is not Chinese.

She was not Spanish.

She wasn’t even born in Santa Barbara.

My great-grandmother did not just destroy evidence of my great-grandfather’s past, she went to great lengths to conceal her own.

—

I’ve been interested in my past since I was a kid. (Yes, that goes back a ways.) When I was in junior high school and high school in the 1970s, I started trying to learn about my family’s history. There was a lot—not all accurate, but mostly accurate—on my dad’s side. On my mom’s side, what we knew of the Chinese ancestry was short. We had no idea who her father was.

I had a chance to start investigating some of that in 1987 or 1988 when I was sent for some training in Cincinnati. Dayton was not that far away, so I headed up there while on a break to track down vital records of my mom. I did not discover who her father was, but I got some strong hints that a lot of what my mom and I thought we knew about her family’s past just wasn’t so.

There were no records of my mom’s birth—long a bit of a thorn in her side—but there were birth and death records for her mother, aunt, and uncle. And none of them said anything about my great-grandmother being Chinese and/or Spanish.

The words I found that described my great-grandmother—written by the family doctor—were “negro” or “colored.” Her birthplace was listed as either Indiana or Michigan.

—

OK, Houston, I have a problem here.

I didn’t have a problem with being “colored” or “negro” myself. As a Chinese American, I was already not white enough for not-so-polite society. I knew what it was like to live on eggshells for fear that some white idiot would take his frustrations out on me because of my Asian heritage—and anti-Asian sentiment was widespread and openly expressed in the Vietnam Era in which I grew up. (Racists are rarely selective in the targets of their venom.)

My problem was that the information I found in Dayton did not jive with the story my mom and, ultimately, I was raised with. I knew from photos that my great-grandmother was somewhat dark-skinned. But she had prominent eye folds like Asians and frankly reminded me of Filipina women—which, had she been one, would have explained her proclaimed Chinese and Spanish heritage.

So I concluded the doctor didn’t really know or care what she was, and that hypothesis seemed to work for my mom and I for a number of years.

That hypothesis seemed defensible until I, being a trained biologist and former biology professor, started doing genetic testing to help find out who the anonymous grandfather might be.

Done right—and that means using proper sampling and analysis procedure—DNA does not lie. It may not answer all questions, but of those questions it answers, it almost always answers decisively.

In my case, DNA told me the family doctor in Dayton knew exactly what he was talking about. My mitochondrial DNA—my direct maternal line of inheritance—points directly, and rather quickly, to Africa.

In time I filled in more holes in my great-grandmother’s history. In the 1900 U.S. Census—before she was old enough to make up an alternative past for herself—she was living with her parents, William A. and Hannah Robinson, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was listed as having been born in Indiana. Her state of residence and birthplace are consistent with the vital records I found in Dayton. (I can allow some confusion of the state one grows up in with the state one is born in.) William A, Hannah, and Myrtle Robinson are all listed as of the “Black”.

Hannah (I think her family name was Woods) and her parents were from Kentucky—one of the slave states, and one with strong Confederate sympathies despite sticking with the Union in the Civil War. William Robinson was born in Canada, but his parents were from Virginia and they were part of the migration of African Americans fleeing the United States for Canada via the Underground Railroad before the Civil War.

Even for African Americans who were free, the United States was not a friendly place for African Americans. Even in a place like Boston, and even with an almost unintelligible Down East accent, any free Black could—just for the mere crime of walking while Black—be kidnapped as an “escaped” slave and sold into slavery down South, and there would be damned little one could do to prove he or she wasn’t “escaped.”

Whether slave or free, John Robinson and the family of his eventual wife, Harriet Ann Taylor, left for Canada to avoid enslavement and persecution. They did not go there for the long winters, short summers, and massive clouds of black flies and mosquitoes.

John Robinson’s family returned to the United States after the Civil War, but not to the South. In a move that presaged the Great Migration of the twentieth century, they settled in Michigan. Michigan might have been one of the states that sided with the Union and fought the war that earned African Americans’ nominal freedom, but it wasn’t exactly easy to be Black up north—as recent headlines can attest.

—

Time for more genetics! John Robinson’s parents were both identified as “mulatto” in various U.S. Censuses in the decades before they died. In the race classification schemes of the day, a mulatto was often legally defined as half-Black, half-White—with, of course, more emphasis on the Black bit for discrimination purposes. (Just ask Homer Plessy.) Now, if no one knew your ancestry and you didn’t look all that Black, you could identify as “white” and others, such as your local Census taker, would never know the difference. Some of John Robinson’s siblings did just that. If their skin was light enough and their hair straight enough—or able to be straightened enough—they could pass as “white.” Otherwise, they had to identify as the obvious—Black—and “enjoy” all the benefits of white racism that being Black brought with it.

I never had the chance of meeting my great-grandmother, but I am absolutely certain she dissembled about her heritage so as to avoid discrimination or, worse, the stigma of being “black.”

But she never entirely escaped discrimination. My mother remembers some lovely “gentlemen” burning a cross in their yard in Dayton.

—

I study African American literature because I want to understand my history … and, frankly, my anger. I am damned tired of seeing my family (close and otherwise) suffer because they don’t fit someone else’s notion of a “proper” human. I am damned tired of feeling like I can never entirely trust white people—even those in my family! For some people (like Ku Klux Klan recruiters who distribute material loosely called literature in Hanover County from time to time) I am a symbol of all that is wrong with the world. I, and my mom and my children, are likely targets in some idiot’s fantasy race war.

On a more positive note, my forebears survived much worse than what I fear now. Many just like them survived, and they contributed mightily to the building of this nation. My great-grandmother tried to hide their lives and thoughts and contributions from me, but I will not be denied my heritage. Writing this essay is one of the ways I hope to reclaim it for myself.

Everyone in the United States should be required to study minority history and literature. One, it adds unique spices to the American style of the human gumbo. It should be celebrated, not suppressed. (Would I try to outlaw North Carolina-style barbecue because it is, unlike the Texas-style barbecue that I prefer, vinegar based? No!) Studying minority history and literature is also a corrective to the push by Trump and his MAGA faithful to dismiss the minority experience as irrelevant to the perfect story of white American exceptionalism that some state textbook boards (like in Texas) repeatedly try to foist upon our naïve children.

If the United States of America is to become the “more perfect union” the Founders imperfectly envisioned, we have to face our full history squarely and unflinchingly, admit our mistakes, and resolve to make amends for our nation’s wrongs. Learning to see our society through a minority’s eyes is an important step in that direction. It gives us a broader perspective from which to appreciate and understand everyone who is a part of our society, our world. It gives us a solid foundation upon which to build a better world together rather than an excuse for us to tear this fixer-upper of a world apart.

If the majority insists on remaining blinkered, then we, the United States of America, will become—if we aren’t already there—a nation full of blowhards and idiots, telling tales full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing of benefit to anyone else.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on May 25, 2021. The lede has been updated to reflect the current political situation in the United States in early 2025.

[1] Her family name is Yee. Traditionally in China, the family name comes first, but she followed the Western practice of given name first and family name last.

[2] His family name is Yee, and he generally followed the traditional Chinese practice of family name first. However, one of the variations of his name was transliterated as Yee Jack-son, and—at least in the few American records in which he is found—he is identified as if his family name is Jackson rather than Yee.

Rich’s poem uses the story of Marie Curie, who both discovered and died from her exposure to radium, to argue that the source of women’s suffering is also the source of their power. Tharp lived a long, full life. But she often suffered despite her contributions to science.

Like Curie, Marie Tharp was a pioneer, a woman dealing with a male-dominated and chauvinistic scientific hierarchy. Marie became a geologist only because of the opportunities for women to enter male-dominated fields during World War II. She landed a job with Maurice “Doc” Ewing’s research group at Columbia University—a group that later became what is now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory—because she could make geologic maps. Few thought she could do much more than that.

They were idiots.

Still, Marie spent the first decades of her career on land because Ewing and many others felt women had no place at sea (except as passengers—go figure). But Tharp was a was more than a draftswoman. She became a significant collaborator with (and probable lover of) one of Ewing’s star pupils, Bruce Heezen. (I once asked Marie about their relationship. All I got was, “He lived in his house and I lived in my house and he was my best friend.” I knew Marie well enough at the time to realize I wasn’t getting any more detail out of her.)

Marie and Heezen took on the task of taking the data coming from the new technology of echo sounders to make bathymetric maps of the ocean floor. She also made geologic cross sections and, in a series of six across the North Atlantic Basin, she noticed a notch in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (first discovered by Matthew Fontaine Maury, who called it the Dolphin Rise). From its shape, that notch could only be two things: a submarine rift valley—where continents split apart—and, as such, a major headache for Tharp’s colleagues, including Heezen, who realized it suggested the German scientist Alfred Wegener might be onto something with his theory of continental drift.

In fact, Heezen initially dismissed Tharp’s finding as “girl talk,” and added, “It cannot be. It looks too much like continental drift.”[1] But Heezen could not deny the evidence. Even Doc Ewing got on board, and the researchers at Lamont-Doherty played key roles in developing and proving what became known as the theory of plate tectonics.

Marie and Heezen, with Swiss landscape painter Heinrich Berann, were later commissioned by the National Geographic Society to produce a series of colorized physiographic maps of the world’s ocean basins. That effort led ultimately to Tharp’s World Ocean Floor map, published in 1977, that still serves to inspire marine scientists around the world.

I first met Marie in 1996 when I was trying to talk my way into a book writing seminar taught by Samuel G. Freedman at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. (I succeeded.) The goal of the seminar was to produce a book proposal consisting of an overview essay and a sample chapter. Marie was starting to get the scientific recognition she deserved, partly as a result of Lamont’s approaching 50th anniversary and through efforts of others such as the Library of Congress, which was in the process of receiving and cataloging Marie’s vast collection of finished and working maps. (I even took Marie to D.C. one time for her recognition as one of four pioneering cartographers of the twentieth century.)

I helped Lonnie Lippsett edit her oral history for a Lamont-Doherty publication. I told her story in the cover piece for an issue of the late, great magazine Mercator’s World. And that book proposal? It was picked up by Rutgers University Press. Marie is one of the major figures in the book that resulted, Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution. The book was published in 2002.

My initial plan was to just focus on Marie, but by the time I put together the final version of the book proposal, I decided to place her story in the context of a great scientific revolution that had its origins in the ocean mapping work of Maury and other nineteenth century oceanographers. Obviously, Wegener was a major figure in the book, for his theory of continental drift sparked a vicious argument that took more than 50 years to settle in the form of the theory of plate tectonics. Doc Ewing and Heezen were major figures, too, but Marie is no less a lead character in the narrative.

Some years later, Hali Felt published a book, Soundings, that is focused on Marie. I have Soundings, but have never read it, in large part because Felt criticized me for the change in the scope of my book from a narrow story about Marie to a larger story that includes her but focuses on a scientific revolution that fundamentally changed the way we see our planet. Felt angered me because, while she could read the book proposals I placed on my website for her to download, she could not be bothered to talk to me about why I did what I did. She never contacted me at all—and my e-mail address was on the pages she downloaded the book proposals from!

The marketing materials for Soundings makes it seem as if Felt is the first one to introduce the wider world to Marie Tharp. That doesn’t do much to help my mood, especially given that I first wrote about Tharp 14 years before Soundings was published.

Felt also never knew Marie, never talked to Marie. Marie died before Felt began working on Soundings. If Felt had known Marie, she would have known Marie wanted someone to tell Heezen’s story, not hers. (Heezen, never one to take care of his health, died on an oceanographic expedition off Iceland in 1977.) That was a huge obstacle in getting more of her story.

In any event, biographies weren’t that marketable at the time I wrote Upheaval anyway. (Also, the 9/11 attacks pretty much killed the market for my kind of book.) In any event—yes, I may be arrogant in thinking this—I suspect my work made the market for Felt’s book possible.

Right now, there are at least three children’s books focusing on Marie’s story: Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea, Ocean Speaks: How Marie Tharp Revealed the Ocean’s Biggest Secret, and Marie’s Ocean: Marie Tharp Maps the Mountains Under the Sea. The appearance of these books makes me happy. I hope more children learn Marie’s story and, as Marie did, break through the barriers society places in the way of their dreams.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Nov.19, 2023.

[1] The latter quote is from memory and may not be 100 percent accurate. I don’t want to have to flip through my book Upheaval from the Abyss to find it right now.

I longed for that camaraderie, too, but it was only late in my life when I had the honor of experiencing it as a member of the emergency medical services. I know what it is like to put one’s life at risk in the service of others. I know how sharing such risks ties those involved together. I know the pain of saying farewell to a colleague who has fallen in the line of duty. There is no evidence William Shakespeare had an analogous experience. Nevertheless, his Henry V—in the king’s leadership as well as in his relationships with the men in his command, such as the Earl of Westmoreland and the commoner Michael Williams—captures the essence of how shared hardship forges an unbreakable bond among those who risk their lives for a cause greater than themselves.

Arguably the best expression of this bond is given in Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech before the battle of Agincourt:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (Shakespeare 4.3.62-69)

The camaraderie that Shakespeare wrote of at the end of the seventeenth century about a battle that took place early in the fifteenth century was widespread in the twentieth. For example, this is what Stephen Ambrose wrote of Easy Company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, the company featured in the book and television series, Band of Brothers:

They thought the Army was boring, unfeeling, and chicken, and hated it. They found combat to be ugliness, destruction, and death, and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body—anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.

They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love the other guy in the foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them. (Ambrose 1992, 399)

—

With respect to the military, scholars who have studied why those in uniform fight have found a number of factors come into play: allegiance, pride, ideology, patriotism, limited options, self-preservation, and leadership. But one factor trumps all:

The strongest motivation for enduring combat, especially for US soldiers, is the bond formed among members of a squad or platoon. This cohesion is the single most important sustaining and motivating force for combat soldiers. Simply put, soldiers fight because of the other members of their small unit. Most soldiers value honor and reputation more than their lives because life among comrades whom a soldier has failed seems lonely and worthless. (Rielly 2000, 61)

Ernesto Martin, a soldier in the U.S. Army’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment in Iraq, is an example of that sentiment. Martin, an immigrant, had wanted to serve in the Army so much he learned English to be able to do so. But after a bloody tour in Iraq where the unit earned the distinction of being the hardest-hit unit in Operation Iraqi Freedom, he left the country a very different man from the one who went in. Whatever his interest in enlisting before Iraq, he stayed and fought for a much more basic reason once he arrived:

Now, [Martin] doesn’t even tell people he was in the army. If someone asks, he tells them to get a job in an office or in finance. If his family asks and really wants to know, he tries to explain. He tells them about his friends and why they were brave enough to keep going out even with all the horror they had seen. He tries to explain why it was so hard for him not to go back out in sector while his friends still did.

“I doubt it was about the mission,” he said. “It was about ourselves. We knew we had to go out there, but it was just about each other, making sure everyone could come back safe home.” (Kennedy 2010, 268)

This kind of camaraderie is not restricted to the military. What Gwynne Dyer in War says of soldiers applies to members of law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical services: “The essence of the soldier’s trade is self-sacrifice—on behalf of one’s fellow soldiers, in practice, but in a more distant sense also on behalf of the community one serves” (Dyer 1985, 128). For those of us involved in public safety, the community we serve is not so distant. No matter whether our colleagues need our help or our community, we are willing to sacrifice—even sacrifice our own lives—for others.

—

Every day we step into an ambulance, or fire truck, or police car, we know there’s a chance we may not live to see the end of our shift. Yet we do it, day after day, out of a sense of duty. Every day, we think we could use more of us in the ranks—yet every day, we look forward to the challenge of fulfilling our mission. Before Agincourt, when Henry’s cousin, the Earl of Westmoreland, wishes for more men with which to face the French host, Henry firmly disagrees.

If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more.
… if it be a sin to covet honor,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, ’faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace, I would not lose so great an honor
As one man more, methinks, would share from me,
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more! (Shakespeare 4.3.23-36)

The ties that bind all of us involved in public safety were illustrated one night when I was on duty in Richmond. Our ambulance had been called out to a sober house where one of the residents was decidedly unsober. He was naked. He was raving. Whatever he was on, he was so agitated that he had destroyed the furniture in his room. Blood was splattered all over the walls of his room and the adjoining bathroom from him banging his head on the walls.

We were the fourth or fifth unit on scene: one or two Richmond police cars, a Richmond fire engine company, a Virginia State Police car, and our ambulance with a paramedic, a paramedic intern (me), and an emergency medical technician. Many of the firefighters were in the hallway outside the room—there was no need for any more people than necessary to get exposed to the blood. The paramedic, me, two Richmond police officers, the state cop who heard the call on the radio and came to help, and one firefighter were all in the room. One of the Richmond officers tried to talk to the patient. Our paramedic waited while several of us got enough control of the patient to get a shot at giving the man some night-night juice. I had a leg. The state cop had the other. The other Richmond police officer had one arm, and the firefighter had the other.

The night-night juice (haloperidol followed by lorazepam) didn’t knock the patient out, but the combination did calm him down enough to where he wasn’t fighting us or harming himself. (We still used physical restraints when we loaded him on the stretcher, though. The two of us in the back of the ambulance with him weren’t eager for a rematch should he get amped up before the hospital.) All of us—the police, the firefighters, the ambulance crew, and the patient—could have been hurt or worse. It was pretty tense before the drugs our paramedic gave dented the impact of the drugs the patient took. And there was shared relief, not a small amount of levity, and a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation for all who showed up, all who, as Henry V might have said, stepped up into the breach that night. Better than the laughs, we all got to go home that night.

After his victory at Agincourt, Henry V decides to engage in a bit of levity and finish a prank he started the night before the battle by starting an amusing row with a Welshman, Michael Williams, who had no idea he was arguing with the king. Williams was no fan of glory and honor—he was merely in France to fight alongside his friends. The prank nearly gets Williams in trouble with one of his officers, but Henry intervenes before any harm is done. Recognizing Williams’s fighting spirit, Henry and the officer who nearly gets punched by Williams reward Williams with money. But, and I think this is most important, Henry recognizes Williams as a member of the band of brothers he mentioned in his Saint Crispin’s Day speech.

—

For police, firefighters, and EMS workers, not all calls end in levity. Another night many of us stepped into the breach was the night tropical storm Michael came through the area. I was with my volunteer rescue squad, responding to calls in King and Queen and King William counties. Hundreds of first responders were on duty throughout the area. Our unit responded to a call in King William at the height of the storm. We were supposed to shelter, but we were already on the road responding when told to stand down—so we didn’t. We faced a long trek to a hospital in Hanover County, were forced to detour from what is usually the best route to a two-lane road with multiple obstacles: downed trees, debris, standing water. What is normally a thirty-minute trip took something like an hour and a half. As we neared the hospital, I happened to look out the window as we passed over an interstate highway. I saw the trailer of an 18-wheeler looking sideways on the interstate below.

Afterward, as we wheeled our patient into the hospital, we saw some Hanover County sheriff’s deputies looking shellshocked. One of our crew then found out a Hanover County firefighter had been killed and several others injured in an accident involving the tractor-trailer I had seen from the window. The firefighter who was killed—Lt. Brad Clark—yelled a warning that probably saved the lives of others in his engine company.

I felt Clark’s death deeply. I may not have known Brad Clark, but I knew his brother. I live in the county he served. I was on duty during that same storm, risking my own life like he had. And I saw the devastation on the survivors—firefighters and deputies who had been on the scene—at the hospital that night.

Brad Clark’s funeral was the first line of duty death funeral I attended. Clark’s memorial service was impressive. Responders from around the nation came to pay their respects to a fallen brother they never knew. Among those honoring Clark was the Fire Department of New York’s Emerald Society Pipes and Drums—the unit that had played at hundreds of funerals and memorials for fallen comrades in the year following 9/11. A friend of mine, Kerry Sheridan, wrote a book, Bagpipe Brothers, about the band and its year of mourning after the World Trade Center attacks. In the closing paragraph of her book, Sheridan describes the ties forged in trauma that forever bind those who shared the experience:

By being present throughout the mourning, the bagpipers had played a crucial role in the nation’s healing. Their duty had forced them to cling to the past while others moved forward. They’d talked of how it would never be over, but that autumn, the services did cease, and the bagpipers were thrown back to a reality in which they were once again relatively obscure and their ordeal was an outdated remnant of a terrible time that most yearned to erase. Over the past thirteen months, death had been a constant companion. They were lonely in its company, and alone again without it. But there were other companions. Each other. Old friends would stay, and new ones would come. Each moment of life would be differently cherished than before. The recollection would be shared in the lives they led, though spoken of less and less. In years to come, the pain would ebb, the memories smooth over. But they would never forget. (Sheridan 2004, 244)

I will never forget the night Brad Clark died. I feel a kinship with all those affected by accident that took his life—and with those who gathered for Clark’s final sendoff into the beyond. Similarly, I will never forget the bonds I now feel with the men and women of the Webster Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff’s Department, who supported and honored my family when my cousin, Trey Copeland, died in the line of duty—of a heart attack after a high-speed chase. I became a part of their family. They became a part of mine. I will never forget.

Nowadays, when I encounter law enforcement officers or firefighters or other EMS providers while doing my job, I recognize them as family too. I know they will risk their lives to save mine. I know I will risk my life to save theirs. While we may be separated by both geography and history, we are, much as Shakespeare wrote, a band of brothers and sisters.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an English literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on Nov. 6, 2023.

References

Ambrose, Stephen E. 1992. Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. New York: Pocket Star Books.

Dyer, Gwynne. 1985. War. New York: Crown Publishers.

Kennedy, Kelly. 2010. They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq. Nook ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Rielly, Robert J. 2000. “Confronting the Tiger: Small Unit Cohesion in Battle.” Military Review 80 (6): 61-65. https://armyuniversity.edu/cgsc/cgss/files/DCL_SmallUnitCohesion.pdf

Shakespeare, William. Ed. Barbara A Mowat and Paul Werstine, Henry V. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2023. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-v/

Sheridan, Kerry. 2004. Bagpipe Brothers: The FDNY Band’s True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Nov. 3, 2023) — I have had a hard time figuring out what to say about Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. It strikes me as both a celebration of and commiseration with those mainstream society has deemed unfit. They are the hustlers, the wanderers, the free spirits, the drunks, the junkies, the freaks, the sexually adventurous, the mad (both clinically and otherwise), and anyone else who refused to conform to what society considered normal: man with a 9-to-5 job marries a woman who aspires solely to become a homemaker; a couple where each sleeps in separate beds yet that somehow merges—only in the missionary position and only with one another—to produce the requisite 2.1 children; a couple that proudly displays its devout observance of Christianity on Sundays; a couple whose only mind-altering substances are cigarettes, coffee in the morning, and a highball or beer after work.

One could say that Ginsberg’s world—the Beats’ world—was a deviant world. But who defined it as deviant? People weary of a world at war, fearing existential threats from enemies they didn’t really know or understand, people trying to shake off more than a decade of hardship and sacrifice in a rush for what was for many an illusory dream everywhere but the newfangled technology of television. McCarthy had us scared shitless of Reds, seeing a subversive around every corner, so scared that we ratted on each other for crimes no more serious than exercising our First Amendment rights. We had fought—and were fighting again—brutal wars to defend “freedom” while a significant portion of our society was forced to eat at restaurant back doors. And we acted as pillars of sexual morality despite the fact that Kinsey’s reports showed that we were far more freaky—in the Rick James sense—than most of us wanted to admit.

Yet Ginsberg’s people were the deviants. Why? Because the square world had defined Ginsberg’s people as deviants. As Michel Foucault wrote in the preface to Madness and Civilization: A History of History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, it is the act of defining madness/deviance/insanity that makes an act so, not any aspect of the act that existed prior to the definition:

. . . we must renounce the convenience of terminal truths, and never let us be guided by what we may know of madness. None of the concepts of psychopathology, even and especially in the implicit process of retrospections, can play an organizing role. What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science that is elaborated once this division is made and calm restored. (Foucault 1973, ix)

One example of the phenomenon—and one that had some effect on Ginsberg himself—was the scientific community’s definition of homosexuality as pathological. Homosexuality was listed as some form of sexual disorder in the first two editions of the psychological guidebook Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I, 1952, and DSM-II, 1968; Drescher 2015). The definition started to soften with the seventh printing of DSM-II (1973) and homosexuality was removed from the DSM completely in the third edition (DSM-III, 1980; Drescher 2015).

Ginsburg notes that the dominant classes of society eats its young (and old) among the working classes and outcast minorities, repeatedly referring to society as Moloch in the second section of the poem. He begins the section with the following:

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! . . .” (Ginsberg 1959). His vision of America, seen as almost perfect among those who would prosecute him for prosecute the publishers of his poetry as purveyors of obscenity, suggests that America is not the nation the propagandists try to sell to the world.

The third section of the poem speaks to and about Carl Solomon, the poet for whom Howl is dedicated, whom Ginsberg met in a mental institution in New York—but Pilgrim State is not in Rockland County despite the repeated references to Rockland. Two men, treated and confined as mentally ill for reasons that might have had more to do with social norms than with solid science.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Nov. 3, 2023.

References

Drescher, Jack. 2015. “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Behavioral Sciences 5 (4): 565-575. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs5040565. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4695779/.

Foucault, Michel. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.

Ginsberg, Allen. 1959. “Howl.” In Howl, and Other Poems, 9-20. San Francisco, California: City Lights Books.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Oct. 27, 2023) — The Afrofuturism movement offers a uniquely African lens on what some call science fiction and others call speculative fiction, offering diverse perspectives on such staple questions of the genre like “What if?” or alternate explanations that illuminate why things are like they are now.

The three stories we read in the Afrofuturism vein—“Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler, “Give me cornbread or give me death” by N.K. Jemisin, and “The comet” by W.E.B. Bu Bois—offer insights into different aspects of African American history and, in some cases, glimpses of parallels in the experiences of other oppressed groups.

Of the three stories, “The Comet” is the easiest to explain. Set in New York City after a cosmic disaster wipes out most of the population of the city, the story follows the travails of Jim, a Black man who was underground in a bank vault and survived the disaster, as he searches for survivors. He rescues a white woman, Julia, and they begin to bond—until people, including Julia’s father and apparent boyfriend, arrive on the scene. (They were outside the city and somehow unaffected by the disaster.)

Jim should have been regarded as a savior. Instead, he was dismissed by the apparent boyfriend as a “nigger” and offered a job as a token of gratitude (but not the real thing) by the father. In reality, Jim is essentially dismissed as an inferior to them, despite the dangers he faced that the others didn’t.

The story reflects our nation’s disregard of people of color during the Jim Crow era.

“Bloodchild,” a story set in another world dominated by arthropod-like beings, graphically illustrates the parasitism of slavery and segregation. The way whites exploited Black labor (free or otherwise) for profit is illustrated in the egg parasitism of the dominant creatures, the Tlic. They lay their eggs in human hosts, and the larvae consume human flesh until they are ready to pupate and emerge from their hosts. The hosts are at best sickened. At worst, they die as their vital organs are consumed by the ravenous larvae.

“Give me cornbread or give me death” is the most optimistic story of the three stories. The Blacks are resisting the people of the towers’ attempts at suppressing them. The people of the towers deploy horrific weapons in the form of dragons to kill as many Blacks as they can, but the resistance win over the dragons with African foods and, by extension, culture. In time, the dragons join the resistance in toppling their would-be masters.

Decades ago, the rap group Public Enemy released an album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. African Americans were and are still suffering the effects of centuries of slavery and segregation, but artists like Chuck D. of Public Enemy fight back—with art, not violence—and nowadays hip-hop is the dominant musical genre in terms of sales worldwide. Africans may face great oppression, but their culture spreads and conquers all.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Oct. 27, 2023.

The week we read the stories I was distracted by the news of two of my cousins’ deaths. My memories of the stories was not terribly strong. One of the main takeaways I pulled out of the fog was the conflict immigrant families face between preserving their native (for lack of a better term) culture and assimilating into that of their new home.

Rather than focus on the stories I was in no shape to remember, I will illustrate the conflict using a story told in a visual medium: Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust. The film, set on Saint Helena Island off the coast of South Carolina, illustrates the lives of three generations of the Peazants, a Gullah family who are about to leave the island for a new life in the North.

The film moves slowly, with a pace worthy of a landscape ruled by the languid ebb and flow of the tide, and by high heat and humidity before the advent of air conditioning. It is beautifully shot, and skillfully captures the diversity of island residents who, because of their skin color, would be dismissed as merely “negro” or “colored” by the dominant white culture of the mainland.

The Gullah people are descendants of slaves who developed their own culture in semi-isolation in the islands off the South Carolina coast. They speak Gullah, a creole language derived from several African languages and English (the actors in the Daughters of the Dust were actual Gullah speakers). In the film, the younger members of the family had embraced modern (as of the turn of the twentieth century) technology and ways; the older members of the family, especially the matriarch, Nana Peazant, who wishes to remain on the island and tries to preserve the old ways—and encourages the younger members to remember those ways.

To add to the mix of cultures, the characters include Bilal Muhammad, a former slave who maintained his Muslim faith; and St. Julien Lastchild, a Cherokee determined to remain on his island home and who is in love with one of the Peazant granddaughters.

Despite the desire of some family members to stay on the island and hold on to their heritage, the tide of dubious progress was strong. The film ends with most of the family leaving the island, but—my impression only—with those leaving more or less determined to remember their roots in keeping with their matriarch’s wishes.

We viewers, with the advantage of knowing the events of the century that followed, realize it won’t be easy. The dominant culture has a ravenous appetite for grinding smaller cultures into dust. But we remain hopeful that those who leave will remember the old ways that make their culture so distinctive.

Editor’s Note: This original version of this piece was written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Oct. 20, 2023.

Reference

Dash, Julie. 1991. Daughters of the Dust. (Adisa Anderson, Barbara O, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Cora Lee Day, Geraldine Dunston, Vertamae Grosvenor, Tommy Hicks, Kaycee Moore, Eartha Robinson, Alva Rogers, Cornell Royal, Catherine Tarver, Bahni Turpin, Kai-Lynn Warren. Executive Producer Lindsay Law. Producers Julie Dash and Arthur Jafa. Screen Writer Julie Dash. Associate Producer Floyd Webb. Cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Production Designer Kerry James Marshall. Art Director Michael Kelly Williams. Editors Amy Carey and Joseph Burton. Original Music by John Barnes.) United States: Kino International.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Oct. 13, 2023) — The stories “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, “Citizen: ‘You are in the dark, in the car…'” by Claudia Rankine, and “Recitatif,” by Toni Morrison, focus on the burdens of identity—whether accepted or forced upon one—on minorities, especially African Americans.

All three of these stories touched me personally, especially as all three addressed elements of my own life from my dad’s attitudes toward our rural Southern heritage as in “Everyday Use,” the repeated assaults of everyday racism on my own life, as in “Citizen,” or the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s as in “Recitatif.”

The story that had most relevance to my life today—at least my professional life today—was “Citizen.” Rankine hits me where I work in the second section of the poem:

. . . Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. . . . (Rankine 2014, 543)

As an EMS provider, I found the reference to John Henryism interesting. I had to find out if it was a thing. And it is! I’m not sure when Sherman James coined the term, but his first published paper referring to John Henryism in a paper reporting on blood pressure among Black men (James et al., 1983). The phenomenon as James described it was much as Rankine phrased it: people from disadvantaged minorities achieving themselves to death trying to overcome the obstacles put in their way.

In the early/mid 1970s, several provocative papers were published which demonstrated that “high effort” coping (i.e., sustained cognitive and emotional engagement) with difficult psychosocial stressors produce substantial increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, increases which persist as long as individuals actively work at trying to eliminate the stressor. (James 1994, 165)

Since James began researching John Henryism, he and other researchers have found it is not all uniform. There are negative health effects, such as a higher incidence of hypertension. But the severity of these effects vary by gender and socioeconomic status. And the effects are not all negative, either. John Henryism may have protective effects against major depression and suicidal ideation.

Understanding this bears upon my treatment of many of my patients in understanding how they got to be in the shape they’re in. There is more to learn, but I have no more time to discuss it here.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Oct. 13, 2023.

References

James, Sherman A. 1994. “John Henryism and the health of African-Americans.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18 (2): 163-182. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01379448.

James, Sherman A., Sue A. Hartnett, and William D. Kalsbeek. 1983. “John Henryism and blood pressure differences among black men.” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 6 (3): 259-278. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01315113.

Kahsay, Eskira, and Briana Mezuk. 2022. “The Association Between John Henryism and Depression and Suicidal Ideation Among African-American and Caribbean Black Adolescents in the United States.” Journal of Adolescent Health 71 (6): 721-728. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2022.07.006.

Rankine, Claudia. 2014. “Citizen: ‘You are in the dark, in the car…’” Poetry 203 (6): 543-545.

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Oct. 6, 2023) — I grew up a mixed-race kid in the waning days of Jim Crow in Louisiana. The Vietnam War was raging. Anti-Asian sentiment ran high, and the racists I grew up around made no distinction between the Vietnamese we were fighting and any other East Asian group when it came to expressing their hate. I often heard my Asian brethren disparaged—in the early 1960s, being part Chinese was enough to get my mom and I threatened with death if my dad didn’t remove us from Louisiana.

We didn’t leave.

Fortunately for us, folks didn’t know about my mom’s and my African ancestry. (For that matter, we didn’t either as my great-grandmother did a great job of passing as something else.) If folks had known that we were black, too, they would have done more than threaten us—as they did when they shot up the home of a black family that tried to move into our neighborhood in the 1970s.

In fact, according to Louisiana law—twice confirmed as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court—I was legally black until 1983. If the state had known what folks in Dayton, Ohio, knew, the state could have and probably would have identified me as such in all public records. It didn’t matter that I could pass for only white (not that I would have wanted to). Notions such as the “one-drop rule” had so permeated our society and legal norms of the time that all that mattered to the state and society at large was the amount of racial “pollution” that made me less of a person that someone of solely European ancestry.[1]

Critical race theory seems to me as being sold by horrific conservatives to horrified conservatives as just another liberal conspiracy designed to make white people uncomfortable. But really, it is just a theoretical viewpoint that posits the following: 1) racism is the rule, not the exception; 2) because racism advances the interests of the dominant group, there is little incentive for members of that group to fight it; 3) that the concept of race is a social construct; 4) different minority groups experience racism in different ways and to different degrees (Delgado and Stefanic 2023, 8-11).

Racism was the rule in Louisiana where I grew up. It was so much a part of the environment that I absorbed some elements—and was (and am) appalled when some of those internalized prejudices pop up from the depths. It certainly advanced the interests of the dominant group. Whites terrorized minorities, chasing minorities to the margins of the economy and society while the white majority reaped the benefits of unchallenged political and economic power. While there may be biological differences among groups of humans, race itself is a social concept (Lawrence 2004). I can vouch for the differential experience of racism. At times, I feel as if I am not enough of any of my ancestral groups to be counted as a member in them. It can be frustrating to be treated as an outsider by one’s fellow outsiders.

Because of that outsider status, I grew up never feeling safe. The main threat and the main offender was the dominant group: whites. I grew up stuffing my anger at repeatedly hearing white people’s low opinion of folks with my other ancestries. Silence was preferable to a violently shortened existence. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it harder to keep silent, especially in these days of widespread “Make America Great Again” propaganda.

Langston Hughes put it more politely in his poem than I generally do. Here is a sample from his opening lines (Hughes 2023):

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Hughes echoed the way I’ve felt for decades before I (belatedly but gratefully) discovered his poetry. He speaks for me when he says that “America never was America to me.” Some of my African ancestors—whose unfree labor made possible vast fortunes for the white ruling class—found “America” only by fleeing to Canada via the Underground Railroad. They formed part of a former slave community, Queens Bush, in what is now Peel Township, Ontario (Brown-Kubisch 2004).

But even there, the promise of equality was denied them when the white-led government of Canada, realizing the value of the land those former slave ancestors cleared by hand, set the price of the land so high that they could not afford it when the land was made available to purchase (Brown-Kubisch 2004). My African ancestors were forced to move on, eventually ending up back in the United States in Michigan. Some lived not far from where Malcolm Little, aka Malcolm X, grew up (and where his father died).

In 1960, my father and my mother could not have gotten legally married in many states—such as Louisiana—because of anti-miscegenation laws. My mother had two problems: 1) she was African American, but no one knew of that ancestry at the time; and 2) she was Chinese American, which people knew. Louisiana was one of fourteen U.S. states that prohibited marriages between whites and “Mongoloid” persons (Browning 1951). By Louisiana law, my parent’s marriage was “null and void” and “of no effect;” I was an illegitimate child; and my parents, if tried, could have been convicted of a felony (Browning 1951).

The prosecution of Richard and Mildren Loving exposed the thinking of the many who supported such laws. The trial judge, acting on a belief that his racism was both natural and right and echoing the beliefs of many of my friends who cited Biblical passages they claimed justified racial segregation, wrote:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” [Loving v. Virginia 388 (US) 1]

Fortunately for my parents, they met on an Air Force Base in Massachusetts, a state that had no such laws, and married there. Vagueness in the Louisiana law may have protected them from prosecution somewhat (but not from threatening phone calls in the middle of the night.) Until the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, they could have presumably been ordered to leave Louisiana or face jail time, much as Richard and Mildred Loving were threatened with in Virginia.

My Chinese ancestors knew all about discrimination, too. With the passage of the Page Act of 1975 and the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882, the Chinese became the first group denied legal immigration to the United States (Abrams 2005):

Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore, be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States. (U.S. Congress 1882)

My great-great grandfather, Yee Kim Wo, came to this country about the same time the Page Act was passed. My great-grandfather, Yee Jock Leong, was born in San Francisco in 1884, thus by birthright an American citizen. But, as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, he was treated to detention and interrogation before being allowed entry back into the United States after trips to China. He has a pretty substantial Exclusion Act file, viewable to all, at the National Archives in San Bruno, California. The transcripts show he was treated like a criminal—all because he tried to return to the land of his birth. Few of European descent faced such scrutiny as the Chinese upon entering the United States.

Despite the documented persecution, many people still wonder why African Americans and other minorities are angry. They seem constitutionally incapable of understanding what people like Kimberly Jones and Angela Davis have to say. Both Jones and Davis expressed their anger with fire and eloquence. I express mine with just as much fire, with less eloquence and usually more profanity. Like Howard Beale, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

A few years ago, I ended what had been one of my oldest friendships, one that went back to preschool. This friend had a noticeable tendency to do what he needed to do to align himself with those at the top of the social heap. One of the ways he did it was by humor, which was fine.

But another way he did it was to sidle up to the bullies and join them in their persecution of the kids who weren’t cool enough to qualify for the group. He was like that in elementary school. He was like that in high school. Unfortunately, he was still like that when we were well into our 50s. He was politically conservative and, as long as the conservatives were getting away with their rampant oppression of minorities, he was happy.

I sure as hell wasn’t happy.

As I stated above, I can pass for white, but I identify with my Asian and African ancestors—and I’m never going to sell them out for a comfortable chameleonic existence among the dominant white in-group. In one of our arguments—it may have been about Black Lives Matter—I was defending the “out” group and he said, “But you’re white!”

Sure, my skin is lighter toned, and I certainly have a majority European ancestry, but I feel the presence of and embrace all my ancestral threads. I have clear documentation of white oppression of my non-white ancestors (especially that nice, thick Chinese Exclusion Act dossier on my Chinese great-grandfather).

When I see all that my non-white ancestors had to endure at the hands of the white majority, I see much of what critical race theorists have tried to expose, especially widespread racism and little incentive of the dominant group to correct it. Worse, I see the dominant group all-too-often portraying itself as the victim. America has fallen far short of its ideals that “all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I agree with Langston Hughes. America has yet to be America to me. It got close, but in the MAGA era, it seems to be slipping farther and farther away.

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Oct. 6, 2023.

References

Abrams, Kerry. 2005. “Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law.” Columbia Law Review 105 (3): 641-716. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6520&context=faculty_scholarship.

Brown-Kubisch, Linda. 2004. The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers 1839-1865. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books.

Browning, James R. 1951. “Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States.” Duke Bar Journal 1 (1): 26-41. https://doi.org/10.2307/1370809. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1370809.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2023. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Fourth ed. New York: New York University Press.

Hughes, Langston. 2023. “Let America Be America Again.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed Oct 3. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147907/let-america-be-america-again.

Lawrence, D.M. 2004. “A rational basis for race.” The Lancet 364: 1845-1846.

Warren, Earl, and Supreme Court of the United States. 1967. “Loving et ux. v. Virginia.” United States Reports 388: 1-13. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep388001/.

[1] When I wrote this, I had no idea that Donald Trump, in an interview with a conservative media outlet this week, said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

At the time the story was written—and for decades to come (and, if some have their way, yet to come)—the highest station women could expect to achieve was to become a wife and mother. Women often had little choice over whom they could marry as their families. Their identity was often erased by legal fiat as they were forced to assume the legal identity of their husbands, as in Mrs. John Doe. Women couldn’t vote, in many cases they could not own property or have bank accounts in their own names.

The protagonist in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” clearly suffers from the suffocating environment in which she lives. She is likely suffering from postpartum depression—a malady known since ancient times but poorly understood and even more poorly treated. In her case, the accepted treatment—one recommended by her physician husband, John, and her own brother—another physician—was isolation and enforced rest. No mentally stimulating activity, such as her favorite, writing, was allowed.

“It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work,” she writes in her journal. “When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.” (Stetson 1892, p. 649)

The men in her life insisted on enforcing the dogma regarding her treatment and likewise insisted on ignoring the evidence that it was not working. Their female accomplice, John’s sister Jennie, helps enforce the confinement and “convalescence” of the narrator.

“There comes John’s sister,” the protagonist writes. “Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.

“She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!” (Stetson 1892, p. 650)

It is not difficult to draw a line from Jennie’s attitudes toward women’s self-empowerment to those of the practitioners of female genital mutilation today, which is largely perpetrated by women against those in their own families. It is, of course, done to please the men—as was the protagonist’s confinement. The terror and sense of betrayal felt at being harmed by one’s fellow oppressed can only be disheartening as it was in the protagonist’s case.

In the end, I believe the hopelessness she felt from being so vigorously “protected” by those who allegedly loved her drove her to madness. While most women so “protected” don’t deteriorate to such extremes, they still suffer, often greatly, from being denied the fullness of experiences life has to offer.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on Sept. 22, 2023.

References

Stetson, Charlotte Perkins. 1892. “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” The New England Magazine 11 (5): 647-656. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf.

The poem demands that the world start seeing her as she is: as a woman, as a survivor of assault, as a descendant and legacy of state-sponsored violence against other states and peoples. I read it and felt her anger toward colonialism, segregation, discrimination, minimization, and dismissal.

What I felt most, however, was her anger toward sexual violence, which is mentioned throughout the poem, including in the following passage:

I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul . . .

Jordan demands that the world see her as she is. She demands that the world see what has been done to her. She demands the world see what it has done to her ancestral continent, Africa. And she demands the world either accept her on her terms or get the hell out of her way.

When the #metoo movement erupted, it struck me that women were beginning to experience the visibility and understanding that Jordan demanded when she wrote “Poem about My Rights.” (That visibility and understanding seems as if it may have had a short shelf life, unfortunately.) I was certainly sympathetic, as I am a survivor of sexual violence, too. But, as a man, I felt invisible during #metoo. Maybe I just didn’t feel welcome, it’s hard to say. It was certainly hard to join in on the discussion. I didn’t feel entitled or empowered or welcome to share my experience. The space was monopolized by women—or so it seemed.

Certainly, women make up the bulk of the victims of sexual violence. It does not appear to be close. But given the low rates of reporting sexual assaults by survivors of both genders, one can’t really be sure. Survivors also have to deal with society’s misunderstanding of rape (unintentional or otherwise): no ejaculation, no rape; no penetration, no rape; no physical force, no rape; no strict avoidance of flirting, no rape; no dressing up like a Saturday Night Live church lady, no rape. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever happened, it must be the victim’s fault.

In my case, I was camping with a friend. I got drunk and passed out. I woke up during the night with my pants pulled down and him on top of me, going at it with his legs locked in a vice grip around mine. I managed to throw him off, pull up my pants, and promptly passed out again.

The next morning, as I worked my way through a bitch of a hangover, I noticed everything was different—with me.

I’ll spare you the recap of decades of depression and PTSD, sexual confusion (before I learned to trust my own feelings and come out as a flaming heterosexual), drinking, suicide attempts, and more. The only thing I couldn’t experience that a woman can was the risk of pregnancy. Does that fact make my experience any less horrific? Does it make me any less a member of the survivors’ club?

When the #metoo wave broke, some men did come forward and share their experience—football payer turned actor Terry Crews is a notable example. Still, I didn’t feel welcome to the “party.” Women survivors were finally getting noticed and acknowledged. I certainly did not want to steal away any of their hard-won (and deserved) attention. But I wish some of my fellow feminists would have left a little more space for men like me at the table. Until they do, I feel as invisible as Jordan did when she wrote “Poem about My Rights.”

Reference

Jordan, June. “Poem about My Rights.” Poetry Foundation. 2023. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48762/poem-about-my-rights