Well, we have another cancellation by the Woke Left.
A new book by Edward Ball came out on August 4 (click screenshot below) about the author’s investigation of an ancestor who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan right after the Civil War. Highly praised, it apparently paints a sad and devastating picture of how white supremacy had a resurgence in New Orleans after the Civil War, when blacks gained equal rights in Louisiana.
Here’s a precise and some of the praise for the book on its Amazon site (click on screenshot above; their emphasis):
One of The New York Times‘ thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post‘s ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews’ sixteen best books to read in August
Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.
Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages―all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by “our Klansman” and his comrades, and shares their stories.
For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished.
In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball’s family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.
Note that the book also deals with the blacks who were victimized by Lecorgne. In the NYT review below, Walter Isaacson, a well known writer and editor who’s a native of New Orleans, also praises the book (with one small cavil):
Isaacson:
Ball had already written, in 1998, a deeply reported National Book Award-winning history, “Slaves in the Family,” for which he tracked down descendants of those who had once been enslaved by his South Carolina ancestors on his father’s side. In his new book, “Life of a Klansman,” he follows a similar course, taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side.
The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today. “This is a family story,” he writes. “Yet it is not a family story wrapped in sugar, the way some people like to serve them.” The family is not just his, it’s our nation’s.
. . . [Constant] Lecorgne [the author’s distant relative] was a minor player in this movement. But for that reason his tale is valuable, both for understanding his times and for understanding our own; he allows us a glimpse of who becomes one of the mass of followers of racist movements, and why.
. . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance. In Ball’s retelling of his family saga, the sins and stains of the past are still very much with us, not something we can dismiss by blaming them on misguided ancestors who died long ago. “It is not a distortion to say that Constant’s rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible-to-measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now — not just for me and for his 50 or 60 descendants, but for whites in general,” Ball writes. “I am an heir to Constant’s acts of terror. I do not deny it, and the bitter truth makes me sick at the stomach.”
As the last bit suggests, author Ball sees the story as a historical tale in which the Klan and other racists acted as “factories of White supremacy”. The student newspaper, the The Tulane Hullabaloo, reports the author’s take in an interview:
The book narrates his family history of racism and white supremacy with a focus on Ball’s grandfather, New Orleanian Polycarp Constant Lecorgne. Ball compiles stories from Civil War-era New Orleans and Lecorgne’s involvement in militant violence against Black communities. Geographer Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, who specializes in Black geographies and racial capitalism, among other subjects, was also slated to join in the discussion.
Ball said that the story is about white people feeling a loss of status during the Civil Rights Movement and how that “became the tinder for the violence that permeated this man’s life” in an interview with nola.com. His reckoning with his family’s Ku Klux Klan and White League involvement involved a critical look at New Orleans’ past of white supremacy. Ball writes a familial account from the oppressor’s perspective of systemic racism being tied directly together with United States history and national identity.
“New Orleans is a glorious city,” Ball said according to the article. “But it is also a place where some of the factories of White supremacy were housed and where the thing itself was perfected. Less well known is its reputation as a place where whiteness was developed into a refined substance that could be reinforced by violence.”
Indeed, it sounds as this is the very book that social-justice people, and liberals like me, would like to read, and also would want to attend a virtual discussion of the book. Such an event was, indeed, scheduled by Tulane University in New Orleans for August 6. But for reasons I can’t completely fathom, black students protested the event vehemently, and it was postponed. The University also apologized for having dared to schedule an antiracist event (figure that one out!).
Here’s a report by the Hullabaloo (click on screenshot):
The newspaper report gives some of the pushback (some of the links below come from the conservative site Campus Reform, where I learned about this incident):
The Tulane School of Liberal Arts announced the event on their Instagram page, where it was met with backlash from many students who saw the event as inappropriate and offensive, noting that SLA had not publicly scheduled similar speaking events centering Black perspectives. Upwards of 500 comments, mostly by students voicing their anger towards the event, were generated under the picture.
Ingeborg Hyde and Amanda Krantz, the vice president for academic affairs of Tulane’s Undergraduate Student Government and the president of the SLA Student Government, respectively, wrote an open letter that called for the event’s cancellation and for a reassessment of which speakers the university sponsor. They assert that the university should seek to uplift “Black voices and amplify the experiences of Black, Indigenous, people of color.” Their letter also noted the list of demands released by the Tulane Black Student Union and urged the Tulane administration to apologize to Black students, faculty and staff.
. . .The BSU [Black Student Union] was among many organizations on campus that disapproved of the event.
“We did not think the event was appropriate,” President of BSU Raven Ancar, said. “Tulane needs to be centering Black voices at this time. There’s a national conversation that’s happening right now and it is shaping the future of race relations in our country. tBSU, through our 2020 Demands, is forcing Tulane to be apart of that conversation in order to dismantle white supremacist culture on campus. Compensating a white person who benefited from systemic racism is truly inappropriate, especially in the climate that we are in as a nation. Tulane SLA made the conscious choice to prioritize white voices by hosting this event, which allows the continuation of this KKK family history to be profitable, and that is very problematic.”
What this means is that any white person who writes about the rise of white supremacy, even in as disapproving and horrifying a way as Ball, is inappropriate as a speaker, because he was being “compensated” for his appearance and somehow that promotes the cause of white supremacy. (Does that mean that Robin DiAngelo would be inappropriate as a speaker because she profits from her anti-racist book White Fragility?) But in fact Ball is explaining the rise of “systematic racism”, and in a way that only a white person could who discovered a Klansman in his ancestry, so these objections appear ludicrous.
Here’s the Instagram link to the Tulane Student Government’s objection to the talk:
You can guess what happened. The University caved, postponing the event and not rescheduling it. And they apologized! I suspect that Ball’s discussion is dead, an ex-discussion that sings in the Choir Invisible.
Here’s the announcement from Tulane of the postponement, and note that the required apology is tendered.
Let us be clear: Life of a Klansman is an anti-racist book, one that deals with and decries the white supremacy of the South after the Civil War. A black person could not even have written it, for it deals with how a white man reacted when he found the Klan insinuated like Adam’s serpent in his family tree. In this way it is the literary equivalent of (though apparently not as distorted as) the NYT’s 1619 Project, which aims to show how racism arose and became a prominent pattern in the fabric of American history. To object to a book discussion because the author is profiting from his talk (I suspect that if there was any honorarium, it was small), or that somehow white supremacy is being promoted, is simply ridiculous. What we have here are people getting offended about something they should be praising, and confecting reasons to be offended. It is as if, digging through her family history, the relative of a Holocaust survivor, horrified, found a Nazi in her genealogy. Would writing about that somehow advance anti-Semitism or glorify the Nazis? I can’t imagine how.
This never would have happened at the University of Chicago, where the university would simply have responded by saying that Ball was invited and he’s going to speak. And that’s what Tulane should have done. Instead, they truckled to the Offended and even apologized. Shame on them!
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I can imagine the reception would be the same for John Howard Griffin, were he to come back from the dead to speak of his experiences in the South in 1959. Where are the adults in this mess?
I must confess that for a long time I did not take as seriously as I should have the many attempts to suppress free speech on so many campuses. Are they as great a danger to democracy as Trump and his minion? No, not even close. Yet, I am so appalled and angered and almost at a loss for words at Tulane’s caving in to intimidation, thus requiring it to issue a mandatory apology. This incident, perhaps minor in the broader scheme of things, is a microcosmic example of why democracy is so fragile. For a democracy to survive, there must be a general consensus of agreement among the citizenry on certain essential values. One of them is free speech. When free speech is challenged, for whatever the reason, authoritarianism finds an opening. When free speech is challenged from both the right and the left, social stability is particularly endangered. I am convinced that future historians will view the year 2020 as the most consequential in American history since 1968 or perhaps even earlier. What I don’t know is how things will turn out. At the moment, the future doesn’t look bright with our sorry condition of social unraveling, a pandemic, a sociopathic president, the Republican Party controlled by right-wing ideologues, and economic collapse.
I guess that means that the only person who can speak about the Klan is Ron Stallworth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Stallworth
Actually, many Blacks consider Stallworth an Uncle Tom. When Spike Lee released “BlacKkKlansman,” a lot of people were calling him a sell-out for making a movie where the hero is a “pig.”
A “pig” risking his life to expose white supremacists! I’m no longer sure where the madness stops…
I suppose that Ball’s book is a threat to the Offended, because it robs them the possibility of being offended. DiAngelo’s book does the opposite, it allows them to be forever offended by the irremediable racism of white people.
The P.C. fascists strike again. They are akin to nazis without even realizing it.
Well, no. You might as well declare the Tulane Student Government as being like Hitler, and that you thereby forfeit the debate because you had become entangled in Godwin’s Law.
Only the heaviest of eye rolls applies. Thanks for the daily chuckle.
I have not read 1984 because I don’t think I could stomach it (being a snowflakey wuss, I know, I know,) but isn’t part of the rules surrounding language in that culture that negative words simply can’t be used because they’re negative? It seems to me that this is a similar line of thought. The mere mention of the Klan, due to its negativity, cannot be part of discourse anymore. I don’t think people look for context, it’s just “Somebody said Klan! Delete, delete!!”
More like “No white input wanted or needed”, I think. Payback for past “No Colored need apply”. A book on the Klan by a Black author would be okay.
Yes, that’s probably true. Maybe a Robin DiAngelo type as well. I guess it goes back to religion-like dynamics, in the way that hearing the narratives of those in other groups, even if they are supportive, is a kind of blasphemy. To fundamentalists, for example, it would be insulting to describe Jesus, Muhammad, or Noah in complimentary but secular terms (not a perfect analogy because religions have a policy wherein anyone can join if they voluntarily adopt the religion’s beliefs, whereas in intersectionality membership is often by birth only [with a few exceptions, such as gender or perhaps those with status such as DiAngelo]. Same basic idea though, I think.)
Just a stray thought. The Yahoo! news site has always censored readers’ comments for profanity and a seemingly random set of terms that includs “Nazi”, “KKK”, and “Ku Klux Klan”. Because of bad behavior or perhaps for readers calling out their biased reporting and fake news, Yahoo! has now blocked all reader comments.
I actually wish news organizations didn’t allow comments on any news stories. I think there is more negative than positive outcomes from allowing comments there. Save comments for stupid flame wars on social media.
I tend to agree. I’ve looked at them and had to quickly look away and go to my happy place.
If I read those things, I feel depressed by the end of the day.
@Roo It’s actually worse than that: one can’t say “Clan” anymore either. Simon Fraser University in Canada is named after a historical figure from Scotland (Simon Fraser), and the nickname of the university’s sports teams is the Clan (that is, a Scottish extended family group). The university at one time embraced this historical connection: it celebrates Robbie Burns Day, and has a famous pipe-and-drum band. But the woke decided that Clan is too close to Klan, and the university has agreed, so the name will change to something else. The name doesn’t really matter, but the need to turn “Clan” into a non-word is a worrisome sign of creeping Newspeak.
I suppose they sneaked that past everyone clandestinely…
😁
I look forward to introducing my son to music from the then-renamed Wutang Super Happy Fun Pals one day…
Somewhere in there the student government stated that a main reason was the lack of speaking events from a Black perspective. I do think there should be such events.
For accuracy within the marking of history
and in re ” after the Civil War, when blacks
gained .e q u a l rights. in Louisiana, ” then
the word ‘men’ requires insertion within
the phrasing thusly: ” when black MEN gained
.e q u a l rights. in Louisiana. ”
Nothing, one more time yet again, is made
legal in re the human beings who are the
Earth’s female ones within the United States’
Bill of Rights / in re their .e q u a l rights.,
say, … … subject to the immediacy of the
Civil War’s aftermath:
” In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified
to prohibit states from denying a
male citizen the right to vote based on
‘ race, color or previous condition of servitude.’ ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_suffrage
Blue
You must not talk about white supremacy. You must constantly talk about white supremacy. The Wokiees are nothing if not inconsistent.
“The Wokiees are nothing if not inconsistent.”
I’m sure consistency is a sign of whiteness.
I can’t help but wonder if any of the “complainers” even read the book. Seems to me the title has said it all to most of not all.
I read a review of this book last week and I was impressed by the explanations discussed regarding the type and conditions of and by the participants. I don’t believe it could harm anyone.
Part of the objection is that the writer is being compensated.
What if the writer refused his honorarium?
Why should writers not be compensated? So as to discourage others who may write a book?
On a broader note, there is a bit of traction to the argument that the author is profiting (thru book sales) because of his ancestry. There are good counters to that, but it is an argument…
“It is an argument” is a pretty weak argument, IMO.
I agree. But ask: What would the Woke do?
I am frankly surprised that Robin DiAngelo has been able to pocket millions with her speaking tour and seminars despite being white. I would have guessed that only a black educator would have been acceptable for racial deprogramming, but somehow she’s pulled it off.
Upper-class white women love to punch down at working- or lower-class white women for being “racist” hillbillies and rednecks (despite having more contact with and relationships to people of color) and hold their fake “we are all oppressors” teas. It’s just Carrie Nation and the Anti-Saloon League all over again. Make no mistake, Robin DiAngelo and the bluestockings who take her courses live in a privileged bubble and intend to keep it that way.
It seems this argument that the university must promote black experiences is made in bad faith simply for the fact that I think there is room for all experiences. What the arguers are really saying is they don’t want white experiences promoted even in the cause of POC.
To the Woke, the difference between Ball and DiAngelo is that Ball is writing about how his long-dead white ancestors were racists, whereas DiAngelo is writing about how all whites are racist.
Regarding Mike’s post above about Simon Fraser, cf. the word ‘niggardly’ for any school, any person, anywhere. I can imagine ‘clan’ sneaking in the backdoor of a woke-to-woke conversation, but not the above word, which is now completely beyond the pale, as shown in many recent incidents. I suppose that if I were still a HS English teacher, I’d have to post a List of Unacceptable Words in my classroom: “n-word,” “n-ly-word,” etc.
If it’s “white supremacy” for white people to do antiracist work, what then? This is becoming absurd.
Clearly they should listen while sitting on the floor in chains, as PCC(E) noted in a post about the Grievance Studies hoax a while ago: ‘The flagship feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, accepted a paper (not yet published online) arguing that social justice advocates should be allowed to make fun of others, but no one should be permitted to make fun of them. The same journal invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment.’ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/10/03/big-academic-scandal-brewing-three-researchers-deliberately-publish-many-bogus-papers-on-grievance-studies-to-highlight-abysmal-academic-standards-in-the-humanities/
Sincere apologies: on closer inspection that extract was by Nathan Cofnas and quoted by PCC(E).
There is nothing a white person can do that is right. “We are an unclean thing, and all our righteous acts are but filthy rags.”-Isaiah 64.6
Yup, filthy rags not worthy of cleaning the toes of er… Robin diAngelo?! Confused, I know I am!
Stop reading the news! We can’t allow white reporters to profit from writing about black people getting killed by police! And don’t buy the “Life of a Klansman” to learn more about true American history, since that will put money in the pocket of the (white) writer!
Possibly hypersensitive black snowflakes?
I do not understand: “white Frech Creole “, was he white or Creole?
Creole has (and has had) a wide variety of meanings over the years. See e.g. Wikipedia for Louisiana Creole people.