NAVEL GAZING AND TOWN: Insults to the sacred dead!

THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021

The Harvard professor's pecans: Can something be gained from Tiya Miles' new book?

Presumably, yes. Last Sunday, Slate published an interview in which Rebecca Onion and Professor Miles discussed the professor's new book. The headline which sits atop the piece says this, perhaps a bit strangely:

Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Simple Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

Whoever wrote that headline advanced a somewhat peculiar claim—the claim that it's impossible to understand the horror of slavery. 

Miles' book, All That She Carried, is built around an apparent historical artifact—a simple sack cloth on which an inscription was embroidered in 1921. According to the headline in Slate, that cotton sack can bring us closer to understanding that horror, though we'll never fully get there.

We're going to come right out and say that we find that sentiment appalling. We find it self-involved, self-reverential. We find it tremendously dumb. 

A special problem surrounds Professor Miles' new book. The book is based upon an embroidered inscription on a cloth sack, but Miles wasn't able to establish the accuracy of the family story which led a woman named Ruth Middleton  to create that inscription in 1921.

That said, the inscription describes an horrific incident, assuming the incident really took place. 

Presumably, there's something that someone can gain from reading about the way Professor Miles "tries to imagine herself into the lives of the women she writes about." (We're quoting from the very favorable review which appeared in the New York Times.)

That said, every sane person has known, for some time, about "the horror of slavery." It's hard to choke down the disgust we feel when we're encouraged to indulge ourselves further in the pleasures of such ruminations—especially when we think about the many young people, living today, who Miles and  Onion will never ask their readers to try to imagine about.

In truth, we find this whole project appalling, an act of tribal self-admiration and self-regard. This is why we say that:

For starters, we retched as Professor Miles wallowed in the pride of her craft. In truth, her craft, as practiced here, is utterly useless, except as the latest vehicle for tribal performance of virtue.

Does the professor even speak English at this point? Early in the interview, she tells us this about the sack whose provenance she can't vouch for:

MILES (6/13/21): The power of this object seems to emanate from it, whether a person is seeing it from a distance, on the page of a book or on a screen, or up close and personal in a museum exhibit. And I think the power is anchored in the materiality of it, the fact that it’s a concrete and tangible item, and then the emotionality of what’s expressed on the surface of the sack, through the embroidered story. So the experience of engagement for the viewer or reader is a double or triple whammy—there are all these different modes of connection with the thing itself.

The way I tried to convey this in the book was, you take a few steps back from the sack to talk about that space of emotion, that experience of feeling the kinds of things that we do often want to sidestep in historical investigation. I think that to have avoided emotionality in the research and interpretation of the sack would have been to set aside an important aspect of the meaning of the sack, to the women who packed it and gifted it and carried it, and also potentially for us today. 

This was somewhat of a struggle for me as a scholar, because so many of us are trained to try to adopt an objective stance in relationship to our sources. And though of course I have attempted to work within the accepted and proven methodological parameters of my discipline, I had to really make space for myself to relate to this object in a different way, and also to write about that mode of relating in the book—to be transparent about it, to expose it, and to encourage readers, people who have seen the sack in person or who will see an exhibit with it in the future, to be open to the feelings. That’s where so much of the power lies, so much of the usefulness for us today.

It's all about the materiality of the sack, but also the emotionality of what's expressed on it. In writing the book, the professor wanted to take a few steps back "to talk about that space of emotion." 

In fairness, she struggled with "the methodological parameters of [her] discipline," a discipline she transforms into a vehicle for tribal navel-gazing. She wants to let the reader be "open to the feelings" evoked by the sack, which is where we find "so much of the usefulness for us today."

That said, what is the usefulness of this project for us today? Does someone today still need to be convinced of the horror of slavery? 

We're not sure who that person would be. But as the conversation continues, so does the professor's self-involved navel-gazing:

MILES: Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, told us in her writing that we could not know what slavery was. We just do not have that capacity. She said this to her white, free Northern women readers back in the 19th century—but we, too, due to our moment in time and place, can’t know.

And so we are in this place of not knowing, which is difficult for the scholar. But I think in the end, without this information, I was pushed to narrate the history of these women and their sack differently, and I hope that this will bring the readers a bit closer to the experience. These women had to stretch, bend, experiment, and innovate just to stay alive, to maintain their ties to one another, to their daughters, their sons; they had to innovate to tell their stories. And it has been an incredible gift and a learning experience for me to do something like the same in the research and writing of this book.

According to the Harvard professor, "we're in this place of not knowing." We contemporary people "just do not have the capacity" to "know what slavery was." 

In fact, everyone knows "what slavery was" in any way which still matters. That said, the women in question here "had to stretch, bend, experiment, and innovate just to stay alive." 

Insanely, Miles says she had "to do something like the same in the research and writing of this book." This is the kind of insulting nonsense which emits from Our Town's navel gaze.

The professor hopes her book will bring her readers "a bit closer to the experience"—presumably, to the experience of the enslaved woman and enslaved girl in the unverified family story her book discusses. She doesn't say why she wants readers to attain that state—but at that point, the conversation begins to drift.

According to the family story which Miles can't confirm, the simple cotton sack once contained three handfuls of pecans. The pecans were a gift from a mother to a 9-year-old child—a final gift, given as the mother was being sold away from her daughter.

If that actually happened, it would be one of the millions of horrors which occurred during this historical era. But uh-oh! As Onion and Miles continue, attention spans seem to lag.

The horror everyone already knows about starts to fade from view. In its place, we're suddenly subjected to such self-involved piddle as this:

ONION: I loved your section on the pecans—I never know how to say it, but “pee-cahn” is what sounds right to me!—the “three handfulls” that Ruth reports Rose put into Ashley’s sack. You get into natural history, and botany, and write that you went so far as to plant a pecan tree, to observe its unfurling, to understand the objects in the sack from a bunch of different angles.

MILES: For that part of the story, all we have is the notation: “three handfulls of pecans.” That’s it! So what do we do with that? If we want to try to understand what pecans meant to Rose, and how she may have gotten ahold of them, what they could have meant to Ashley, and how they might have not only sustained her but symbolized her relationship to her mother, a relationship to Black culture, and so on … it was difficult to figure out how to access that when the record has only three words!

Sad! The professor wanted to imagine all sorts of things about the sacred dead. In Onion's rendering, she wanted to understand the objects in the sack from a bunch of different angles (assuming those objects existed).

She wanted to imagine what the pecans, if there really were pecans, could have meant to the 9-year-old girl, if there really was a 9-year-old girl. She even wanted to know how they might have symbolized the 9-year-old child's relationship to her mother and to black culture, assuming that any such symbolic meaning existed at all.

Like Hephaestus dreaming the imagery on Achilles' shield, the professor wanted to imagine many things. She wanted to get closer to the thing-in-itself! The grotesque conversation continues:

MILES (continuing directly): So the move I made was to try to get closer to the thing itself in the present day. So, of course, I have my pecan sapling. It’s still growing! It’s wonderful. I love it.

ONION: Oh, good, I was afraid to ask!

MILES: Yes, it’s going [sic]! I wanted to see what would happen if Ashley had chosen to—if she was able to—plant a pecan tree. And if she tried to grow it, what would it have looked like? My sapling is not the same as Ashley’s, if she ever had one, but being able to see the new leaves on a pecan sapling, to think about what kind of life that could have signified for Ashley—the kind of life that is embodied by a growing plant, the kind of life that is encapsulated in a source of food—that helped me think about telling that part of the story.

I also ate more pecans! I wanted to, through my own senses, connect to what was in the sack. For breakfast today, I had rice cakes with pecan butter and peanut butter. And you’ll see that in the book, I actually include pecan recipes. This is the kind of experimental, exploratory chain of thinking that unfolded: going from the stitched notation on the sack, to trying to grow a little sapling, to eating more pecans, to talking with you today about how "pecan" is pronounced.

There are quite a few "ifs" in that ridiculous passage. Along the way, we got to learn what the Professor had for breakfast. Also this:

Perhaps as her own parting gift, the professor includes pecan recipes in the book! When we asked them to explain this behavior, major top anthropologists simply hung their heads.

In this interview at Slate, the horror of slavery disappears as we wallow in the self-involvement of these  denizens of Our Town. Under the circumstances, we'd describe that gruesome exchange as  an example of Self-Involvement Porn.

It's hard to be sufficiently repulsed by this repulsive—and dumb—conversation. The dumbness lies in the idea that we should want to get as close as we can to fully understanding the horror of slavery. (Not that we could ever fully get there!)

The proposal is so dumb that even the author of the proposal can't seem to sustain it for long. As the boredom and the bad faith set in, we switch to other questions: how to pronounce the word pecan, what Miles eats for breakfast.

For ourselves, we don't think there's much to gain by encouraging modern readers to get closer to the experience of historical enslavement—to the thing-in-itself. 

No one who reads the professor's book doesn't already know everything he or she needs to know about the horror of that lapsed institution. What we don't need to know about is what the professor eats for breakfast, or how much she loves the pecan tree she planted, weirdly thinking it would somehow bring her closer to the alleged experience of the child whose mother was sold away.

Million died in the horror of a different slavery—the horror of the gulag. Yevtushenko may have suggested that those people "cannot be brought back."

If the Rose and Ashley of Miles' book actually existed, they haven't asked to be brought back. Nor is it obvious, at this point, what purpose will be served by trying to "imagine" them, even as we plant our own pecan trees in our own lush, ivied yards.  

We moderns know as much as we need to know about what happened back then. As we noted on Tuesday, documented historical incidents have long since existed, in droves.

But as we read the self-involved conversation beneath that self-referential headline, we thought of people living today—the many people Professor Miles and the gang at Slate won't help us imagine.

The tease about the pecan recipes appeared in Slate last Sunday. One day earlier, some of those other people were disappeared on the front page of the New York Time. 

One day later, some of those people were disappeared in an essay in Slate.

Tomorrow, we'll tell you who those disappeared people are. For today, we'll only say this:

Our tribe is deeply self-impressed and—the anthropologists say—just extremely performative. We deeply involved in finding ways to display our own moral greatness, even as we look away from the actual living children who actually do need our help..

Tomorrow: Invisible 9-year-olds of the modern era


71 comments:

  1. "We find it tremendously dumb. "

    Hey, it's liberal claptrap, dear Bob. 'nuff said.

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  2. "That said, every sane person has known, for some time, about "the horror of slavery." It's hard to choke down the disgust we feel when we're encouraged to indulge ourselves further in the pleasures of such ruminations—especially when we think about the many young people, living today, who Miles and Onion will never ask their readers to try to imagine about."

    This is just so odd. Somerby cannot think that if one tries to imagine what a slave felt, that means one cannot try to imagine what someone today, in a similar situation might experience.

    Empathy is not limited that way. He might know that if he ever felt any. He wants us to think that his dislike of Miles is motivated by an excess of empathy for slaves, but that isn't it. He doesn't like to experience negative affect so he avoids it, and that is why he won't try to imagine being a woman who is losing her child. He won't try to imagine anyone in distress. And he is angry toward anyone else who tries.

    And Somerby imagines that empathy feels like pleasure. He thinks it is fun to think about what it must have been like to be a slave! That is very wrong. And he pretends a holier than thou disgust over acts of empathy, as if not feeling anything about the realities of slavery were a virtue. It is not.

    Somerby thinks those who try to experience empathy are vile, despicable, disgusting people. And that suggests he has a major problem with emotion -- his own and other people's. It is no wonder he is unmarried. Most women find it hard to relate to a man who is phobic about experiencing affect, much less talking about it.

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  3. Knowing about the horror of slavery isn't the same thing as experiencing what it must have been like, on a daily basis, in the small details of living. That is what Miles is trying to get at, with her pecans and other methods of putting herself into her subject's shoes.

    I used to watch the show Scrubs when my daughter was in medical school, because it made me feel closer to her. She wasn't like any of the characters and her school was different than their training, but it still helped me feel like I was in some sense experiencing her life with her. That is what the pecan tree and the pecans was about for Dr. Miles. Somerby ridicules this. I assume that is because he wishes to maintain his emotional distance from slavery and other emotional experiences, while "understanding" what slavery was about. Feeling is different than understanding.

    Somerby has never had a child. How can he know what it is like to lose one? Maybe if he felt the love and care that went into that bag, he might know more than just the intellectual fact that mothers routinely lose their kids during slavery. He'd rather fart out pieces about how no one doesn't "understand" slavery than find out what a woman feels when her child is "ripped" from her arms by an owner. But that might involve feeling grief and Somerby cannot tolerate any negative emotion except disdain and hate, and he is lavish with spreading that around, especially toward unsuspecting female authors who have the nerve to try to make a slave narrative more real for her readers. That nerve of that woman!

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    1. Her bit about pecans was insane, sorry. Bob's right

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    ReplyDelete
  5. No one was "disappeared". Somerby thinks this is a zero-sum game, and if slavery is being discussed on the front page, then the kids of Baltimore cannot be, so no one cares about them. If I felt that way about it, I would mourn all the people never mentioned because of sports reporting.

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  6. I don't have all the answers. Maybe we should make slavery reminiscing the center of our lives. Most Americans aren't exactly busy doing anything important, so let's give them something to think about. I propose that rather than a sack, we focus on a whip. Let's replace the Washington Monument with a statue of a giant whip. We could also put statues all over the country of R. E. Lee whipping his slaves.

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    1. We have one answer, dear Gloucon.

      Your liberal cult is losing its 'minority' voters, and it's panicking. Replacing the Washington Monument with a statue of a giant whip -- and all the rest of this apparent bullshit -- might convince the dumbest of them to keep voting for your cult. For a while. How many of them, and for how long, it remains to be seen. That's all.

      Delete
    2. It'll never work, Glaucon X.
      Way too many fragile white snowflakes, who whine, cry, and insist that there white privilege should never be compromised.

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    3. Anonymouse, liberals could change that by doing frequent demonstrations of whipping each other.

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    4. ha ha ha ha, people being whipped is so so funny!

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    5. It’ll save a lot of time compared to doing it to the entire populace rhetorically.

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    6. Obviously. Only liberals have agency.

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    7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    8. Oh, I see, the anon-wokesters want us to talk about slavery but just some fake sanitized version, without the millions of whippings. Robert E. Lee ordered that the 100 slaves he inherited from his father should be whipped--every man, woman, and child--because they had thought they were going to be freed. Millions of whippings are a fact of US slavery.

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    9. If you're going to have these atrocity museums they need to show the worst in great detail, or what's the point. The same with war. They should show the first 20 min. of Saving Private Ryan at all recruiting places.

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    10. Slavery is ancient history.
      Every child should learn about recent heroes of the 21st Century.
      Of course, I mean 2nd Amendment martyr and world hero, Micah X. Johnson.
      We sure could use millions more like him.

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    11. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    12. Like Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK, Johnson was murdered by thugs.

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    13. Micah X. Johnson died for our sins.

      Delete
    14. He sure made George W. Bush happy, did you see the video of him dancing at the police officers' memorial service?

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    15. Johnson was able to effect positive change more in one day, than all the people carrying "De-fund the Police" placards were able to in a year.

      Delete
    16. I didn't see it, but George W. Bush dancing at the police officers' memorial service doesn't surprise me. Especially, after cops spent last Summer tear gassing citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
      Remember, Bush started a $3 Trillion war because Saddam Hussein gassed his own people.

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    17. The pretext for the Iraq War was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

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    18. Saddam's weapons of mass destruction = Antifa = Santa Claus = Republican who isn't turned on by bigotry.

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    19. Anonymouse 10:22am, overwhelmingly likely.

      You can bet that some of Cheney’s boys and Biden’s boys got their palms greased by Putin. All the benefits and none of the environmental matters to explain.

      Delete
    20. Will the bet payoff based on your feelings about what you thought happened?

      Delete
    21. This is one of the best Somerby's ever. Bob completely nails the insane self-involvement of these people, these academic elitists.

      You all know what Ashley did with those pecans, don't you (and they're called pee-cans in those parts). She ate them!

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  7. You could get the experience firsthand by spending some time with the Uyghur.

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  8. Why do people need to appreciate on an emotional level what it was like to have a child ripped away during slavery? Because then, when you worked for Trump's immigration service, you wouldn't be so quick to take kids away from parents at the border.

    Maybe these are the "disappeared" others who Somerby is going to tell us about sometime in the future? Maybe he will finally wonder what the Latin American equivalent to pecans is.

    By the way, not one word from Somerby while that was going on. Nada.

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    1. That’s still happening.

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    2. No, Biden remanded that policy.

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    3. Parents are sending their kids over by themselves or with human guides, some of whom abuse them.

      VP Harris just gave a speech telling them not to come.

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    4. That is far from the same as a parent arriving with a child who then has that child ripped from them by government officials, placed in a camp, and no records kept so they could be reunified in the future. Which is what Trump did.

      Delete
    5. It was difficult to house children with an adult population. It’s a nightmare for the Biden Admin too.

      Trump had illegal border crossing at a low point not seen for some years.

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    6. Right, and keeping records is sooooo difficult too.

      Because of Trump's harassment of immigrants there are many restaurants who cannot find the staff to serve their customers now that covid is diminishing. Our birth rate is also falling, which will cause workforce and social security problems down the line, largely because of Trump's cutoff of immigration. This wasn't a good decision unless you have a thing against brown people.

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    7. There is such a thing called legal immigration and enhanced unemployment benefits have effected the work force too.

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    8. You must be aware that Trump also limited legal immigration. Enhanced unemployment is ending in many places but there are still shortages of workers in low wage jobs.

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    9. As per this- we’re still in the place where it’s going to be some weeks before the numbers change.

      https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.natlawreview.com/article/unemployment-insurance-system-update-part-iii-additional-states-opting-out-federal%3famp

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    10. National Review.
      As Charlie Pierce correctly calls it "America's most respected journal of white supremacy."

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    11. Not everyone. The bigots don't. They pretend there's something else TNR is pushing.

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  9. "That said, the inscription describes an horrific incident, assuming the incident really took place. "

    Somerby has no basis for assuming this incident did not take place. There is plenty of documentation of other situations where mothers and children were separated by slaveowners. His implication that such an event didn't happen is mean-spirited and intended to malign the author of the book, who did describe her efforts to verify the details of the story.

    Somerby's efforts to discredit a book simply because the details are lost in time strike me as a denial of the significance of what happened, much as those who wish to deny the holocaust simply because those who died in it are not around to tell their stories either.

    Somerby seems to consider it ghoulish when the author tries to recreate the feelings of that era. It isn't. It is what caring, empathetic people do. His own approach of dismissing what occurred is callous, especially to the extent that it is self-serving or political.

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    1. Sure he has the basis for questioning whether the story is true. It's called " white privilege".

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  10. "Insanely, Miles says she had "to do something like the same in the research and writing of this book." This is the kind of insulting nonsense which emits from Our Town's navel gaze."

    She had to stretch, bend, experiment and innovate too, not to stay alive, but to recreate a past that has disappeared due to the passage of time (and systematic efforts of white people to "disappear" the past). Somerby, of course, finds that effort distasteful. Despite his concerned with the "disappeared," he is fine with slavery being erased and he apparently considers the efforts of historians to restore knowledge an awful thing. It is a good thing he is not a historian because he seems to have no curiosity or desire to inquire about anything past.

    Somerby "delicacy" strikes me as somewhat convenient. No doubt, he would never venture into the Holocaust Museum in D.C., which shows us exactly how the Nazis determined who was and was not a Jew. That experience is a profound one for most people. A similar museum of slavery might turn Somerby into a different, better person, but Somerby thinks the slavery exhibits should be "disappeared" along with historians such as Miles.

    "No one who reads the professor's book doesn't already know everything he or she needs to know about the horror of that lapsed institution."

    This is patently untrue when there are many people, not all Republicans, who think slavery was no big deal as long as the slaves were not beaten or starved. In fact, they seem to think it was the equivalent of poor people living on the dole, a cushy existence of lazy singing and dancing without the cares of supporting oneself or one's family. This is what slavery appears to be without the details. This is why David thinks black people just don't work as hard as Jews, don't care about learning. He doesn't know what happened to those who tried to teach them to read (hint: lynching). People who think black people are immoral and don't care about having children out of wedlock may have no idea that marriage between slaves was forbidden and not recognized by slave owners who casually separated those married by vow or custom. Not only did rape create more slaves, but it broke up relationships among those enslaved -- it was an act of domination and control not lust.

    There is too much that Somerby doesn't know about slavery. It is too soon for him to declare the subject closed because he thinks everyone already understands it.

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    1. Maybe Bob just doesn’t like pecan pancakes.

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    2. Yes, that's surely it!

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  11. 1. This took place during an interview about how she wrote the book.
    2. The interviewer was asking her questions that invited her to be more personal.
    3. What is the harm in that?

    If you were writing a book about Hannibal, you would want to visit his home town and imagine what he was like as a boy and what he ate for breakfast. People who write biographies become enmeshed with their subjects, just as actors get "into character" when playing a major role and study for it by trying to reexperience their lives in the places where they grew up.

    Somerby doesn't seem to understand the creative process very well. He also doesn't seem to understand the respects in which writing history and biography are creative (while still staying true to the facts). Speculation is not a crime when it is labeled as such.

    It is sad that Somerby never took a history class while at Harvard. They do try to teach undergrads something about methodology, not just how to memorize facts.

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    1. On behalf of Miles, I’m not entirely sure that she would want you to describe what she did as the “creative process”.


      Ever read Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic?


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    2. Neither you nor Somerby has the standing to critique her as a historian. You don't know enough about history methodology. I am not a Tom Wolfe fan.

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    3. I’m pretty sure he was critiquing her as a reader.

      It’s a blog, dear.

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    4. It's Somerby's blog. He gets to write anything he wants to make the country's bigotry seem like just another political ideology.

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  12. "Do you believe that current Israelis forget and forgive the Germans?"

    Oh really? How hitlerian of you, dear dembot.

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  14. I think navel gazing is an offensive term when applied to slavery.

    It is as if Somerby, walking into a group of women discussing their childbirth experiences, were to complain about all that navel gazing. It doesn't concern him, so he thinks too much time is being wasted talking about it, or he finds it disgusting despite its importance to those more affected by the topic. He is being a huge jerk about this.

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    1. Do you have to hang out here, dear dembot, because your safe place is overcrowded?

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    2. perfect for Somerby.

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    3. It is highly unlikely that we will ever know what Hannibal ate for breakfast, though maybe in was corn flakes.

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  15. jackass.
    el stupido.

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  16. ' We deeply involved in finding ways to display our own moral greatness, even as we look away from the actual living children who actually do need our help..'

    Certainly, your crowd of hard core malevolent Trumptards try to display their moral greatness by defending Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes and Ron Johnson. Notably Somerby ignores stories such as some of the NYT's coverage of how remote learning is a special problem for minority/poor students. He doesn't care about such stories, his sole goal in life is to be a Trumptard.

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  17. "some of those other people were disappeared on the front page of the New York Time."

    Somerby is complaining because the newspapers won't discuss the people who died in the gulags? He is complaining because an author described her breakfast during an interview? Is an author not allowed to be a person?

    African Americans are people too, even if it requires an act of imagination to consider them such. Somerby refuses to expend the energy.

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  18. "even as we plant our own pecan trees in our own lush, ivied yards"

    Somerby supposedly has a pear tree to sit under. I don't know about you, but I don't have a lush ivied yard. When did what you plant in your backyard become a literary criticism.

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    1. When these things are used as metaphors, cement-for-brains.

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  19. Navel gazing is what philosophers do, not historians.

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    1. It’s the recommended “national conversation” on past injustices that he’s referencing as being navel gazing.

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    2. “Also” goes in that sentence somewhere.

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    3. Let's have a national conversation about the current injustices perpetrated against people of color by Republican-led state legislatures.

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    4. Anonymouse 5:55pm, because the accusation is deemed unassailable truth. In which case, the best move would be via the courts.

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