Quentin Compson imagines blacks unfettered from the myth of white superiority; he sees himself chained to its absences. To shackle the blacks to that myth of racial purity would be preferable to living in what another incredulous character of Faulkner's labeled, an "unbearable reality" (Absalom, Absalom!).
What's to be done if not return to the river? Anger has called him.
This story about Quentin Compson came to mind while I was reading Sarah Churchwell's Behold, America: The Entangled History of 'America First' and 'The American Dream' (2018). He's haunted by what he perceives to be a nightmare, personal as it is social, cultural. A defeated Confederate general, grandpa Compson, looking on as enslaved blacks walk off Southern plantations.
I thought of the young Quentin. Here's a man unwilling to live with the reality of human suffering, of injustice. Here the literary representation of a man for whom the time is never right so long as racial hierarchy isn't the law of the land in order to guarantee the social, political, and economic rights of white Americans. Without the legalization of racial hierarchy America is no more a paradise but a living hell. A nightmare.
Behold, America is a reading that calls to mind Faulkner's famous observation about the past, which isn't a matter of the simple re-occurrence of events. Rather, its as if we are in a continuum, contrary to all reason, all illusions of time passing. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." No amount of "flat-iron weights" resolves the way Americans entangle the "American dream" and "America first" (illusions) with what Churchwell calls the three fates: capitalism, democracy, and race (equally illusions, useful to manipulate human relations and resources into anything but an ordering life into a just society). Truly, a nightmarish existence for everyone. But the real nightmare is the continuation, generation after generation, by a consensus, in the practice of cruelty and indifference toward the plight of other human beings.
***
To the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the 1920s, the "American dream" was slipping away with every appearance of an "uppity" black. Despite the increase in the spectacle of "economically motivated" violence against blacks, including gruesome lynchings and the forced return of blacks "to work in the cotton fields of South Carolina," it was not enough to discourage blacks from walking about, unfettered--as if free people. Lynching becomes a means to eradicate the problem of black people talking "wild," gambling, or arguing about wages and debts, not to mention some possessing the audacity to circulate literature. Aligning itself with the political front, first with President Wilson and then the Republican candidate for president Warren G. Harding, the KKK adopts "America first."
A "fig leaf," writes Churchwell. The move toward "America first" is a way for the KKK to brandish an anti-immigrant rhetoric, the vocalization of a normalized xenophobia, one "socially and politically acceptable" while serving as a cover for "a vigilante racism that was (at least officially) not, as they protested that they were purging 'alien elements,' and that they had nothing against black people." Sounds familiar. And yet, the victims of vigilantism were rarely foreigners.
Employing a euphemism, the KKK brands "the wrong kind of American" as anti-American. And by "the wrong kind" the KKK meant the "hyphenated kind," writes Churchwell, "the kind with alien ideas, an alien name, an alien religion, or of an alien race." (Let's not forget how "the wrong kind," the hyphenated identity troubles many Americans today. Then as now, however, some Americans are not troubled by a call for borders and walls. "America first" implied then as now "pure blooded"). A brand of nationalism for white Anglo-Americans, in other words.
Churchwell notes the concern of Americans who feared the "one-drop rule" wasn't enough to prevent a black person from passing as white. After a rumor became a national hysterical debate about the racial make-up of the presidential candidate, Harding, leaders called for the disqualification of any presidential candidate who isn't "one hundred per cent American." Harding passed the test and became President Harding, America first all the way! One hundred per cent American. "The pure blood of the white man," possessing a long cultural ancestry that could be proven most obviously by "splendid patriotism" and "high achievement."
Jews, blacks, indigenous, Latinx people needn't apply!
"From the 'pure Americanism' of 'America first' to 'the pure blood of the white man' in a few easy rhetorical steps," writes Churchwell. Fascism in America is easily attainable.
And indeed the fascists boarding ships to arrive in America wasn't necessary; Americans donned black shirts and sewed on their chests swastika patches and, engaging in the usual brand of American racism, as fascists, white Americans attacked black Americans. It's not long before it becomes necessary to disempower the feared--creating and developing Jim Crow legislation to force "segregation" between black and white people. Make the South, at least, great again!
America merges with its own shadow. Don't mind that the American fascists' pamphlets denounce communists. Look to the banners that read: "Back to the cotton patch, n-word--it needs you; we don't!"
A decline in KKK membership opened the door to a more virile grouping of the anti-democratic. The leader of the American blackshirts, Churchwell writes, was a former member of the KKK!
The "American dream," first version, intended to "differentiate American democracy from totalitarian or authoritarian projects and from the prejudices and racism," Churchwell argues, drives the country to fascism.
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