(Published in LA Progressive, April 25, 2021)
Iago loves no one. He hates his superior, the general. In the first minutes he appears before us, he is already in motion, busy conspiring, wasting no time now that the battle is won, the ship has docked, and he and the Moor aback on land. While Venice sings the Moor's praises for gallantry and bravery under fire, Iago spews hate toward the more. I wear the uniform of an assistant to the general; but, nonetheless, he assures his conspirator, I'm loyal to all who despise "blackamoors."
" I hate the blackamoor." And despite the new wind of change that attempts to overthrow the social climate in Venice, a climate, mind you, that has protected and served the advantages for you and me, I repeatI know who I am! I'm with those who hate the blackamoors!
My friend, look at what he has done to corrupt our purity !
It's not long before Iago arrives at the home of the Moor's father-in-law where he cries out, look to your daughter, for "a lascivious Moor" has stolen her from you! (From us!). He has robbed your house! (Our house!). He has married her and, in the process, he has committed the greatest injustice against our society! She, in turn, was forced to deceive you, her father, by running away to marry him. The blackamoor! They've committed treason against blood, against purity!
I hate the Moor ! I'm with you, he tells the father, and all those who hate the blackamoor.
It doesn't take Shakespeare long to establish in a fictional character such a mindset as Iago's.
In the opening chapter of James Shapiro's Shakespeare in A Divided America , "1833: Miscegenation," begins with an examination of a letter John Quincy Adams wrote to a friend on New Years Eve, 1835. The letter concerns the play, Othello . Desdemona disturbance him. And why? Because she desires and marries a Black man.
This Desdemona deserts her father's home "in the dead of night" to be with a Black man! What "unnatural passion" is on display in this play. "It cannot be named with delicacy. Her admirers now say this is criticism of 1835; that the color of Othello has nothing to do with the passion of Desdemona. No? Why, it Othello had been white, what need would there have been for her running away with him?"
John Quincy Adams had been the sixth president of the United States (1824-29) and, from my observation, has no qualms with hating Desdemona, yet had nothing to say about the loathsome Iago .
For years, writes Shapiro, Adams couldn't wrap his head around the possibility that what Desdemona and Othello shared was love. But how was someone like Adams to think on what for him was such an "unnaturalness"? This mingling of blood could only represent the fall of civilization, of culture, of all that is naturally pure and white in the world.
Shapiro asks, "why had a former president and now member of Congress felt it necessary to weigh in publicly not once, but twice, and so unflinchingly, on Desdemona's interracial marriage?"
Adams' father, John Adams, wasn't a slave owner, and, in the 1760s, he could identify with the life of an Othello that is "here and everywhere." For John Adams, writes Shapiro, "Othello's blackness doesn't even register." For the son, however, he has inherited a generation of "problems" swirling around slavery and race. In America, nothing else matters but race, writes Shapiro.
It would seem to me that for a future president and a young nation in the future, Iago's legacy matters.
What Iago's legacy does, it does in words, first. What follows is a cascade of actions that, in turn, precipitates shallow thoughtif you can give to narratives of irrational fear such a name. Nonetheless, the adherents have been known to ready the noose, tighten the zip-ties, shoot a Black child in seconds of arriving on the scene, continue kneeling on the neck of a dying Black man, and reject all and anything that has to do with the rights of all except those who are like them.
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