JF Ptak Science Books Post 2361
I am constantly surprised-and-then-unsurprised, having the "surprise" part ripped away like a bandage to leave a vacuum of missing surprise, when I bump into deep, inherent, part-of-the-language and part-of-the-social-landscape racism. I've mentioned before in this blog that some years ago I bought a very large collection of pamphlets from the Library of Congress--it was a collection in name only (even though almost every item was stamped "the Pamphlet Collection") though their storage and relationship was basically unassociated and uncategorized even though they were supposed to be so, housed in 3,000 document boxes that supposedly put everything into order, though the classifications were extremely loose and could refer to author/title/subject/publisher and so indexed almost nothing. The great majority of the time The Finding of Things was almost random, and there was really no telling what might slip out of each box.
I looked at quite a few of these documents, and one thing that I found over and over, in varied subject areas and content, in obvious and odd places, was periodic deep-seated racist remarks. The vast majority was directed at African Americans, though there has been a showing for the Japanese and Chinese, as well as Mexicans, and Eastern Europeans, and of course Jews. The surprising thing to me has been how this racism emerges from the pamphlets--usually it seems so, well, "out of context", even if you were racist, the way that suddenly something bizarre and racist would appear, as though dropping unexpectedly from the sky. For example, in the middle of an introduction to carnival barking, the caller was supposed to occasionally "slap his hands like a n-word" when accepting money. I mean, right there in the middle of a nothing sentence, this awful stuff would just appear. After many exposures to this I took it to represent very deeply rooted systemic racism, where light banter and semi-meaningless explanations would be peppered seemingly from nowhere with racist statements. I remember feeling so outraged opening a pamphlet on Purina sheep feed and catching a phrase where the farmer is supposed to feel some part of a sheep's wool and that it should feel something like "n-word hair but softer". It is an incredible disgrace to read it in 2014 and to think that in 1940 (when the Purina sales catalog was written) that it would be so much part of the verbal landscape that it would seem like nothing at all.
And this happened many times, and all by chance, a weird turgidity of racist serendipity.
Which brings me to tonight. I selected the pamphlet (above) called Language as a Medium of Communication to be part of my book cover Found-Surreal collection--I mean, what else is language for, and what would Wittgenstein say in his quietest moments about this? I opened the pamphlet, and there it was, the found-offending bit, on page 9.
The question the author asked in text was "Does the increase in vocabulary facilitate ease in thought?" Which is kind of an interesting question if it wasn't so filled with the demand for explanation and definition.
The rejoinder was this:
"Do remarkable vocabularies of many hotel porters, couriers, precocious children, negroes, parrots, and schizophrenics "facilitate" their "ease in thought"?
Now, the irony here of course is that this problematic and overwritten pamphlet was on language and communication, and what happens here is that (a) the author does not capitalize "Negro" even though it had been a long-fought battle that was basically decided in favor of the capital "N" a few decades earlier, which communicates something in a corruption of language, and (b) that the inclusion of "Negro" speech alongside that of parrots, children, and schizophrenics communicates a racist view of African American speech. None of this makes a dent in the consciousness of the author because these completely unexpected racist bombs that seem so incredibly pernicious and disgusting to us now were really evidently nothing when this pamphlet was written in 1942. That they appear without any real call for them is a damnable thing, that the racist aspect was so deep that one could include a racist reference even in an innocuous statement--that made bitter and repugnant with the expression of stupidity, fear, and loathsomeness. And this is only 72 years ago.
I found the same thing when reading the works of Maxwell Gray. Although her era (late Victorian / Edwardian) makes it more likely, I was still surprised to find it in the vocabulary of someone from the educated middle class.
"Hence a ghastly row of jerry-built stucco villas, a focus of cheap-trippers, bathing-machines, nigger bands and other horrors"
- The Last Sentence, 1893
Posted by: Ray Girvan | 10 December 2014 at 03:53 PM