Ever heard of Maria Louise Baldwin (1856 – 1922)? Neither had I. You can find a portrait of her and other female African-American activists at this Library of Congress site. I came across her name and that of many other activists in an illuminating essay by a SUNY professor of anthropology and women’s studies, Denise Oliver Velez, who talks about a fitting term for the lack of prominence that black women activists experience: misogynoir. Love that word, hate the concept, namely that being black makes it even harder for women to be treated fairly or even being remembered…. gender compounded by race.

Baldwin was a highly respected and successful educator in the Boston area in the early 1900s, and believed that a democratic multiracial society could be established in the US. She was a prominent leader, teaching people like e.e.cummings, among others, and became part of the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAAPC (not without a fight there, either: the male members of the movements at first did not want to admit women…) The movement was convened to renounce Booker T. Washington’s accommodation-ism (the movement name derived from the fact that as black folks they had to rent hotel rooms in Ontario, Canada, because nobody would let them on the US side.) Here is what Baldwin and others in the movement fought for (and here is a good source for the general history of resistance in that era:)

…. freedom of speech and criticism; a free press; manhood suffrage; abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color; recognition of the principle of human brotherhood; belief in the dignity of labor; and a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership.

That fight has continued throughout the last 120 years, obviously, with black women leading the charge in so many cases, voting rights included. We only have to remember the events of Bloody Sunday in Selma, which has its anniversary in close proximity to this International Women’s Day. To borrow the words of Marcela Howell, the founder and president of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda: “Black women leaders are carrying both the water — as we do the hard, unglamorous work of organizing in and nurturing our communities — and the torch, as we inspire the country to see past the darkness to a just future.”

If all this makes you more curious about history and you are looking for informative sources – here’s a reading list (selected not by me but Keisha N. Blain, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of the multi-prize winning book, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. The list looked interesting, and the two books I knew spoke for the rest that I have not (yet) read.

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America Paula Giddings (1984) 

To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War Tera W. Hunter (1998)

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday Angela Davis (1999)

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision Barbara Ransby (2005)

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching Crystal N. Feimster (2009)

Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism and the Making of Black Left Feminism Erik S. McDuffie (2011)

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray Rosalind Rosenberg (2017)

Sex Workers, Psychics and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy LaShawn D. Harris (2017)

Let’s resurrect the memory of these incredible women!

And do it while listening to some of the more energetic music around – Yola will make us hum!

This weekend we were invited to dinner at a friend’s house. Still dreaming of the pasta carbonara…. the second attraction was a guided tour to the host’s collection of buttons given out by political campaigns.

It never ceases to amaze me what people collect. Can’t help but roll my eyes at many collections given my hesitancy to amass objects, but not this one – this one scored. I think it has to do with the continuity between what these buttons represent and the rest of the owner’s life, a life in large parts devoted to political activism.

It also links to lived history – my Beloved got unusually animated when discovering buttons that were part of his own youth, worn during presidential campaigns, and largely forgotten for decades.

It is educational – your’s truly got a lecture in two voices about her ignorance of the difference between Eugene McCarthy and McCarthyism… and certainly a crash course in Presidential campaigns before my arrival on US shores.

And last but not least the collection was displayed in ways that were artistically designed and often gripping.

Collector Carl Wolfson was the host of “Carl in the Morning” on AM 620 KPOJ and FM 107.1 KXRY, Portland, Oregon’s progressive talk stations, for almost a decade until 2016. The show and his many other radio appearances were devoted to the issues he cared about: healthcare, social and economic justice, foreign policy. These topics were also a large part of his routines as a comedian, a fixture on national television, appearing on Showtime’s Comedy Club Network, VH-1 Stand-Up Spotlight, An Evening at the Improv, and The Joan Rivers Show.

He is certainly a funny man, something we cherish. Passion takes over, however, when the subject comes to American Political Items, the category these button belong to. The study of campaign memorabilia is serious business as any historian can tell you. The collection by now contains some 20.000 buttons, displayed on over 200 canvas boards, put together in pop-art-like grids. Most of them, alas, in storage, since there is not enough space to hang them all. The prognosis calls for about 600 boards when all is pinned and done – time to explore public venues!

https://carlwolfson.com/collector

The progression through time of these buttons is in itself fascinating – what began as a simple identifier soon morphed to slogans, was elaborated, became strategic tool and followed the roots of all other persuasive mechanisms, advertisement included. Some of it barbed, but none of it in the slime pits of contemporary discourse of the Trumpian universe. They also provide glimpses in the kinds of civic organizations actively involved in the political process, and windows into the role of women as flattering by-products of electoral choices (or not….)

A museum is called for, if there was only a funding angel to be found…. in the meantime I wonder what large space in our area would be feasible for hosting a temporary exhibition. It would be a blockbuster, I am sure. Hive mind, get to work!

Music today can be chosen by yourself from this play list: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/playlist-election-day

My pick was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSwzjD0L4co

(The album it comes from, “My Name is Buddy,” recounts the early-twentieth-century history of big labor and leftist politics using a cat, Buddy, as a protagonist.)

A lot of people want change. That is true for the Left and also applies to the Right. If you think about it, the two are really on opposing trajectories – the Left fights, among other things, for structurally disadvantaged people’s rights to access, for them to be able to rise to a place of equal opportunity in society, to ascend to equality from their place at the bottom of the heap. They want a future filled with justice.

The Right is, to large parts, constituted of people who fear a descent, a decline in their status, a loss of privileges, a replacement by others they deem non-legitimate. They want a return to a past they perceive to be their birthright. Opposing trajectories, as I said, both with regard to the experienced direction of change, up or down, and the respective times, future or past, under consideration.

What both movements share, though, is some kind of resentment (no clue why they call it the fancier ressentiment, but they often do.) It’s not about an individual’s desire simply to have what others have (that would be envy. ) It is about generally and collectively questioning the legitimacy of the principles of distribution of goods and rights: who is justified to own/have access/call the shots and who is not. And, in the case of the Right, it’s often about seeing one’s own displacement or descent as directly caused by the ascent of specific others – women who work, migrants who come into the country, etc.

Resentment grows when there is a discrepancy between what you consider your right and what your actual life provides. And it becomes particularly strong if you feel you’ve played by the rules, and those are changed mid-game, or the other team is cheating.

.https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/whats-ressentiment-got-do-it.

Unfortunately, these emotions are often stirred by easily manipulated beliefs rather than facts: if your job is gone, it is easier to blame the women who you see working all around you for displacing you, than questioning an economic system that relies on automation and outsourcing to continue to reap profits. If you believe that South American migrants will deprive you of your share of limited resources you don’t even look at the facts that show this to be untrue. And those emotions mobilize: You see yourself attacked as a class, no longer as a failing individual, and that unites you with the many who share your view. Rather than apportioning blame to yourself as not being competitive, you can blame a shared out-group enemy – making for these dangerous movements that are now sprouting across the US, movements that are willing to consider even violence to defend what they believe is ripped from them.

I’m musing on this because I promised to report on my readings and because I think it is essential that we understand the psychological underpinnings of what leads to populist movements. If we want to have a chance to reach these people we must convey, among other things, that we are not playing a zero-sum game, where you either win or lose.

Source, alas, in German (and I only reported on a smidgen of the entire argument….https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/der-blick-nach-unten

Photographs today from NYC’s streets in honor of our new congressional members who will hopefully shake things up and seem to have a sense of humor.

Music is self explanatory…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ