alias Bruce.

Joy DeGruy did an interview

that I have been meaning to share with you since I learned of it months ago. It's a conversation she had with a reporter at City Newspaper in my hometown of Rochester, NY. And it is exactly on time – up to the minute, really – in spite of its having taken place in 2009.

Joy DeGruy, (formerly Joy DeGruy Leary), in case you don't know of her, is the social worker and psychologist whose book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing has brought the not-so-well-absorbed poisons of our racial history boiling up out of the national pores. What moves DeGruy's analysis beyond the usual arguments about American slavery and racism is that she had the brilliant insight to analyze slavery-based racial relations and their lingering aftermath not simply as brutal and wrong, but as clinical trauma. Suddenly we are not speaking the squishy language of "injustice" toward black Americans and "progress" toward fairness. We are speaking the more precise and clinically-understood language of traumatic-event-based loss of healthy psychological function – and methodologies for healing and regaining healthy function. On a personal and national level.

An excerpt from the interview with DeGruy will give you an idea of where this goes:

When I studied PTS [Post Traumatic Stress], what fascinated me most was that a person can be diagnosed with PTS as a result of a single trauma. And not only that, they can experience trauma indirectly. They can hear about something happening to a loved one and be traumatized to such a degree that they require assistance.

I looked at that construct and thought, O.K., if a person can conceivably be diagnosed with a stress-related mental illness by having heard about a trauma, what in the world must have occurred with people who not only experienced trauma directly, but those who experienced the trauma of all those around them? And this traumatic episode occurred over centuries. So what people have to understand when I say "post traumatic" is that I'm giving you an etiology of some of the things we passed along from generation to generation.

When you look at the symptoms of PTS, you're looking at hyper-vigilance, outbursts of anger, difficulties going to sleep and waking up a lot, thoughts of a foreshortened future, and it goes on and on. Now just imagine the people living in those environments with people with those symptoms. After a while, with it never being diagnosed, never being treated, and never given a chance to heal, what you have is a culture with broken behaviors.

That's just for starters. The entire interview is here.

Joe Bageant died

of cancer on Saturday, and we are all the worse for it. He was a redneck (his term) and he was a progressive and he was both smart and passionate about fairness, which put him in the perfect position to write and speak about the actual lives of many poor white Americans and their reasons for embracing some positions that drive liberals crazy. The book that put him on the map in this regard was Deer Hunting with Jesus, but there is also Rainbow Pie, plus scads of blogs and interviews. On his website, which is still up, you will find a brotherly tribute to Joe by his friend and colleague Fred Reed.

Read his books. Listen to what he had to say. We still need him.

I have heard "nigger" casually uttered twice on NPR

in the past week – once in a conversation about the newly-cleaned-up edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I've written about here and here), and once in an interview concerning racial traumas endured by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., father of the civil rights leader – and both uses of the word seemed appropriate given the conversations. Is this a change in radio etiquette? Did I miss it when it first happened? Or has it coincided, interestingly enough, with the Huck Finn controversy, in which academics and pundits of all races (including me) have come forward to declare that it's no help to ban "nigger" from the canon?

Just asking.

More on the Huck Finn thing:

I have been thinking more about what it is that makes a book like Huck Finn, with its 219 spoken repetitions of "nigger," such a conundrum for Americans.

The real problem, I think, is that many of us in the alleged melting pot are still not ready to see, hear, or think about the awful truth of how racism has sabotaged our relationships. Fact is, even in 1885 when Huck Finn was first published in this country, Mark Twain was eons ahead of 21st-century America. So, in today's era of racialized hatred of a black president, the chickens squawk for the banning (or redacting) of a book that dares to shed light on how our intimate racial estrangement came to be. And, ironically, children who come to school damaged by racism are used to rationalize the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach that sustains the tragedy.

You can lead a nation to its medicine, but you can't make it take it.

The new version of Huck Finn replacing the word "nigger"

with "slave," and "injun" with "Indian," manages to accomplish one thing: it worsens the problem it claims to want to solve.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University – whose new edition of the book will come out next month as a joint volume containing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a similarly-sterilized Tom Sawyer – has an affable enough explanation for his revisionist escapade. Since Huck Finn is so widely outlawed in schools (it is reportedly the fourth-most-banned book in America), Gribben reasons, why should we let a mere word deny students the chance to read one of the great American novels? As the BBC quotes him, "It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers."

But here is the problem: Huck Finn was not meant to be a "marvelous reading experience." It was meant to be a story in which the reader is forced to feel the grating contradiction between racism and true human interaction. A story in which the white protagonist's voice, uttering "nigger" 219 times, comes up against the experience of his compelling relationship with an actual black person. The hideous and hurtful resonance of racism throughout Huck Finn is not a "barrier" blocking understanding of the book; it is the very point of the book, by which the reader is confronted with an excruciating question: What created this unjust and insane situation for two people rafting down a river?

There are two ways for readers (and teachers) to respond to this. One is to answer the question. The other is to paint over the question, like a picket fence in need of whitewashing, so that students can be spared the ugliness inherent in the story's lesson and instead enjoy their "marvelous reading experience." By choosing the latter, Gribben actually strengthens the unspoken influence of racism by prettifying it and denying it. It is as if a scholar were to write a revised history of the Holocaust that deleted references to Auschwitz and Dachau so that young people could have an unimpeded "marvelous reading experience" about Nazi society. The entire idea is cowardly and absurd.

Yes, teaching Huck Finn raises profound problems for students, teachers, and parents. It demands context, compassionate support, strong guidance of reading and classroom conversation, and a lot of informed preparation for everyone involved. And it requires particular attention to the needs and feelings of students of color who come to the text already having had a lifetime of demeaning, abusive and injurious racial experiences. These are real problems for teachers in a racist society. But is the answer to ban history? Or to help students to deal with it?

Alan Gribben may mean well. But, like whites who have insisted to me that they "don't see color," he isn't part of the solution. He is part of the problem.

On one level, Condoleezza Rice's new memoir,

Extraordinary, Ordinary People, can be seen as a typically cold-blooded Rice-ian maneuver to resurrect her image. After all, what's she to do now that the legacy of the gang of thugs who she so loyally served has plunged into public disrepute? Aha! Write a poignant childhood story of her family's proud struggle against racial injustice and cruelty! I can almost hear the flacks in the pre-publication meetings: "Condi, this book will humanize your image. People will see your beating heart, your unshakeable love of family and your bold belief in fairness." Roll the cameras. Cue the "Today" show.

On another level, though, Rice's telling her story looks like just another case of the confounding nature of human beings. Drug dealers who routinely order executions have also been known to arrange with neighborhood elders to try to protect young kids and innocent families. A "friend" will willingly give you the shirt off his back and then turn around and lie through his teeth about you. A brilliant Stanford provost will sign on with the Bush posse of plutocratic liars and criminals while holding on, somewhere in the unsold part of her heart, to her formative memories of fighting societal injustice. That's life.

I have written before (4/11/2004) about the tragedy of talented young black people who sell out their futures for lives of crime. You just wish Rice's upbringing could somehow have saved her.

Sarcastic Euphemism of the Day:

"educationist of pallor," used by John Liechty to describe white teacher John Foley, who opposes the teaching of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. See Liechty's piece Who’s Afraid of Huckleberry Finn?, which is an interesting read.

Eye-Openers.

In searching for something else, I ran across this article about differences between European and Native American attitudes toward children at the time of the European conquest of North America. It provides food for thought about what has made modern capitalism, with its lack of soulful purpose and its machined inhumanity, possible. Here is an excerpt:

European observers were shocked by the differences between their child-rearing customs and those of the Indian peoples of the Eastern woodlands. There were certain superficial similarities. Native peoples, like Europeans, surrounded pregnancy with rituals to ensure the newborn's health, and practiced rites following a childbirth that Europeans regarded as perversions of baptism and CIRCUMCISION (such as rubbing an infant in bear's fat and piercing the newborn's tongue, nose, or ears). The differences in child rearing were especially striking. Girls were not expected to spin, weave, or knit, as they were in Europe, and boys were not expected to farm. Nor were children subjected to corporal punishment, since this was believed to produce timidity and submissiveness.

Maturation among Indians was much more enmeshed in religious and communal rituals than among Europeans. For boys, there were ceremonies to mark one's first tooth, killing of one's first large game, and a vision quest, in which boys went alone into the wilderness to find a guardian spirit. Many girls were secluded at the time of first menstruation. Among certain Southeastern tribes, there was a ceremony called huskinaw through which boys and girls shed their childish identity and assumed adult status.

English colonists regarded children as "adults-in-training." They recognized that children differed from adults in their mental, moral, and physical capabilities, and drew a distinction between childhood, an intermediate stage they called youth, and adulthood. But they did not rigidly segregate children by age. Size and physical strength were more important than chronological age in defining a young person's roles and responsibilities. Parents wanted children to speak, read, reason, and contribute to their family's economic well-being as soon as possible.

Infancy was regarded as a state of deficiency. Unable to speak or stand, infants lacked two essential attributes of full humanity. Parents discouraged infants from crawling, and placed them in "walking stools," similar to modern walkers. To ensure proper adult posture, young girls wore leather corsets and parents placed rods along the spines of very young children of both sexes. The colonists rarely swaddled their infants, and not surprisingly some youngsters fell into fireplaces or wells.

It goes on from there. I suggest reading it in its entirety. But you get the idea. The momentum toward today's treatment of 11-year-olds as consumer decision-makers was set early. The culture we now live in continues to pay dearly for its careless, randomized view of life trajectory, as if each of our 70-year episodes of life on earth is a mechanically-jangled course in material competency, or, alternatively, employment in servitude toward an autocratic afterlife CEO.

As it happens, I am now reading Of Water and the Spirit, a memoir of traditional West African ritual initiation by Malidoma Patrice Somé. It's some story, and it illuminates the point that consumer life unanchored in participatory meaning is one hell of a horrible way to starve.

But, like I said, I found the article about childhood while looking for something else. I was seeking information I remembered having seen about sleep patterns for a friend who awakens inexplicably in the middle of the night. And I found it: in the form of a New York Times op-ed by Virginia Tech professor A. Roger Ekirch. His basic premise, which I have also seen elsewhere, is that our idea of a continuous, unbroken, peaceful night's sleep is a recent one. Historically, insect bites, cold, and other unavoidable discomforts have made sleep a more normally fragmented proposition. In European colonial America, for instance, the nightly habit of a "first sleep" and a "second sleep," separated by a period of wee-hours wakeful activity, was commonly accepted.

So if you're awake and perky -- as I am at the moment -- sometime after 3 in the morning, there may be more reason for it than you know. In my case, my siblings and I had night-owl parents. But that simply begs the question of where they got it.

In any case, Ekirch's article might give you some things to ponder late at night. Me, I'm now going to bed. It's time for my First Sleep.

We've Got to Talk.

Look to the left and you'll see a new link: to the Race Manners Discussion Guide, now available as a free download. It gives you ways to think and talk about the issues raised in my book Race Manners, which we all suffer from avoiding. It's great for book groups and teachers, who have been asking for it for some time now. I owe immediate thanks to a member of the audience at a recent book signing in Connecticut who raised his hand and asked me, in effect, "When are you going to release a discussion guide already?" It's here. And it's free.