It Still Shocks

I should know better, and yet, because of my own social and cultural position, reading American history still has the capacity to zap me, to remind me that other people not born of any privilege faced/face atrocities that I will very likely never experience.

I recently came across this book excerpt of Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis.  Kaplan's basic premise is that understanding the time these three women spent in Paris in the fifties (or in Davis's case, the early sixties) gives the historian a remarkable glimpse into the way that Paris helped shape their public personae.   It's a fascinating premise, though since I have not read the entire book, I can't really argue in support of or in opposition to Kaplan.  (I will say that Kaplan's writing has hooked me enough to try and find the time to read the whole thing.)

The shock I received came in the form of a parenthetical sentence in a section where Kaplan describes Angela Davis's parents, their origins and their roles as community leaders in Birmingham.  After noting that the Davises lived in a border neighborhood (that is, a Black neighborhood bordering on a white one) that was nicknamed Dynamite Hill "because of the bombs planted there by segregationists," Kaplan writes in parentheses, that "There were some fifty unsolved bombings in Birmingham between 1957 and 1962."

Even as someone who has studied the nexus of race and crime for years,  I kept seeing that sentence -- again, one Kaplan puts inside parentheses -- and shaking my head, uncomprehendingly that so many explosions could go off in one American city and no one held accountable for any of them.  And if such a statement can shock someone of my years, who does know a thing or two about American history, imagine how such a statement gets read by young people my students' age, whose sense of history is hardly formed yet, and whose awareness of race may be very limited.   (Of course, if I were teaching at one of the Manhattan CUNY schools, where I'd worked off an on for many years, my students would probably make fun of me for being so shocked; wake up, dude, they might admonish me.)

Later, Kaplan very poignantly describes how Davis, staying in Biarritz before heading to Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne, read the headline of the New York Herald Tribune, which reproduced an AP wire story about the church bombing that killed four teenaged girls.   Kaplan summarizes what Davis would write in her autobiography about seeing the headline: she was overwhelmed not simply by the deaths, but by the feeling that her white friends from college, who were studying with her, could not possibly comprehend the bombing and its deeper meaning. As I read Kaplan's summary, I of course knew that Davis's feeling was right on target. 

I am not making any broad claims here.   Had any of Davis's Jewish classmates' families fled from or were lost in the Holocaust, they would have had a very good understanding of what the church bombing meant.  I'm speaking only about myself, and thinking about those I teach, and my children, too.   I won't let my social and cultural position prevent me from understanding the meanings of the unpleasant facts of history, even as I am aware that my position may limit my understanding.   Not knowing is worse.