The Other Profile

This is for Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose misadventure inspired these thoughts, with thanks to Scott M. Sommer of United Auto Workers Region 9, whose Facebook comment lit a firestorm of denial.

Riding the New York City subway—the Number 1 line, that runs from Harlem through Times Square to Greenwich Village and the southern tip of Manhattan—I’m reading the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe. A voice says, “Excuse me,” and I look up and see, sitting across from me, a Black woman more or less my own age, strikingly dressed in clothes that aren’t traditional African garb but evocative of it. “Do you travel much?” she asks.

“A fair amount,” I tell her, and we strike up a conversation about travel. After a bit, she says, “But you know, everything takes longer now, since 9-11. They ask me so many more questions at check-in and security than they used to that it’s actually gotten harder to travel.”

I look at her for a long minute, gauging whether to utter the response that’s on the tip of my tongue, which is, “Not for me.” She and I are, as I have noted, similar in many ways: both New York City urban, both middle-aged, both showing the insignia of a certain level of middle-income comfort. But there’s one salient difference: She’s a middle-aged woman of color, and I’m a middle-aged woman of no color—and as such, invisible to security personnel and police.

That’s not a complaint. For instance, speaking of 9-11, for a few days in mid-September, 2001, southern Manhattan was off-limits to everyone except people who lived or worked there. To travel south of 14th Street, people had to show ID at police checkpoints. People, that is, who weren’t—well, me. I got waved through every time, without producing any identification at all.

Then there was the time I was coming back from Palestine. I had been in the West Bank on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We had been advised to have the Palestinian materials we had collected during the two-week visit mailed to us, rather than attempt to carry them through the Israeli exit check at Ben Gurion airport. We were told that security officers often checked cameras, too, and that if we didn’t want to be questioned and delayed it was wise to move photographs—of, say, the Wall of Separation—off our digital cameras and onto other digital storage media. I spent my last day in the West Bank moving photos and going through everything I had acquired to make sure that on the way out of Israel I couldn’t be identified as pro-Palestinian.

It was wasted work. The Israeli security forces waved me through the way the police officers at 14rh Street had. When I got home, I discovered I had overlooked one item: In a front section of my pocketbook was a beaded bracelet that said, “I [HEART] PALESTINE.”

Once, while on that same delegation, my apparent invisibility extended to half a dozen other people, not all of whom were middle-aged, not all of whom were female (although all of us were in at least one of those categories).

It was the night of the West Bank championship basketball game in Ramallah. We were staying at the Ibdaa Cultural Center of the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, and the Ibdaa team had just won the championship from the Bethlehem team. We were on the Ibdaa bus, going back with the team and their coaches from the West Bank into Israel. In other words, the bus held perhaps twenty-some young Palestinian men and seven very pale Americans—five women, most but not all middle-aged, and two middle-aged men.

The bus stopped at the check point into Jerusalem. Several Israeli Defense Force soldiers, all armed, boarded the bus and walked up the aisle, asking each Palestinian youth for ID. They took the IDs, left the bus, huddled outside for half an hour, looking over the IDs with flashlights, then re-boarded the bus and handed back the IDs. Twice, they walked past all seven Americans without stopping or saying a word.

• • •

The recent disorderly-conduct arrest of Black Harvard scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., after he spoke with some heat to a white police officer who was demanding that Gates identify himself in his—Gates’—own home, started a national conversation about racial profiling. President Barack Obama even offered his opinion on the subject—twice, the second time moderating if not rescinding his original assertion that the police officer had acted “stupidly.” When my former Metropolitan Council on Housing colleague Scott M. Sommer, now of United Auto Workers Region 9, posted a comment on his Facebook page to the effect that Obama had been right the first time, he ignited an explosion of responses—51 so far, and counting.

None of them, however, noted that racial profiling can and does go in two directions. Indeed, the benefit of the doubt accorded people of no-color happens so often and so routinely that, like me at a checkpoint, it’s usually invisible—at least to most of us who reap that benefit. Sharing stories like these should help make that privilege more visible to everyone.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009

A Very Political Landscape, Part Deux

Café Rendez-vous, Place Denfert Rochereau, Paris, 14 juillet—Beyond the table in front of me, beyond my poached salmon and glass of Sancerre, are camouflage-painted tanks, guns at the ready, rolling down the Avenue du Général Leclerc. Later, when I get back to my Paris home-for-the-summer, a television special will combine patriotic songs (by no means limited to “The Marseillaise”) with film clips of France’s newest contributions to military technology, including the latest in the pilotless, unstaffed bombers called predator drones.

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the Fête Nationale—July 14, France’s National Holiday, which the rest of the world calls Bastille Day. It commemorates the July 14, 1789, storming of the royal prison called the Bastille that marks the start of the French Revolution. Amazingly, the Fête Nationale vastly outdoes the U.S. Fourth of July in celebrating military might—in this case, of course, France’s.

I’m in this café conducting my own celebration. I’m toasting both a different French revolution and what turned out to be the perfect observance of my first Quatorze Juillet.

I’ve never before been in France in mid-July. I’ve celebrated aspects of Bastille Day in New York, although not the guns and tanks and drones. I got up this morning thinking about how to observe the day without joining the military hoop-la tonight at the Eiffel Tower.

I went for a walk. In the course of it, by sheerest accident, I discovered another monument to the world’s first socialist-anarchist revolution, the Paris Commune (see “A Very Political Landscape,” June 9.

I’ve visited the Mur des Fédérés—the Wall of the Communards—at Père Lachaise Cemetery every time I’ve come to Paris. My mother told me to, on the occasion of my first visit here. Go to the Louvre, she said, and see the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus de Milo—and go to Père Lachaise and see the Mur des Fédérés. (If she had known that Eugène Pottier, the poet who wrote the words to the communist-anarchist anthem, “The Internationale,” was also buried there, she’d have told me to see his tomb as well. I come from a long line of leftists.)

Living in Paris this summer, I’ve also dropped in occasionally at the Montparnasse Cemetery, the final resting place of two of France’s great political philosophers of the Left, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I stopped to say hello to them today for Quatorze Juillet, then turned to leave the cemetery—

And came face to face with a map I had never seen before that informed me I was yards away from the “Monument de Fédérés.”

It’s smaller than the wall at Père Lachaise, and the inscription on it is a little worn and hard to see. Also, it wasn’t exactly where the map placed it.

Finally I found it. I took a few pictures. Then (I was quite alone there) I lifted my fist in the communist salute and sang one chorus of “The Internationale,” for Quatorze Juillet and in memory of my mother.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009

The Adventure of the Art Students from Xi'an

I was in Beijing with a hundred or so friends, traveling with the New York Oratorio Society, which was giving two concerts in China.

The trip included a tightly scheduled tour of the country under the aegis of the Chinese government tourism office. Like all tourists in China, we saw the Great Wall and after Beijing would go to the central province of Xi’an to see its famous terra cotta army. Our guides—all young, stylishly dressed representatives of China's emerging middle class—declared in every lecture that the new China, with its "special Chinese" version of communism called "capitalism," was an improvement on the old China.

On the day of the second concert, however, those of us who weren’t singing had a precious hour or so of free time. Two of us had already taken the Beijing subway once and gotten lost in the middle of the city. This time we headed, more prudently, for the nearby shopping area called Silk Alley.

No sooner were we well away from our hotel, than we were approached by two young Asian women who asked whether they might walk with us and practice their English. Hardly more than twenty and respectably dressed; they looked harmless enough. “Sure,” we said, and along they came.

As we walked, they said they were art students recently arrived in Beijing from Xi'an. After we told them we ourselves were going to Xi’an the very next day, we felt as if we knew each other better. They seemed like country girls, a little lost and alone in the big city.

Right after that, one of them said, "Oh, our studio is right here—won't you come up and meet our teacher?" Ah, I thought—they're salespeople, shilling for customers. Or worse, a voice in my head warned, suggesting sinister scenarios of which robbery at gunpoint was the least terrifying. But the two young women really did seem innocent and the dire possibilities in my head not really very likely, so with only a little trepidation, we went along with them.

It looked like a real studio, full of tables holding art paraphernalia and paintings lining the walls. Their teacher was nowhere in sight, but they fixed us jasmine tea and led us around to look at the paintings. They were for sale, the young women said, and asked us which ones we liked.

So it really was only a sales hustle. I liked some of the paintings; one set in particular seemed like just the thing for my son the water-colorist. They named a price and when I hesitated, translating into dollars in my head, they offered me a "discount."

I bought the set, and my friend bought another. The jasmine tea wasn't drugged, and no one robbed us. When we got back to the hotel, the packages the students had wrapped so carefully did indeed contain the paintings we had chosen. There was no crime at all, in other words—only another face of the new Chinese communism.

But there was, after all, a mystery: At a late, post-concert supper that night, it turned out that everyone at our large table had been approached by two young women art students from Xi'an. They, too, had been brought to studios, where they, too, had bought paintings. But we had all been brought to different studios—and, from the descriptions, by different young art students from Xi'an.

The small-time entrepreneurs of Beijing, it seemed, have discovered that Western tourists who might boggle at going to a strange place with a strange man will go almost anywhere with personable young women who say they're students from the provinces. And then they’ll do what Westerners do around the world: Shop.

Mystery solved.

©Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009
Photo by Ellen Davidson © 2009

Sculpting Empire

Paris, June 2009—In New York City, in front of the American Museum of Natural History, stands a sculpture of a man on horseback, accompanied by two men on foot. The man on the horse is U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, friend of the museum, and, of course, the soldier who won Puerto Rico, Guantánamo, and the Philippines for the United States. He appears to be dressed in the Rough Rider uniform of those victories.

The other two men are nameless, meant to represent not individuals at all, but continents. A generic African and a generic Native American, they’re leading TR’s horse, and they’re dressed in almost nothing at all. In my youth, during the years that the movement for racial equality was becoming militant, I wondered how that statue, so near Harlem, was allowed to stand, unmolested, not even graffiti’d. No one else even complained about it, at least not publicly

I met its ideological twin in Paris the other day.

More precisely, I met its ideological sextuplets. They’re also in front of a museum, in this case the Musée d’Orsay, and all six of them depict continents: Six larger-than-life female figures representing, from left to right, Europe (yes, Europe comes first), Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and “Oceania.” Like Roosevelt, the statue of “Europe” is somewhat military, despite being female; she seems to be modeled on Athena and is dressed head-to-toe in flowing robes and a suggestion of armor, with a helmet on her head. And, like Roosevelt’s companions, the other five are all half naked.

This is so curious it bears repetition: Seven generic “natives,” created on separate continents and in different centuries, are nevertheless all bare-breasted and accompanying fully clothed white people. What were those sculptors thinking? Surely they never let themselves think what the figures imply …

This is what we know about the sculptures: The Musée d’Orsay sculptures were made for the Trocadero Palace and the Universal Exposition of 1878. Six sculptors were commissioned to create them: Alexandre Schoenewerk, to sculpt the figure representing “Europe”; Alexandre Falguière to create “Asia”; Eugène Delaplanche, “Africa”; Ernest-Eugène Hiolle, “North America”; Aimé Millet, South America; and Mathurin Moreau, “Oceania.” Each did his job; the six works graced the Trocadero during the Exposition and then were discarded and found after the Orsay railroad station was converted into a museum in 1986. The Roosevelt statue was sculpted by James Earle Fraser and placed on the museum plaza and dedicated in 1940.

Those are the bare facts, so to speak. Their meaning would be clear to a child and indeed has presumably been clear to the generations of children who have been taken on school trips to those museums. There is, however, one difference worth noting between the two groups; they are very close ideological relatives, but not quite identical.

The French group was created when Europe truly ran the world, its mastery supported by the ideas shouted by those statues. The group in New York was sculpted just at the moment when the mantle of empire was passing to the United States, which might do well to take to heart the lesson Europe had to learn, the sequel—what empires do after they rise.

They fall.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

photo by Brian Pasternak © 2009

A Very Political Landscape

For a century and a half, almost anybody in Paris who had been anybody in life was laid to rest at Père Lachaise after death—along with many who had been nobody of note. Once, a hundred odd who had been less than nobody, who were of the canaille (“rabble,” “riffraff,” "mob,” sometimes “scum”), were slaughtered there.

Atop a hill in the 20th arrondissement of eastern Paris, Cimetiére Père Lachaise is named for a 17-th century priest who lived there before the cemetery was built. At 48 hectares (118.5 acres), it is the city’s largest cemetery. It holds the remains of more than 300,000 people, including the beloved French singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963), U.S. rocker-poet Jim Morrison (1943-1971), composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875); medieval lovers Héloïse (1101-1164) and Abelard (1079-1142); actor-spouses Simone Signoret (1921-1985) and Yves Montand (1921-1991); and writers Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Colette (1873-1954), and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Under one monument, in the southeast corner of the cemetery, lie “a few of the ashes of the seven thousand French martyrs murdered by the Nazis at the camp of Neuengamme.”

Few tracts of real estate in the world are as politically charged as that corner. Within a few yards of the Neuengamme stone are monuments to the victims of half a dozen other concentration camps, to the French volunteers of the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic, and to the Central Committee of the French Communist party.

They’re not there by accident. Those memorials are directly across a narrow roadway from the Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Communards. Against that wall, on May 28, 1871, the French Army shot 147 defenders of the Paris Commune, the world’s first—albeit tragically short-lived—socialist-anarchist revolution.

The Commune was born out of dire circumstances. After the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, in the spring of 1871, the poor and hungry workers of Paris—including both socialists and anarchists—declared the city an independent political entity and held elections for a governing council, or commune. The existing government fled to Versailles; the Commune, flying the red flag of revolution rather than the French tricoleur, took office on March 28. It elected as its leader the jailed socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) and rapidly instituted a series of laws and regulations meant to create political and economic equality, mandates that included a strong feminist component as well.

Blanqui never took office. The French government in Versailles sent the army out against the Commune. After weeks of skirmishes, the army re-occupied Paris. The last 147 defenders of the Commune were shot by a firing squad in Père Lachaise on May 28 at the end of what is still called la Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, which saw the summary executions by the French troops of tens of thousands of suspected communards.

One survivor, the poet Eugène Pottier (1816-1887), later wrote a poem that, set to music by composer Pierre De Geyter (1848-1932), became the anthem of socialists and anarchists around the world as “The Internationale.” It was sung for me once at the Mur des Fédérés, which remains a beacon for the hope for economic equality; French fighters for freedom and justice, including Blanqui and Pottier, have been buried or commemorated near it ever since.

The events of 1871 are also commemorated beyond the walls of Père Lachaise. A Parisian café is named for the Commune’s favorite song, “The Cherries of Springtime,” and a few miles south of the Mur des Fédérés, a boulevard in the Left Bank’s 13th arrondissement bears the name August Blanqui.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

Courtesy

12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS—I’m at a dinner party in Paris; I am, in fact, the reason for the dinner party, the guest of honor, the visiting American. Five of us sit around a table, eating, drinking wine, and chatting, amiably and aimlessly, about the world situation, music, theatre, travel, and whatever else arises. My hosts are a French sociologist—whose research brings her from time to time to the United States, which is how I met her—and her student-son. The other two guests are a scholar in the slightly rarefied field of Southeast Asian tourism, and her husband, the director of international relations for a town just outside Paris. (His specialty is also Southeast Asia.)

Among them, the four speak several languages: French, of course, Spanish, Portuguese, German, I think, Indonesian, and smatterings of other Asian languages. And English. Everyone here speaks English, mostly as a third or fourth or fifth language rather than as a second, and mostly less than perfectly. But tonight, they’re all speaking English—

Because the American in the room is competent in only one language: her own. I speak enough French for shopping, but not enough to be comfortable conversing in it.

If any of my companions are equally self-conscious about their less-than-perfect English, it doesn’t show. All evening, as a courtesy to me, they speak my language. Sometimes they fall into French for a moment, but after a couple of sentences, the conversation stops, one of them checks to see if I understood, and they go back to English.

During one such moment, I wonder if I’ve ever seen this happen in reverse. Have I ever been in a room in the United States in which everyone present was speaking a language not their own—that they didn’t even use in their work—to accommodate a non-English-speaking visitor?

My companions stop and explain the last two sentences to me, and I lose the thought. Half an hour later, during another French moment, I come back to it, this time with the answer: Never. I’ve never been at a U.S. party at which everyone spoke a visitor’s language instead of English.

Are the French, then—by custom or nature—more courteous than the people of the United States? Possibly. Could there be another explanation for this particular act of kindness, one that doesn’t involve ethnic or cultural stereotypes?

Well, Europe and the United States are almost exactly the same size—Europe’s area is 3.9 million square miles, the United States’ 3.79 million. But Europe’s population is more than double the U.S. population—700 million to some 300 million. And while the United States has one national language, Europe has dozens. As one corollary among many, Europeans are far more likely to learn multiple languages, to speak some better than others, and to be used to a world in which people speak multiple languages—some better than others.

I find the thought—that these four Parisians are less uncomfortable speaking imperfect English than I am speaking imperfect French—more comforting than credible. They may simply be more willing to get past their discomfort in order to make me comfortable—that is, they may, after all, simply be more deeply courteous than I am.

Either way, the evening is lovely and memorable. I leave wishing to acquire at least a bit of my hosts’ language habit, to speak French more while in France—and perhaps someday, in the company of another visitor to a country not her own, to return the courtesy shown to me tonight.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

A Change in the Landscape,Magnitude As Yet Unknown

It is finally possible, in this nation so profoundly and for so long divided by race, for a Black man to become president.

"War, Peace, Justice, and the Elections"
A War Resisters League Statement

Election Night, 2008—A commentator on CNN this evening mentioned that it had been 43 years since the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A little later I spoke with someone who was on that march, who said that if you had asked her then whether the United States could elect a Black man to the presidency, she'd have said, "Not in my lifetime!"

The march, in the spring of 1965, was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign to make the franchise a reality for African-Americans in the South. Almost a century after the ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which declared that the right to vote could not “be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” poll taxes and lynch mobs still stood between most Southern Black citizens and the vote. Thousands—Southerners and Northerners—had worked to change that; some, like Southerner James Chaney and Northerners Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo, had died to change it. Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Let me be clear: I expect almost nothing from Barack Obama that we wouldn't have gotten from Hillary Clinton--indeed, almost nothing we didn't get from Bill Clinton. Obama, like all the presidents before him including George W. Bush, represents the war machine--although it is possible he represents a somewhat more prudent element of that machine than did Bush; he represents capitalism, although it is almost certain that his domestic policies will be less devastating than Bush's; he uncritically supports Israel.

Yet for me, and, I suspect, for many of us who lived through and participated in the civil rights efforts of the '60s, the fact that this has happened in our lifetime after all is, in itself, deeply moving. My African-American nephew DeShawn (above), now seventeen months old, unlike his own mother, will never have known a world in which it could not have happened.

This past weekend, I was on a family road trip. My white brother was driving, I was sitting next to him in the front seat, and a bunch of Black teenagers were sitting in the back of the car carrying on like--well, like teenagers. My brother played Mavis Staples' "We'll Never Turn Back" cd, and I was singing along with "We Shall Not Be Moved," when a voice asked from the back, "Aunt Judith, you like that music?" It was clear she meant, "You like that tired old music?" I admitted to liking it, old as it is. I said, "Once, it moved a movement."

So this is all: What has happened is not revolutionary. It represents no change in the structures of power that allot so much to so few, and so little to so many. It will feed no hungry children; it will house no homeless. It won't change, by the smallest increment, the proportion of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, in this country and in the world, who are people of color.

But a generation ago, we had to march--some of us had to die—so that Black people might vote. Something has changed. We have something to build on—and our work cut out for us if we are to build on it.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2008