Ta-Nehisi Coates

Within ten years past as many as ten thousand slaves have been drawn away from Charleston by the attractive prices of the West, and [white] laborers from abroad have come to take their places. These laborers have every disposition to work above the slave, and if there were opportunity, would be glad to do so; but without such opportunity they come into competition with him; they are necessarily restive to the contact. Already there is disposition to exclude him from the trades, from public works, from drays, and the tables of the hotels; he is even now excluded to a great extent, and ... when more laborers ... shall come in greater numbers to the South, they will still more increase the tendency to exclusion; they will question the right of masters to employ their slaves in any work that they may wish for; they will invoke the aid of legislation; they will use the elective franchise to that end; they will acquire the power to determine municipal elections; they will inexorably use it; and thus the town of Charleston, at the very heart of slavery, may become a fortress of democratic power against it.

No such movement was in the offing. This offends our romantic sense of struggle and coalition. There seemed a natural interest between the enslaved and the white poor. In a very real way, enslavement circumscribed the lives of both classes. Blacks could never hire out their labor. Whites could, but only at wages repressed by enslavement. There seems here a clear common interest for the construction of a revolutionary coalition. Instead the opposite happened, and  poor whites became the direct agents of enslavement themselves, working as overseers, slave-drivers and serving on slave-patrols.

This formulation is somewhat backwards. In fact it was the very existence of enforcement work in the slave system that militated against coalition-building. Slave-driving and overseeing were the only kind of labor in the slave system that could not be entrusted to blacks, and thus was guaranteed to poor whites. Revolution sounds nice, until you consider that it meant poor whites sacrificing the only exclusive means they had for feeding and sheltering their own families.

The upshot of this labor quota does not end at basic needs but expands into the psychological:

...above and beyond this, [slavery] fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own “niggers.” To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.

For those on the left, working in the realm of coalition politics, this problem of tiered privilege and basic human psychology still poses a problem. Poverty, oppression and degradation are relative. They depend, not simply on who is above, but who is beneath. When Du Bois writes that white labor could never be “real estate,” he is not simply making an observation about the economics of slavery, he is noting an actual class distinction which can’t be papered over by regarding everyone as “workers.” It’s true that enslavement restricted the possible for poor whites, but it also guaranteed that some class of people would always be lower than them. More, it held out the chance of poor whites possibly joining the very class of people responsible for holding down their wages in the first place.

One must take care to not lapse into moral condemnation in regards to poor Southern whites. The erection of a “buffer class” to maintain an oppressive system is not original, and poor whites are neither the first, nor the last, to serve that role. For decades, the gens de couleur of Haiti sought to preserve and augment their rights at the expense of enslaved blacks and by making common cause with “pure” white slaveholding French. So it goes. There is nothing shocking or amazing in the calculus of poor whites in the antebellum South. Their behavior was neither particularly craven nor particularly anomalous. Indeed it was deeply human.

* I looked at the wage slavery argument a few years ago while blogging about the fascinating 1857 pro-slavery polemic Cannibals All.

I don’t know how intentional, or how conscious this movement is, and I do not want to paper over the (many) disagreements and nuances you find among these historians. But I do think that it’s safe to say that, collectively, they represent a shift away from viewing racism in general, and anti-black racism in particular, as incidental to the American past.

The ur-text for this reconsideration is W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction In America. Written in 1935, when the Dunning School still held sway, and slavery was considered benign if regrettable, and Reconstruction was viewed as plunder perpetrated by carpet-baggers and ignorant blacks, Du Bois’s text veered left and offered a different picture—one that, according to Foner, regarded Reconstruction ...

...as an idealistic effort to construct a democratic interracial political order from the ashes of slavery as well as a phase in a prolonged struggle between capital and labor for control of the South’s economic resources...In many ways Black Reconstruction anticipated the findings of modern scholarship. At the time, however, it was largely ignored.

I think Du Bois was well aware of Black Reconstruction’s likely, immediate fate. Here is the last paragraph of Du Bois’s note to the reader:

It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down.

But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.

This note deeply moved me. So often I am asked—as all black writers are asked—how their message might be packaged to appeal to those who have no appetite for what we are saying. The interlocutor is usually a person of good faith, who is in agreement, but the question is always a trap. Any writer who takes as their starting place any doubt as to their own humanity, or the humanity of their subject, has already lost. The real questions, the questions in that writer’s heart, are never explored. And instead they are stuck answering the same set of questions that they’ve, long ago, resolved. For black writers, this is a formula for never evolving, for writing the same thing over and over. For black writers the danger is having their work devolve into workshop on racial sensitivity.

Du Bois rejected that approach. He wrote knowing full well that what he said was neither palatable nor negotiable, that a large portion of the country would not be swayed, and that the truth, in and of itself, must be enough. It is often said that this space lacks for hope. Here is your bone for the day: In the academy, Du Bois was victorious. He did not live to see that victory, but it is his view on the centrality of white supremacy that now carries the day.

More tomorrow.

Swamp-Thing’s old foe Arcane is (for now) dead, and though the two were enemies, what we get in the comic is a sense that, somehow, the same forces that hunted Arcane are now hunting Swamp Thing. Those forces don’t just represent “evil” but a kind of modernism which threatens to sweep all the magic in the world away. Swamp Thing #21 (the second issue in Moore’s run) is considered the classic, because it offers a brilliant take on the character’s origins. But for me, it’s really Swamp Thing #20—with its high poetry—that sticks.

I’m thinking about this volume a lot as I start sketching out the second season of Black Panther. I really like how Moore is able to do both broad thematic work and character study with lines like, “Maybe the world...has run out of room for monsters.” Balancing those two things are tough, and if there’s one thing thing I’d like to do better with S2 of Black Panther it’s to figure out how to burrow deeper into T’Challa’s head while at the same time delving expanding and deepening the Wakanda around T’Challa.

I imagine Wakanda as a country with strong natural barriers—impenetrable mountains to the North and West, dense forests, foreboding marshlands to the South, and the lake to the East. (When Prince Namor recently innudated Wakanda, he did so by causing the lake to rise.) There are passable points into Wakanda, but each of these are secured by a garrison which eventually bloomed into cities. One area that is less secure is the border between Niganda and Wakanda. Again, I don’t want to say too much there, but it has meaning.

A few words on continuity and geography here: I stress the “In my imagination” portion of this description. From what I can tell, canon and continuity are things comic book creators try to pay attention to, without becoming beholden to them. I have tried to root my Wakanda, and my Black Panther, in all that came before. But it’s really ultimately impossible to do this—there simply is too much information to read and remember. That said you do try to respect continuity and use it to you it to advance the story.

This is my first serious go at mapping. Eventually we’ll have to get a map that is of enough quality to be reproduced in a comic book. This clearly isn’t it. But I’m learning. And that was the whole reason to take this gig to begin with. To learn.

Shout-out to Jessica Khoury for the tutorial. Time for to cop that sketch-tablet, I guess.

The feminist critique is in the air now. If my rendition of Black Panther wasn’t created by that critique, it breathed the same air. I can’t really kill off or depower women characters without grappling with Gail Simone. I can’t really think about how women characters are drawn anymore without thinking about the women in Bitch Planet, and how they seem drawn beyond the male gaze.

This is why criticism is important. The job of criticism isn’t to interrupt or encourage commercial prospects. (“Batman vs Superman smashes Box Office, despite critic complaints!”) Criticism should push our imagination and help us understand what is actually possible in art and, I’d argue, even what is moral. Through much of my time collecting comic books I never took much issue with how women were drawn. I had a vague sense that there was something about, say, the reworking of Psylocke that bugged me. But I simply didn’t give it much thought. It never occurred to me, for instance, to ask whether a superhero’s pose was anatomically possible. It never occurred to me to ask why a super-hero would have a DD cup-size. Was that for her benefit or for mine? I never asked.

The feminist critique of comics has made “not asking” a lot harder. That, in itself, is a victory. The point is not to change the thinking of the active sexist. (Highly unlikely.) The point is  to force the passive sexist to take responsibility for his own thoughts.

More on this, and a lot more, in this episode of the Women of Marvel podcast.