Star Spangled Erasure by Brandon Lee

Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight'
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? 

Can you see

                    the gleaming

          RED GLARE

                                        bursting through our flag?

What’s Important: Reflections Across Undergraduate Writings (Fall 2017)

            Before my parents moved to New Mexico this year, my dad gave me a stack of college essays he had written.  One of them in particular caught my attention because he had previously provided me with the book that the paper was written about: “The Little Prince” written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint Exupery.  It’s this combination of artifacts, intimately tied and impossible to negotiate independent of the other, that I have chosen as my topic. 

The paper of the essay is thin and possibly yellowed with age (although I don’t know if there was laser white printing paper in 1978) and has a title page containing the name of the essay (“The Little Prince: friends and grown-ups”), the course number, the date (November 30, 1978) and my father’s name and what I assume is his student number.  Below this the professor has written his comments on the essay in pencil.  The paper received an “A –“ from the professor.

The paperback copy of “The Little Prince” was bought at “the bookstore.”  The sticker in the bottom right corner of the book indicates it’s for the “English 318” class which matches the course description on the title page of my father’s essay.  In 1978, my dad bought this book for $1.75 Canadian dollars.  On the title page of the book is my dad’s youthful signature.  He would later perfect a more Ph. D worthy signature - a signature with sharp discipline, purpose and practice, but this signature, penned in blue ballpoint looks lackadaisical, youthful, and sort of juvenile.  He was 22 after all when the essay was type-written for that unknown professor at Trinity Western in Vancouver, British Columbia.  I am 26 at the time of writing this, which makes me wonder if my child will ever analyze this text for a similar project during their own undergraduate studies.

There’s a blank page after the title page and then the pagination starts at two with the Preface.  It’s nine pages long, but type-written so the margins are nearly an inch and three-quarters – I’m guessing around 1,700 words tops.  The type-written text is the best aesthetic feature of the essay.  So much character.  So much permanence – there are maybe a total of fifteen white out spots and an equal number of grammar corrections done in pencil by the professor.  As I grow from a preservice teacher to a bona-fide teacher, I will make it a point for my students to have to print out their assignments and turn them in so that I may correct them with a thick red pen.  Internet drop boxes with comment bubbles are almost as unsatisfying as corrections done in a #2 pencil.  Give me a hard copy or give me nothing at all.

The annotations of the text are done in the same blue pen.  My mom told me my dad slept in the same sleeping bag through most of his undergrad years so he wouldn’t have to wash sheets, so I’m guessing he was a one-pen-at-a-time kind of student.  I had the same mechanical pencil from second grade till now frankly, so I’m not certain but not entirely surprised by the frugality.  There are about two or three annotations per page, which is fair because this book is legendary, piercing and soulful.  It’s eerie reading my dad’s copy of the book because my annotation wouldn’t be much different – indications of metaphors, double-meanings, clever quips, maxims to live and die by, and just heart-wrenching reminders of what love, knowledge and growing old really means.

The only dog-eared page of the book holds the quote that makes me choke up every time.  It must have this effect on everyone who encounters this text with an open heart and mind.  My dad quoted it at length in his essay so I will do the same, but some context is appropriate for it to mean anything.  The first-person narrator crashed his plane in the desert when a young boy happens upon him and informs him he’s from an asteroid.  This is the Little Prince.  The Prince traveled from his asteroid after cultivating a relationship with a pretentious rose.  Upon his travels he meets an assortment of adults on various asteroids doing menial jobs.  On Earth, his loneliness sets in before a fox befriends him.  After a while he must leave the fox which sets up this exchange:

“Goodbye,” said the fox.  “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It’s the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose---” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox.  “But you must not forget it.  You become responsible forever, for what you have tamed.  You are responsible for your rose…”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember. (87-88)

            After quoting the above section, my dad follows writing:

            Maybe then, some things have to be said.

            But, maybe those things are best said in a children’s story.  Most of the time the matters which really need explanation can only be understood by children and the child that lives in all of us.

After leaving the fox the Little Prince happens upon the downed aviator and asks him to draw him a picture of sheep because he wants to take the sheep back to his asteroid.  After a while, the Little Prince and the aviator-narrator go in search of water, happen upon a well and then tragedy.  The Little Prince must return to his asteroid and allows himself to be bitten by a poisonous snake.  The book ends with the author asking the reader to consider the Little Prince, the sheep and the flower when one looks at the stars, and to wonder if the sheep has eaten the flower that the Little Prince loves.

My dad didn’t share this book with me until I was in my mid-twenties and I actually chastised him for it after reading it through: “Why didn’t you read this to me when I was a kid?!”.  This book holds power.  Ultimately, that’s why he probably never shared this book with me because if I were to read it aloud with another person I would cry and that’s something that we reserve the right to reveal (or not reveal) when the relationship is right.

The most touching part of my dad’s college essay is the Preface because he recognizes that his children’s literature class may be the last time he gets to encounter texts that aren’t beating him over the head with academic (grown-up) jargon.  He writes: “This paper will probably be the last of its kind for me.  And, in some ways I’m glad, but in others I feel regretful…Responding as an individual takes practice, for it involves dropping my intellectual shield and allowing an artist through his play or book to effect [I inherited his trouble with affect/effect] me in way only he, as one particular person, can do so.  I have not done a lot of that and I blame my education for this shortcoming.”  The professor, in pencil writes in the margin, “I’m inclined to agree.”

I put “The Little Prince” on a pedestal which makes it all the more worthwhile to take it down and handle it like I would any other text.  Wikipedia tells me the author is a French aviator turned writer who disappeared over the Mediterranean fighting with the French in North Africa during World War II.  An adventurer, highly-regarded author, turned anti-fascist pilot who didn’t have to return to the World War climate after a hiatus in North America, well that’s just someone who doesn’t ever have to come down from anyone’s pedestal.  The book is accessible.  It should be required reading for all students, much more so than other dead white men because this author, like Hemingway, Camus and Orwell, knew what it meant to fight evil wherever it may gain traction.

The essay was written at a Christian college for a 300-level children’s literature course in Vancouver, Canada by a Chinese twenty-two-year-old son of a truck driver and nurse.  The scripture quoted reads, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13 [NAS]).  My dad would go on to teach at a Christian institution only to not receive tenure for not sending my sister and I to overwhelmingly white Christian private schools.  This took him to private practicing and counseling where he remains today.

I value education and knowledge.  I hold all institutions in the lowest regard.  My Christian identity is thin at best and only goes so far as it can support my ideals of resisting power wherever it arises (“Give unto Cesar what is Caesar’s but give unto the Lord what is his.”).  I can pass for white, but am willing to admit my mixed-race identity.  I recognize racism, sexism and classism as oppressions based off arbitrary inheritances given to arbitrary factors of one’s personal existence.  What isn’t arbitrary is how one criticizes or resists injustices based off social constructs, and that’s what I choose to align myself with even if I do it haphazardly or not at all at times (which is a privilege I realize).  If we must quote scripture at length, let us quote the young rich kid who asks Jesus what he can do to get into heaven.  Jesus responds by telling him to sell everything he owns and follow him, which sends the kid away sad because he was really rich.  This is the cost of being a revolutionary, a cost I’m not entirely willing to enact at the present moment, nor a cost I’m entirely sure is necessary given the circumstances of complacency in the United States today.  The arguments to stay or go are both valid, but the material comfort and (although thin) security of being an educator in the US still seems to pave the path of my future.  It’s in this light to remember that what truly matters cannot be seen with the eyes but rather with the heart.

"Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" Selected Final Exam Responses for YAL Course at MSU

1.     What is your current thinking about the questions, “What is literature? And what qualifies a work as literature for young adults (or YAL)?” In your discussion, be sure to discuss whether HP#3 qualifies as literature and/or as YAL.  Be sure to discuss in detail at least several “narrative elements” of the text as part of this essay (characterization, plot, conflicts, language, point of view, and so on)

1. I must remove my fanboy lenses for this one.  I wasn’t a Harry Potter fan although I was exactly the right age, (7 when the first book came out) but I still found this book to be one of the most engaging and delightful reads I’ve had since The Stranger.  My current position on young adult literature is that it’s a concoction by publishers, researchers, and capitalists to better train young people into standardized market genres.  Mainly, it’s a way to infantilize young people’s taste and then pigeon-hole them as they grow up to consume this or that.  Writers, growing out of this cycle of targeted consumption, write books that use young people as main characters because childhood and/or adolescence is usually a time of strong feeling.  Publishers, in turn, take these books and market them as the next big fad for wealthy Western parents to purchase for their children.  Ultimately, it hurts everyone to further charachterize some books as children’s or young adult literature, because there is a stigma that adults, in order to remain mature, cannot enjoy or partake in young adult or children’s literature, but if the definitive years of our youth really do provoke strong emotions when we read about other young people fiction or non-fiction, then it’s only a harm to adults, an alienation of them from their youth.  With that, said HP#3 qualifies as literature because I see mainly harm in the Young Adult qualifier.  This book takes place in a school which many in society associate with youth, but that’s not beneficial for a free and democratic society if schools have a monopoly on education which I believe they do in the US.  If education is for the young then the old will become Republicans and/or fascists.  Harry’s parents are dead, murdered when he was a child.  This trauma and the love and consolation that Rowling offers the reader through Dumbledore (p. 427) knows no age limit.  Anyone who has lost a loved one can benefit from this conversation.  My question then I why restrict any book to a certain age group?  (Again, my answer is to better sell it.)  Dr. Seuss can teach us lessons that Dostoevsky cannot and any attempt to sway me from any book is more or less a form of censorship, and therefore unacceptable.    

1.     Given the novel’s primary setting at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, representations and evocations of teaching abound in HP#3. Trace out in the text some aspect of pedagogy or teaching presented in the book, being sure to take your own stance in relation to it.  

1. Obviously, Dumbledore is the golden standard for educators and administrators, but the rest of the teaching staff at Hogwarts tends to humanize those in the education profession.  Snape is a trite and brutal character actively targeting students.  Professor Trelawney is a bit over-the-top and fatalistic, whereas Professor McGonagall sort of balances the energy out and reveals to student’s the inconsistent and reckless nature of the Divination instructor (109).  Hagrid reveals to us the nature of an educator under scrutiny and what a little bit of pushback from connected parents can do to exciting and cutting-edge educators.  Professor Lupin is the most intriguing case at Hogwarts and the one I most identify with not because I am a werewolf but because I understand the precarious identity I will bring into a classroom being a social critic and activist.  There are times where I must downplay my political positions and criticisms of capitalism, the federal government and even education in order to better prepare students against the dark arts of propaganda, power, and privilege.  I appreciate the diversity and flaws of the educators at Hogwarts.  All in all, the teachers bring their personalities into their classroom and this shapes their pedagogies.  This is true in HP#3 and in the world at large.  Often times we position teachers as simply teachers, but it’s becoming obvious that no one can be neutral anymore in the US as injustices, oppressions and inequalities pile up like bullet manufacturing during war time.  Lupin takes the time to covertly teach Harry a challenging spell in order to defend himself.  The battle against evils in this world do not require weapons training, but that is entirely what happened in Harry Potter.  The battle against evil in the world today requires hyper-critical vigilance, exposure to social movements of the past and present, and a willingness to create waves.  Perhaps the standardized classrooms of the US are not the place for training against tyrannical politics as the traditional classroom is designed to mitigate any waves.  Howard Zinn said it best when he noted that the worst atrocities in the world have been as the result of obedience.  Even Dumbledore advises students to break the Ministry of Magic’s laws in order to do the right thing (395). 

"Electric Arches" Response

Electric Arches is a collection of prose, poems, and images composed by Eve L. Ewing of Chicago, Illinois.  The book’s aesthetics as well as its meaning is characterized by afro-futurism – the idea that black people will be present in a more just and equitable future – a fact that must be paraded as science fiction (or something like it) because white supremacy’s visions of the future are entirely whitewashed.  The book is comprised of three parts, “true stories,” “oil and water,” and “letters from the flatlands.”  The first section contains some vivid accounts of happenings as observed by the author or some other omniscient narrator both real and unreal.  Several of these scenarios deal with incidents of blatant racism which inspires the quote at the beginning of the section by Assata Shakur reading, “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions” (qtd. in Ewing 5).  The second section of Electric Arches seems as auto-biographical as a collection of vivid yet visionary poems can.  “[M]y hair was in a zoo. my hair escaped from the zoo and took out three officers of the law before they shot my hair up full of tranquilizers, tranquilizers only because my hair is too valuable to die” (Ewing 37).  These lines taken from the page entitled, “why you cannot touch my hair,” expresses a certain way Ewing constructs her reality within Electric Arches namely infusing parts of ourselves and our world with a kind of magical realism.  The final portion of the book, “letters from the flatlands,” are primarily poems and visual art dedicated to recounting childhood in Chicago as well as a few detours through unspecified rural USAmerican destinations to visit family.  The ending side-by-side poem titled, “Affirmation” and dedicated, “to youth living in prison after Assata Shaku,” commands the reader to, “Speak this to yourself/until you know it is true.”  What follows is a side-by-side poem that embodies the blessings of a living being, the miracle of hope for something, “green and wonderful” and ends with a mantra proclaiming, “I am alive/I am alive/I am alive” (Ewing 89). 

            The central issues in this book are race, growing up black and a woman in the United States, everyday images infused with hope and magic, and the importance of family and place.  These issues are unconventional, yes, but so is this text.  One short story entitled, “four boys on Ellis [a re-telling]” describes the narrator (gender unspecified) witnessing four boys on the curb being detained by the Chicago Police Department with “the university police…looking on.”  The narrator pulls up in their car and asks, “if their parents had been called and informed that they were being questioned.”  Only for the narrator, to be yelled at by the police to leave.  It’s at this point, when the narrator will not leave, that they close their eyes and concentrate, “very hard, picturing the boys at home, eating cereal and watching Naruto.”  When they open their eyes, the police are shouting trying to grab onto the shoelaces of the boys as they drift off into the air.  The bikes also drift up, “and they [manage] to climb atop them midair, which was impressive.”  They smile and sing as they fly away. 

Although the race of the four boys is not specified, it’s not a stretch to understand that they’re most likely black evidenced by the academic setting.  The only time I ever talked to Michigan State University police was one time in when I was in middle-school when a black friend and I were skateboarding around campus and were stopped and questioned by police regarding bike thefts.  Perhaps I am allowing this experience to direct my reading, but the flavor of this book does makes it all to clear that the four boys are black.  Returning to the short story, it does work in touching on almost all the central issues I listed above.  The complexity of race and growing up black in the US is present in the universal relatability of this story to the experiences of young black folks, the power of the “the boys at home, eating cereal and watching Naruto,” and the importance of family and place: place being in the title and family being invoked when the narrator is talking to the police about the boys’ situation.  This book does not offer easy answers not only because it’s dense and magical in its language, but because it portrays the issues in an interconnected realism – connecting racism, to womanhood, to a sense of place and finally a sense of hope and positivity.  This is a difficult accomplishment – invoking hope out of the nightmare of racism – but it is achieved in this text. 

The second to last poem in the book titled, “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then,” could be used as required reading for a teachers conference in its ability to quickly and profoundly introduce us to several young people as well as the staff at an undisclosed school.  The first young person introduced is Javonte Stevens, a fourth grader, who is asking the gym teacher if it’s alright for another teacher to send over three students because they did not bring money for the field trip and will not be able to go to the aquarium.  Another young person is Nakyla Smith, who is crying in the bathroom and then in the counselor’s office to disclose cigarette burns on her body.  The clues are there that indicate the identities of these young people as well as the adults in the narrative.  They indicate pain, lack of resources, and the work of the adults populating these under-resourced schools to be strong and supportive for the youth and their needs.  The narrative weaves in and out of focus from adult to young person and so on, and in doing so captures the turmoil each faces in only two three pages of stanzas (Ewing 84-86).

One of the most descriptive short stories as far as characters goes is a story called, “The Device.”  A, “hive mind of Black nerds,” create a machine that eventually is revealed to get in touch with a person’s ancestors.  A “gangly…fifth grader from Providence,” was chosen to be the first user of the device at its much-anticipated public debut.  Her school’s science enrichment afterschool program got cut, her dress is making her legs itch, she’s read and practiced the script, and when contact is made she reads the question from the paper, “to get it exactly right.  ‘What words can you offer us to help us be free as black people in a world that does not love us?’”  The device hums and shakes and the audience waits in a fervor, but nothing comes.  The little girl begins, “’Grandmoth-‘ she began.  But sound from the device cut her off, echoing across the auditorium, bouncing against brick and plaster and ricocheting in everyone’s ears.  It was laughter…and the woman somewhere in America, sometime in America, laughed and laughed and laughed” (Ewing 9-14).  It’s a joyous story with attention to detail both culturally speaking in it’s description of the inter-disciplinary make-up of minds to build the device, but also the young girls posture on stage being the first one to speak across time and space to an ancestor.  The response is so natural which breaks from the seriousness of all those that put so much time into building a telepathic-time-communication device, and it works.  The use of a young black girl to be the first to use the machine is decided by those, “in charge of communication and media and symbolism,” a great way to label the philosophers and English intellects, but when the girl is about to turn it on the head scientist realizes (wrongly thankfully), “that having a child be the one to do it was symbolic, sure, and also very, very stupid…the girl would be the first to die, and he would live just long enough to see it happen (Ewing 9-12).  Ewing does great work weaving the thoughts and narratives of adults and young people in this book both in her prose and poetry.  This is as refreshing for myself as it is for young people reading this book.  Young people are not offered only perspectives of young people, but also the fallible and often blinded-by-hubris positions of adults.  Adults are offered a magical view of the everyday that is beaten out of us by the trenches of adult life. 

This entire collection is a testament to the creative resistance that is being black and a woman in the United States.  “Every black woman is an artist/versed in the craft of the swift,/the game of the subtle,/the gift of the sideways glance” (Ewing 30-31).  In a society that has doubly oppressed the person hood of black women there is a gesture of resistance that speaks volumes: a sideways glance!  This is but a light reading of what is happening in this book.  In another auto-biographical story, “Of all the hours I have spent in Shiloh Baptist Church, I cannot tell you the message or even the topic of a single sermon.  But I can tell you whose grandbaby I am” (Ewing 75).  This is the last line of, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Black Jesus,” a fantastic piece explaining the authors personal beliefs on the spiritual universe as well as the connections between black people in the US and the biblical stories of Moses, Abraham, and Eve.  “We’re a people forever in exodus….we are the masters of the art of sacrifice…[Eve] was the first person on this strange sunlit planet to know anything at all, though she paid for it with terrible cramps” (Ewing 72-73).  The author doesn’t shy away from the hard questions but invokes them in a literary way to represent the narratives of the oppressed. 

This book is marvelous.  It is rooted in a Midwestern urban identity but can transcend to an any audience that has looked to long at trash in an empty parking lot at night time.  The book documents in poetic and magical realism, the hardships and beauty of growing up all at once.  The format of the book is unconventional revealing to young people that the rules can be broken in the name of a creative spirit and as long as it brings positivity, justice and laughter to the world.  This book is relevant in the United States as it comes from a conscientious voice on the bottom of the social hierarchy of this white supremacist patriarchal capitalist Empire.  It’s a voice of beautiful resistance – a luxury that will only be afforded to those seeking another way of organizing this world and the ways we write about this world. 

(Written in the Summer of 2018 for a Young Adult Literature course.)

Fighting in "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

To steal from Malcolm X, the indigenous people of the Americas didn’t land on Plymouth rock; Plymouth rock landed on them.  The occupation and struggle at Standing Rock is just the most recent manifestation of the fight that indigenous people are involved in going all the way back to 1492.  Sherman Alexie himself explains that he writes “to give [young adults] weapons – in the form of words and ideas – that will help them fight their monsters” (Alexie,   Why the Best…).  It is within this angle – an angle of fighting the monster of white supremacy - that I re-read a chapter from Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

In the chapter appropriately titled, “How to Fight Monsters,” Junior describes, “The Unofficial and Unwritten Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs.”  The rules essentially trap Spokane Indians into a cycle of violence as retribution against insults, the government agencies meant to manage American Indians and white people on the reservation (Alexie, The Absolutely… 61 – 62).  It’s soon after laying out these rules that “Roger the Giant” tells Junior an ultra-racist joke and in return, Junior punches him in the face.  Roger, a white male at the white school, calls Junior, “an animal,” and walks away from him.  Junior, being conditioned in the rules of violence for Indians and not white people, is confused at the response and even yells the question, “What are the rules?” as Roger and his friends depart (Alexie 64-66).  In this scene during lunchtime, Roger comes to represent the violent white supremacist elements of USAmerican culture.  Roger insults African and Native Americans and is shocked when the scrawny Indian kid responds with physical violence, but Roger doesn’t fight back.  He doesn’t have too: the white supremacist society is already doing it for him systemically.  The shock Roger experiences can be likened to the shock felt by USAmericans after 9/11 – the greatest purveyor of violence in the world (the USA) cannot comprehend being the target of mass violence.  The rules laid out for Spokane Indians (and most other oppressed peoples of the world) don’t give Junior that option when Roger spews racism: especially for indigenous people, fighting is the only option for resisting white supremacy whether that looks like European settler colonialism, the lingering effects of genocide, forced displacement and/or the poverty of reservation life. 

At the end of the chapter, “In Like a Lion,” which depicts the second meeting between Reardan and Wellpinit on the basketball court, Junior realizes that the white school of Reardan is the Goliath that just defeated the David of Wellpinit and admits that, “maybe my white teammates had problems, serious problems, but none of their problems were life threatening” (Alexie 195).  Whether it’s fist fights or the violence of structural poverty and the resulting privation, the indigenous people of the Americas will continue to be subjected to battles for survival until social, economic and racial justice is achieved. 

(Written Summer 2018 for a Young Adult Literature course.)

My Response to "The Real Charlotte" by Somerville and Ross (Published 1894)

          After a year of education articles and thousands of tweets, I pushed my mental stamina to the limit.  What I will tell my literary friends about Somerville and Ross’ The Real Charlotte is the amount of character and setting development that took place before things got moving.  I posited real interest into the characters and plot around chapter eighteen, or roughly two hundred pages into the story, when Francie is sent to the Dysart estate in Bruff.  I imagine in 1894, a capsizing yacht may appeal to readers, but what I took away from this text was how the authors described characters and their near-constant cringe-worthy behavior (Isn’t that the motif of literature?).  Francie Fitzpatrick is tactfully crafted as physically stunning but, “to whom flirtation was as ordinary and indispensable as the breath of her nostrils” (377).  The object of her desire remains a mystery for the reader until she loses the reader’s sympathy by turning down the good guy.  One hundred pages from the end, the authors lay bare Francie’s character, “she had never pretended … that she was in love with him [Mr. Lambert]; her engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness, and bitterness of soul…” (408).  The mixture of economic position and carelessness portray Francie as a product of her environment, while at the same time, entirely to blame.  Miss Charlotte Mullen is subtly shown to be a bearable shrew until she kills her friend, Mrs. Lambert, in the surfacing of, “the real Charlotte” (304).  It took a several re-readings of the scene in chapter thirty-two where Mrs. Lambert dies while being exposed to the traumatic correspondence between her husband and Francie.  The real Charlotte allows Mrs. Lambert to die by cleaning her tracks rather than providing the lady with her “drops” (312).  It is a truly horrendous display of Miss Mullen’s ruthlessness in forcing the “turkey-hen” to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity (306).  Mr. Lambert is a creepy sad excuse for a human who failed to kill Francie in his yacht only to be the impromptu destination of Francie’s fatal ride after he wins over his Lolita.  The nature of his creepy predation is laid bare in chapter sixteen when he meets with Francie after the yachting accident.  He becomes indignant, whiney, predatory, and finally, generous when he spends part of his loan from Miss Mullen on a gold bracelet for Francie (160).  Christopher Dysart materialized as the hope of all my goodwill for the cast in this novel.  His demeanor is amicably aloof yet intellectually burdened; “deadlock[ed]”as the authors mention in his description on page 120.  Even after saving the “man-eater[‘s]” life (Francie, according to his mother, Lady Dysart) he is still rejected when he proposes to her (239, 325)).  The cast is a collection of debased money-grabbers, socialites, and their Irish plebian-speaking servants, but ultimately the book reveals a certain “social poverty” of the Irish gentry (correction: all elites, past and present), and those immediately below them in the socio-economic hierarchy (197).  The Real Charlotte is a remarkable novel that I’m sure only increases in value as the knowledge of late 19^th century Ireland increases. 

Why I Will Resist Richard Spencer (March 2, 2018)

On March 5, alt-right agitator Richard Spencer is coming to our campus to speak on his white nationalist politics. I will be one of a thousand people in the streets to make sure the event is cancelled. Let me explain.

I first encountered Spencer in 2017 when The Atlantic released video of a man in a three-piece suit shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory.” The audience in the room cheered, stood up and some of them threw the straight-arm Nazi salute. I was terrified — why are there Americans advocating Nazi politics?

Later, news began spreading about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, planned for August 12, 2017. The night prior, videos surfaced of white men carrying tiki torches on the campus of the University of Virginia chanting slogans inspired by Nazi propaganda. The day of, brawls broke out in the streets, a police helicopter crashed, and a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd killing one and injuring others. Richard Spencer was an integral organizer in the events that shocked a nation and took a young woman’s life. The next day, I attended a vigil on the steps of the Capitol in Lansing and was determined to do all I could to resist any Neo-Nazi presence in my community. 

Most recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a study claiming in the last four years “over 100 people [have been] killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called ‘alt-right.’” The study cites Richard Spencer for coining the term “alt-right” in 2008, but let’s cut through the euphemisms and just call them what they are: white nationalist Neo-Nazis. This country has a past of white nationalist terrorism from the thousands of lynchings following the Civil War to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 to Dylann Roof killing nine worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. 

The connection is clear: white nationalist ideologies are historically and inherently violent. The election of Trump drew these trolls out of the digital space, and now they are desperately trying to gain a foothold in mainstream politics. The protest at the MSU pavilion is not an attack on free speech but an expression of community self-defense against the spread of a political ideology seeped in hatred and violence. 

White supremacy does not go away by ignoring it. It never has and never will. White supremacy is defeated when communities come together to confront Neo-Nazis wherever they try to rally. The country will be watching. The Neo-Nazis will be watching. This is our chance to tell Richard Spencer and his white nationalist sympathizers that their hate is not welcome here.

Originally Published by The State News.