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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language.)
Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian
Content note: racism, gaslighting
Recorded a little over a week after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police in Minneapolis, MN (US), this episode touches inexpertly on some of the components of white supremacy.
You can read Priyamvada Gopal’s Huffington Post article on Black deaths in police custody in the UK here and find her on Twitter here.
You can read Roxane Gay’s New York Times article on racism in the US here and find her on Twitter here.
You can listen to Guilaine Kinouani on the podcast Getting Better Acquainted here and find her on Twitter here.
You can read Alicia Liu writing about the limitations of empathy here.
You can read about the 1944 film Gaslight on Wikipedia here.
You can watch Claudia Rankine talking about and reading from her book Citizen on YouTube here.
You can read discussion of police abolition in the US and the UK as part of a review by Peter Stäuber of Alex S. Vitale’s book The End Of Policing in Counterfire here and read an interview with Alex S. Vitale in The Nation here. More information about police abolition in the US can be found by following links curated by The Marshall Project here.
You can read about the prison abolition movement in the US in Teen Vogue here and about the prison abolition movement in the UK in The Independent here.
You can watch a very interesting discussion on prison abolition and its relationship to policing and the criminalisation of vulnerable communities between Reina Gossett and Dean Spade in four parts on YouTube starting here.
Another book by David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, is discussed in Page One 71. David Foster Wallace is also talked about in Page One 19 and Page One 160.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 50 and Page One 51.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 2nd June, 2020
Episode released: 14th July, 2020
Book listing:
The Making Of Americans by Gertrude Stein (Page One 50)
Signifying Nothing from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace (Page One 51)
Links:
Priyamvada Gopal in the Huffington Post
Roxane Gay in the New York Times
Guilaine Kinouani on Getting Better Acquainted
Alicia Liu on the limitations of empathy
Claudia Rankine reading from Citizen on YouTube
Review of Alex S. Vitale’s The End Of Policing by Peter Stäuber in Counterfire
Alex S. Vitale interviewed in The Nation
Police abolition links curated by The Marshall Project
US prison abolition in Teen Vogue
UK prison abolition in The Independent
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 169th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 13th Page One In Review.
Today is the 2nd of June. It's just a day after I recorded the previous Page One In Review, the 12th Page One In Review, and I'm recording this one so soon after the last one partly because it looks as though I took a two week break between recording the 11th and the 12th Page One In Review - I honestly didn't notice that until I was editing the 12th Page On In Review yesterday - and I'm getting a bit nervous about my diminishing stockpile of episodes. Also, I mean, I have the time and the energy to record today and so I thought: “Why not?”
Now, I don't normally do content notes for these episodes but I will be talking about racism and gaslighting in this episode and I know that some of you will not need that added to what you're already carrying. So please look after yourselves and do what you need to do. It's... It's a little strange for me to be recording what are intended to be light-hearted reflections on books that I've received from guests on my podcast over the last eight years at a time when very serious protests are happening in the United States and the United Kingdom - Black Lives Matter protests - in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. For anybody who doesn't know - it seems extraordinary that you wouldn't but... - George Floyd was suspected, I think, of using a forged $20 note and the police officer who arrested him kneeled on his neck until he died.
Yeah. I... I don't have anything particularly intelligent or interesting to add to the discussion that is happening all around at the moment and, in general, white supremacy is not a topic that I feel particularly expert in or a topic that I'm particularly comfortable exploring publicly. But it feels wrong not to acknowledge that this is happening and that it is... you know, the... the protests are happening for a reason and a very good reason. White supremacy is a devastating force in the United States, in the United Kingdom and around the world. I'll... I'll include links in the episode description to two articles that I've read over the last couple of days - one by Priyamvada Gopal about the situation in the United Kingdom and one by Roxane Gay, who is one of my favourite writers, about the situation in the United States. I think they're both worth reading and reflecting on - and there's much else to read around the topic of white supremacy and how it affects policing and... Priyamvada Gopal also... has also talked a lot in the past about how white supremacy affects academia and... you know, including her experience of academia. She is Cambridge don and, I think, the recipient of a substantial amount of gaslighting in, you know, her attempts to highlight what it is like to be somebody who is not white in that kind of setting. Who else? I would also recommend writing by Guilaine Kinouani about the way that racism shows up in different places. She's French and has been living in the United Kingdom for a while and has written in the past - I'll see if I can find something that she's written on this... I'm not sure how much of her writing is in the public domain - but she's written very interestingly in the past and spoken very interestingly about the different experience of racism in different places, how it manifests differently and what we tell ourselves as societies about what we're doing right when we're not.
[page turning]
Okay. The first book that I want to talk about today, strangely enough, is The Making Of Americans by Gertrude Stein. This was given to me by Marcel Schwald during the 50th Page One. We recorded that on a very hot day in Hove on the south coast of England, I remember. I mean, [sighs] it's quite a title, isn't it, for today, isn't it - The Making Of Americans. That's... It's something that is... you know, so many people are trying to unpick: How were Americans made? What are the things that went into the mix? Yeah. It's... I mean, that's just one of many questions that needs to be asked.
I have no idea how Gertrude Stein approaches that question because I haven't read this book. It's 925 pages long and very repetitive and very difficult to get inside for someone like me who is mostly interested in narrative when I'm reading something. I think the pleasure of reading this book is largely in the... the [laughing] experience of reading it. I don't know how else to put it. Marcel tells me that I need to read it out loud. That is the way to read this book, apparently.
I'm going to read you a little bit from the very beginning of the book. And I think, in the light of everything that I've been talking about so far, it is interesting, perhaps, to think about, as I say, the ways in which we imagine ourselves. This is... I mean, she's talking about something slightly different here - she's talking about age - but I think it is useful, particularly for white people in places like the United Kingdom to think critically about how we picture ourselves and our positions in those societies and the ways in which we interact with other people. I think we... yeah, we very often cast ourselves as ‘nice’ when... when, in fact, we're not. I'm going to read from pages 4, 5 and 6 of this Dalkey Archive edition of The Making Of Americans and I think you'll... well, first of all, I think you'll get a sense of the hypnotic effect of this prose but also, perhaps, and hopefully, some of these sentences will provoke interesting reflection.
We, living now, are always to ourselves young men and women. When we, living always in such feeling, think back to them who make for us a beginning, it is always as grown and old men and women or as little children that we feel them, those whose lives we have just been thinking. We sometimes talk it long, but really, it is only very little time we feel ourselves ever to have being as old men and women or as children. Such parts of our living are little ever really there to us as present in our feeling. Yes; we, who are always all our lives, to ourselves grown young men and women, when we think back to them who make for us a beginning, it is always as grown old men and women or as little children that we feel them, such as them whose lives we have just been thinking.
Yes it is easy to think ourselves and our friends, all our lives as young grown men and women, indeed it is hard for us to feel even when we talk it long, that we are old like old men and women or little as a baby or as children. Such parts of our living are never really there to us as present, to our feeling.
Yes we are very little children when we first begin to be to ourselves grown men and women. We say then, yes we are children, but we know then, way inside us, we are not to ourselves real as children, we are grown to ourselves, as young grown men and women. Nay we never know ourselves as other than young and grown men and women. When we know we are no longer to ourselves as children. Very little things we are then and very full of such feeling. No, to be feeling ourselves to be as children it [sic] is like the state between when we are asleep and when we are just waking, it is never really there to us as present to our feeling.
And so it is to be really old to ourselves in our feeling; we are weary and are old, and we know it in our working and our thinking, and we talk it long, and we can see it just by looking, and yet we are a very little time really old to ourselves in our feeling, old as old men and old women once were and still are to our feeling. No, no one can be old like that to himself in his feeling. No it must be always as grown and young men and women that we know ourselves and our friends in our feeling. We know it is not so, by our saying, but it must be so always to our feeling. To be old to ourselves in our feeling is a losing of ourselves like just dropping off into sleeping. To be awake, we must have it that we are to ourselves young and grown men and women.
To be ourself like an old man or an old woman to our feeling must be a horrid losing-self sense to be having. It must be a horrid feeling, like the hard leaving of our sense when we are forced into sleeping or the coming to it when we are just waking. It must be a horrid feeling to have such a strong sense of losing, such a feeling as being to ourselves like children or like grown old men and women. Perhaps to some it is a gentle sense of losing some who like themselves to be without a self sense feeling, but certainly it must be always a sense of self losing in each one who finds himself really having a very young or very old self feeling.
Our mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, in the histories, and the stories, all the others, they all are always little babies grown old men and women or as children for us. No, old generations and past ages never have grown young men and women in them. So long ago they were, why they must be old grown men and women or as babies or as children. No, them we never can feel as young grown men and women. Such only are ourselves and our friends with whom we have been living.
And so since there is no other way to do with our kind of thinking we will make our elders to be for us the grown old men and women in our stories, or the babies or the children. We will be always, in ourselves, the young grown men and women.
And so now we begin, and with such men and women as we have old or as very little, in us, to our thinking.
Well, Marcel might be right. Having read that out loud, I feel as though I have a slightly better grasp of some of the things that are happening than I did when I read that in my head silently. And yeah, of course, I'm thinking about the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the importance of situating our sense of ourselves in the history that we belong to, as it were, however uncomfortable that history might be. Who are the people who we look back on as ancestors, who, you know, by living their lives and making the decisions that they did, created the conditions that we see all around us and... you know, the conditions of our lives, as it were? I think that's very, very important. And then, also, yes, I really actually like the idea that she hammers on and on that we only ever see ourselves as young grown men and women - and, of course, there are other gender options that Gertrude Stein may or may not have been aware of. But, yeah, I think it is tempting to see ourselves as young grown people - and I think we can also take that to mean ‘people who are in our prime’, ‘people who are doing our best’ and perhaps even go so far as to say ‘people who are having a good effect on the world’. I think, for a lot of us, that's an essential part of our self-image, which bears some investigation.
Yeah, so I'm... I don't know. I might dig more into this book. I've a fee... I don't know how much this is really going to grapple with any of those issues. I'm not sure. Gertrude Stein was famously ‘queer’, in today's language, but I'm not sure what her relationship to white supremacy was.
[page turning]
Moving on to the second book that I want to talk about today, this was given to me by Filippo Andreatta during the 51st Page One. This was the last episode of the first season of the podcast. We recorded this conversation in Polverigi, in Italy, which is where I saw the Altocumulus lenticularis clouds that I talked about in the 7th Page One In Review, which is Page One 163. He gave me Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. I don't remember anything... I have read this book. I think I enjoyed it. I don't remember anything about it. I'm not going to try and invent anything interesting to say about it. This edition is published by Abacus. It is 273 pages long.
What... What I've done is just to... I've been flicking through and I came across a story called Signifying Nothing and I thought I would read this... So, something that my boyfriend Moses said to me - just now, actually - was that he finds it slightly frustrating to see a lot of white celebrities posting over and over again about how they can't possibly imagine what it is like to be a black person in America or in the United Kingdom or wherever else. And, you know, he was saying, obviously, he understands why they would say that but there's something very strange about the repetition and perhaps frustrating about that as a... you know, if that's your end point, you know, perhaps that's not good enough. And while, yeah, maybe it's impossible to know what somebody else is experience is like, it might be perhaps an interesting exercise to try... I know... There's a... Again, there's some interesting writing that I've seen recently about the limitations of empathy. It's not enough... you know, it is not enough to empathise.
But what... what I thought... So what this brought up for me, this little... it's not little, actually, it's a quite a long paragraph that I'm going to read to you from pages 64, 65 and 66. What this passage brought up for me were thoughts about gaslighting, which is a term that is used quite a lot in relation to oppression. So. It comes from - to give you a, kind of... how I understand it - it is taken from the film Gaslight in which a man tries to persuade a woman that she is not experiencing what she is, in fact, experiencing. He is turning the gas light down and up and when she tells him that she's been seeing the gas light go down and up he tells her that that she's wrong. I haven't seen the film for years and years - I saw it as a child - so I don't remember now if he manages to persuade her or if he nearly manages to persuade her. But, anyway, that particular kind of psychological... torture, I would describe it as - certainly anguish - is something that not everybody has experienced, for sure, but I think it's possible for everybody to understand what that is. And so it strikes me, having, you know, read and listened to people talking about white supremacy and its effects, that one of the things that is so, let's say, challenging about the struggle against white supremacy is the ease with which those of us who benefit from white supremacy can persuade other people that they're not experiencing what they're experiencing as a result of it.
I'm reminded of some conversations that I had a few years ago with somebody who was being bullied at work. He was a black man in an... in an environment which was largely white. I don't remember what the job was but he was experiencing almost constant racist bullying at work. And when he talked to his supervisor about it, his supervisor... the response of his supervisor was: “I have no idea what you're talking about.” “Everybody goes through this.” You know: “They're just joking around.” “You're taking this too seriously.” All of the same tropes that... that you hear again and again and again from people's experience. And this is what... I mean, I'm... yeah, I'm slightly hesitant to set this up as the context for this... for what I'm going to read to you because, obviously, what I'm going to read to you was written by a white man about white men - and there's some weird stuff about masculinity in here as well. But it is about the experience of gaslighting and it is... I mean, it's the material that I have to work from today and I think it is not un-useful. And perhaps also just as proof that people who are, in many respects, at the top of the tree - ie straight white men - do know what gaslighting is and can describe it.
So. Okay. So the setup for this is that the narrator of this story has had a memory that when he was a child his father came into the rec room where he was watching TV, stood in front of him and took his dick out and waggled it in his face. That's the extent of the memory. And he later confronts his father with this memory as follows:
Now it gets even weirder, because I finally, the day my father took a half day off, and we went down and rented a van for me to pack and move out with, I, finally, in the van, on the way home from the rental place, brought it up, and asked him about the memory. I asked him about it straight up. It is not like there is a way to gradually lead up to something like that. My father had put the rental of the van on his card, and he was the one driving it home. I remember the radio in the van did not work. In the van, out of (from his perspective) nowhere, I suddenly tell my father I just had recently remembered the day he came down and waggled his dick in my face when I was a little kid, and I sort of briefly described what I had remembered, and asked him, ‘What the fuck was up with that?’ When he kept merely driving the van, and did not say or do anything to respond, I persisted, and brought the incident up again, and asked him the same question all over again. (I pretended like maybe he did not hear what I said the first time.) And then what my father does - we are in the van, on a brief straight away on the route home to my folks' house, so I can get ready to move out on my own - he, without moving his hands on the wheel or moving one muscle except for his neck, turns his head to look at me, and gives me this look. It is not a pissed off look, or a confused one like he believes he did not quite hear. And it is not like he says, ‘What the hell is the matter with you,’ or ‘Get the fuck outta here,’ or any of the usual things he says when [sic] you can tell he is pissed off. He does not say one thing, however, this look he gives me says it all, like he cannot believe he just heard this shit come out of my mouth, like he is in total disbelief, and total disgust, like not only did he never in his life waggle his dick at me for no reason when I was a little kid but just the fact that I could even fucking imagine that he ever waggled his dick at me, and then like, believe it, and then come into his own presence in this rental van and, like, accuse him. Etc., etc. The look he reacted and gave me in the van while he drove, after I brought up the memory and asked him straight up about it - this is what sent me totally over the edge, where my father was concerned. The look he turned and slowly gave me said he was embarrassed for me, and embarrassed for himself for even being related to me. Imagine if you were at a large, fancy, and coat-and-tie dinner or track banquet with your father, and if, like, you all of a sudden got up on the banquet table and bent down and took a shit right there on the table, in front of everybody at the dinner - this would be the look your father would be giving you as you did it (took a shit). Roughly, it was then, in the van, that I felt like I could have killed him. For a second, I felt like I wished the van would open up and swallow me whole, I was so embarrassed. But, just split seconds later, what I felt was I was so totally pissed off I could have killed him. It was weird - the memory in itself did not, at the time, get me pissed off, but only freaked out, like in a shocked daze. But, in the rented van that day, the way my father did not even say anything, but merely drove home to the house in silence, with both hands on the wheel, and that look on his face about me asking about it - now I was totally pissed off. I always thought that thing you hear about seeing ‘red’ if you get mad enough was a figure of speech, but it is real. After I packed up all my shit in the van, I moved away, and did not get in contact with my folks for over a year. Not a word. My apartment, in the same town, was maybe only two miles away, but I did not even tell them my phone number. I pretended they did not exist. I was so disgusted and pissed off. My Mom had no clue why I was not in contact, but I sure was not going to mention a word to her about any of it, and I knew for fucking-’A’ sure, my father was not going to say anything to her about it. Everything I saw stayed slightly red for months, after I moved out and broke off contact, or at least a pink tinge. I did not think of the memory of my father waggling his dick at me as a little kid very often, but barely a day went by that I did not remember that look in the van he gave me when I brought it up again. I wanted to kill him. For months, I thought about going home when nobody was there and kicking his ass. My sisters had no clue why I was not in contact with my folks, and said I must have gone crazy, and was breaking my Mom's heart, and when I called them they gave me this [sic] shit about breaking off contact without explanation constantly, but I was so pissed off, I knew I was going to go to my grave never saying another fucking word about it. It was not that I was chicken to say anything about it, but I was so fucking over the edge about it, it felt like, if I ever mentioned it again, and got any kind of look from somebody, something terrible would happen. Almost every day, I imagined that, as I went home and was kicking his ass, my father would keep asking me why I was doing it, and what it meant, but I would not say anything, nor would my face have any look or emotion on it as I beat the shit out of him.
There you go. Yeah, some of that is about the generally unmet need for closure, I think, and the anger and the trauma that comes from that. I mean, obviously, the experience of white supremacy is a manifold thing and there are many, many things that have to happen before anything like justice is attained. You know, there's the individual justice that George Floyd and his family and many other people and their families deserve, but there is also the reinvestigation of how we police our societies - whether we police our societies and how - we have to talk about incarceration, we have to talk about workplace culture, we have to talk about who is heard in rooms and who is not heard in rooms, and so on and so forth. But one of the things that I feel as though I have a handle on - perhaps one of the only things that I really feel as though I have a handle on - is the experience of experiencing something and then having that experience denied. Yeah. And I think that is a little evocation of that. It's an important part of why the demonstrations are happening at the moment and why they are so important. And, yeah, it's just important to acknowledge what happened and the effect that that has on so many people.
I've remembered, while I was reading that, that something else that I've read that I would recommend in this regard is Claudia Rankine's book Citizen, which a lot of you will have read. But, in case you haven't, go and read it. It's... It's excellent.
Okay. So. Thank you very much for being with me today. I have a feeling that this episode may have provoked all kinds of different emotions for all kinds of different reasons, some of those emotions directed at me specifically, and that's fine. I don't normally say this but in case you would like to feed back or reflect or discuss anything that I talk about you can find me on Twitter as @charldrian. I don't post very much but I do occasionally check Twitter. And I think if you go to my website, charlesadrian.co.uk, there are contact links there as well. I hope you're all doing Okay. Or as Okay as possible. Yeah. Look after yourselves inasmuch as you can. I will be back, hopefully, as far as you're concerned, in a week's time with the next episode, which will look at three of the books that I was given at the beginning of the second season of this podcast. Thanks very much for sticking with me. Bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]