In college, we complained endlessly about the food. The steak, served every Saturday, was charred beyond recognition. The vegetables were rarely fresh, and always undercooked. The cheesecake, served once a week, was a rude facsimile.
While we continuously kvetched about the culinary fare, we never complained about the plates the food was served on. They were not really noticed. Each plate was rimmed with the image of a soldier on horseback wielding a hatchet chasing an indigenous warrior running away (pictured accompanying this post).This was Amherst College, then an all-male institution which officially prided itself on its academic privilege and unofficially honored the social privilege of the majority of us who were part of the white upper middle class.The soldier was Lord Jeffrey Amherst (1717-1797) a “soldier of the King”, for whom both the college and town was named. Lord Jeff, as we affectionately called him, was victorious in several military campaigns against scores of indigenous tribes. A major factor in his success that he perhaps originated — or at least supported, germ warfare by giving blankets infested with smallpox to vanquished enemies.
Some minority students complained about the oppressive and shaming dinnerware, along with the accompanying racist history. Their protests were ignored — or dismissed. I remember a senior college official saying it was important to keep the plates because “we need to honor our history.”
And while we ignored the plates, we celebrated the story. “Lord Jefferey Amherst” was the rousing college fight song. We relished singing it —after every touchdown, at classmates weddings, whenever a cohort of alums gathered and someone could start us off on a good pitch. We sang it with gusto — “and he (Lord Jeff) conquered all the enemies that came within his sight, and he looked around for more when he was through.” And for those of us who knew the second verse, we belted it out with passion: “but give us our only Jeffrey, he’s the noblest and the best, to the end we will stand fast for him”.
Some forty years after graduation I was at an Amherst House reunion in Kyoto, Japan with many of the former Japanese students with whom I lived from 1973-75. Doshisha University was founded by an Amherst College alumnus in 1871, and Amherst House was a visible tribute to the continuous relationship, along with a recent Amherst College graduate who would be in residence for a year or two as a cross cultural “Fellow”. (I was one of 50 or so over the years). At the end of our reunion dinner, the guys all wanted to sing the Amherst songs, which they had long ago all learned and loved. When it came to the signature fight song, which we all knew best, Anki stood up and with heartfelt indignation blurted out, “I will not sing that song. That song is violence.”
And so we didn’t. And these days at Amherst College they don’t. A few years ago, after a long process, Amherst decided it would no longer be be Lord Jeffs, but would become the “Mammoths”, presumably named after fossils of the extinct species found on the nearby Connecticut River.
Those dinner plates — and the college alma mater, are indeed violence. .And now both have been stored away into different archives. The history remains, but the privilege — which provides a perch to see and hear only what one chooses to see and hear, has been pierced. An opening has occurred — for many of us. I don’t miss those plates — and certainly don’t miss the food, but I do miss singing “Lord Jeffry Amherst”. in harmony. With gusto.
But I won’t. As Anki said, that song is violence.
Privilege resists being pierced. Privilege carries with it the ability to take in — visually or aurally — what we want to take in; and ignore or dismiss — or even denigrate, what doesn’t fit. The privilege of privilege has been brought home to me more recently as I have been reading Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, an historical account of blackface that immediately went on the best seller list, written by Rhea Lynn Barnes, a professor of history at Princeton. Blackface was not about Black people, Barnes, a white scholar, notably claims. It was about white people applying black face with burnt cork, and writing plays and songs — minstrelsy — that denigrated an entire race by caricaturing their language, insulting their intelligence, lampooning their dress and movement, and augmenting racial features in hideous ways. It was all meant to be in good fun — for its all white audiences. It was immensely popular — for over 150 years.
I vaguely remember this idiom. Like many of us, I had thought that blackface was fringe entertainment. Barnes carefully and clearly demonstrates that it was mainstream; that for decades minstrelsy, of which Blackface was a key ingredient, was the most popular form of American entertainment. The Elks, a fraternal order which was formed by minstrelsy musicians and playwrights, had over half the members of Congress as its members in the 1920s and 30s. Mark Twain was a minstrelsy buff; FDR was reported to have just completed a blackface script the day he died. Jim Crow was a fictional character lampooned in an early Blackface skit who ended up defining a whole swath of American history. Looney Tunes, which was the company that created most of the cartoons that so many of us watched as kids, had direct connections with blackface as it regularly featured blackface characters in compromising situations.
Darkology doesn’t just pierce privilege. For me, the book shreds it; and exposes — in evidence that has been painstakingly gathered —how deep and wide the need so many Americans have had to shame, indeed to scapegoat, a whole race of people. People may say insist that they are not racists; but Barnes’s book brings home, in a new and powerful way, that institutional racism has been a prime building block of American life and its history. The extent and popularity of blackface is an embarrassing story. A story which needs to be told. I give thanks to Dr. Barnes for the tenacity and courage to tell it. Already there is resistance to a story that many people, who desperately hold on to some sort of privilege, don’t want to read or hear.
Putting someone down in order to lift oneself up is a time-honored practice. It is baked into American history. It is shameful. As I discovered with my college experience scapegoating can be hard to unlearn. We need to expose the shame of systemically shaming the other, atone for it — and then learn to honor the archive and disavow the practice. Blackface is a story we should no longer perform, and minstrelsy are songs we should no longer sing. We can and need to do better.
