Flannery O'Connor's racism

 So reading Paul Elie's essays, one in Commonweal: "The inconvenient truth is that O’Connor stated her dislike of “negroes...particularly the new kind” twice in May 1964. That is, she did so very late in her career, after she revised her story “Revelation,” deep into the Civil Rights Era, ten weeks before her death. That is, those remarks defy any claim that she was repentant, “recovering,” or undergoing a “slow conversion” on matters of race."

Paul Elie in New Yorker: "The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her."

I was pretty upset when I found out Hemingway was ungrateful to Sherwood Anderson and Fitzgerald. The first helped him get his foot in the door. The second edited his great work The Sun Also Rises. Gratitude towards supporters is essential in my book. 

"Clay feet" is what my therapist would say.

O'Connor thought James Baldwin would be insufferable as a white, which was her test of whether she liked a black person. She used the n word liberally. She thought Baldwin should shut up. That's not very generous. People can talk all they like, just don't read them if you're not interested, and she wasn't. It's a blot on her spirit that she wasn't. Nobody is perfect. She still liked one of his stories. That makes me think that perhaps we don't need to see writers as the be all and end all on every subject. Academics are smart, they confine their comments to their "specialty".

Loyola University unnamed a building after her, joining cancel culture. There are Catholics who want her included in the cannon because she is Catholic. The canceling debate continues. Some scholars have downplayed her comments, in an effort to hide her racism.

I believe that we're all racist. We all have racial ideas. When they are nice, they are OK. When they are connected to power, they are not OK. Of course bosses don't have to give reasons why people aren't hired. They like big busted women at Hooters. They do hire women with humble breasts. But I digress. 

I've just read Wise Blood. Haze has some opinions about blacks while he's on the train, but he's a character in a book and he's not really put out as a hero. In the end he's some weird penitent who doesn't believe in Christ, but he's too odd to think his opinions are being put forth. There is more evidence in the stories which I have yet to read.

When I read Shakespeare, the racism and anti-semitism and sexism is present in his times. Jews were not allowed in England, and Shakespeare is not known to know any Jewish people. The sexism and racism was of the times. But while Shakespeare may draw racist or sexist characters, I don't ever feel that they are his ideas that he's putting forth. It is part of the drama.

Now that may seem like I'm protecting a writer that I love, but I'm not so precious, I'd be OK with him having obvious flaws. We know so little about Shakespeare. We have his plays and no idea what he believed in besides excellent writing and drama. OK, you can glean some things, but it would be a sophisticated argument.

We have O'Connor's letters. She is clearly racist. Her writing Wise Blood without any black characters, it's like they were absent and silent in a town that must have had blacks. She writes about what she knows, and doesn't try to be comprehensive. She writes in an interesting psychological way, she was influenced by Dostoevsky. 

My grandmother, who is deceased, said racist things. I think she found it an acceptable outlet for her anger and bitterness. I still love my grandmother. Hate the sin, but love the sinner.

I don't think I'm ignoring her racism by saying I liked reading Wise Blood. I'm not ignoring her racism because I've read the article. I just still think it's OK to read her. I don't feel more racist reading her. I think that would be the test for me, if I admired a writer who when I read them I felt more racist. If their writing was about race. Mostly the racists avoid race. Shakespeare did not avoid Othello or Shylock or Kate in the Taming of the Shrew (Always read Gayle Rubin's Traffic In Women essay. You can use it all as a springboard for fighting racism, anti-semitism and feminism. 

I will read Flannery O'Connor closely looking for her racism in her works as I read them.

We have to read all we read with a critical eye. Nothing has been pre-cleansed of future mistakes. History will find us cruel to immigrants, and murderers for eating animals and on and on. I try to be as compassionate as I can be. And I certainly have a lot more to learn.

I actually read everything as Dharma. The lessons of the 4 noble truths are everywhere. What I liked about Wise Blood was that Haze was secretly trying to transcend pain. He was a preacher who didn't believe in Christ, which put him out of step in the bible belt. He was schizoid in many respects, people moved towards him but he often seemed to be afraid to connect with others. He came back from WW2 traumatized. His downward spiral is a testament to trauma, among other things. No more family left, he went home and it was run down. He was all alone. Racism was perhaps part of that schizoid system, constantly rejecting rejecting.

How would you argue with someone who was retarded and racist? They don't have the higher learning capabilities. I think the ideals of moving away from racism are quite high ideals.

My father was beaten up in Detroit. He lived in a black neighborhood. His wife got a huge house for little money. He said racist things about his attackers, but part of that was anger at being attacked. 

His father used phrases like "cotton picking" which were tangentially racist, but he was a man of god and I like to think he was above racism, even if his church has a black organization and white organization (Baptist). He just fell into the easy path. That's in a way the insidiousness of racism, you just slide into the racist structure around you and say, "I'm just one man." These are voluntary organizations, the members of them would have to want to integrate. Should I join the black one? I'm not even Baptist. I do like the wife of the preacher in Forest Hills, she was kind to my daughter at the park. She invited me to service. I was noting that the people who embraced the family religion, led more stable lives. 

There is one book that puts forth the idea that O'Connor was racially sensitive. The book is called Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor. From the quotes it seems like the academic was working too hard to make her racism go away.

Racism impacts everything in America, in subtle and gross ways. I worked with a man who when he was working with a guy found out he was getting less because he was black. They went to the boss and confronted him. The boss lowered the white guy's salary and told the white guy he was stupid for pointing it out. Thus white people are punished for pointing it out. But anyone with confidence doesn't need the harming of others to succeed.

That we can have a not hiding it racist as President in 2020 is beyond my imagination, but it's a good lesson about how much more work still needs to be done.

The dialectic on transcending racism continues.

Flannery O'Connor: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.”

Here is a counterpoint article, conservatives believe if they pretend racism doesn't exist, then it doesn't. I wish that were true.