B1221-SZ15
War Of Shame
Copyright © by SuZi, 3/8/12
Shameful, bloody, American history is a sweep of hegemony, of group-held
prejudices that in old-school definitions would qualify as a form of fascism.
Yet, the cultural consensus is one of a polemic, of a welcoming of multi-culturalism—and
indeed, syncreticisms abound: just witness the food enfranchisement of edibles
that were previously the realm of Italian, Cuban, Mexican folk cuisine that are
available at every interstate highway exit; the incorporation of previously
separate musical folk genres into corporate entertainment as varied as fashion,
home decoration and the music industry itself. Our cultural paeans shout the
virtues of democracy—of multi-cultural inclusion—and too often these slogans
paradoxically become the justification for colonization, for more tyranny, for
more bloodshed.
Contemplation of ancestral misconduct is an overwhelming prospect,
especially in our current culture of narcissism, especially in our current
culture of a return to a sort of economic feudal system. Unless our individual
commitment is an overt commitment to hypocrisy, to narcissism, then our
obligation is to stagger to enlightenment, to true egalitarianism—or, at
least, an existential effort to be responsible, mindful.
Thus, the entrenchment of racism in America, the tacit social assumption
of segregation, must no longer remain a de facto transgressive subject for
public meditation. Even as America stumbles into its early decades of the twenty
first century common era, racism flourishes in political discourse, albeit in
the diaphanous veils of policy debate.
Policy does not dictate the private—in as much as there are those who
slobber at the prospect that it might. Despite public policy insisting that
schools and places of work and commerce must be accessible to all folks, no
matter their race or physical ability, our private lives are often –too
often— bare witness to segregation that is frequently born of race-separation,
albeit hidden under the lacey language of different cultural behaviors. Whether
Up North, or Down South, sometimes whole areas of public space will be covertly
designated as gathering points for one group or another; in places where space
is compressed and these groups must picnic side by side, the groups
themselves rarely show visual intermixing of races, unless the event is a social
offshoot of a work environment. Our third place (not home, not work) racial
experiences most often mimic the segregation of our home environment, with
a sort of sad tolerance for those few families with integrated and-or
mixed-race kitchens.
Capitalizing on the hectic nature of modern economic stressors to
provide limited time available for third place involvement, and also
capitalizing on the society-wide despair that is now epidemic—without yet
fomenting social change—houses of religion purport to aid in the enlightenment
of its constituency—congregation—yet too often maintain a policy of
hierarchy (obedience) that also includes either obvious segregation, or tokenism
of mixed race acceptance among those who park in its pews. One Southern Baptist
(if the denomination makes any difference) person said of the segregation
visible in various local churches—all of the same denomination—that “they
have a different worship style”. When asked to elucidate, given the example
of, say, the singing of Amazing Grace, this person said “At a conservative
white church, you sit there and listen, or stand as instructed by the leader,
and sing or mouth the words. At a black church, people are jumping in the aisles
and waving their hands, they make noise during the service and shout out” (Bruns).
Smaller congregations may prefer their service given in Spanish of a dialect
spoken in the homes of the church members. Another person said the folks attend
the church that their family attended in generations previous, and further
added, “For black people, it was the only thing they had”, indicating that
ownership –or its lack—would necessitate a small, racially unionized
community (Coleman). A third person attends a church with a large number of
participants related to each other by marriage or ancestry, and is committed to
this particular church for that reason: community and family are intertwined.
Racially, the three testimonials above are from a White Person, a
Black (African-American) Person and an Oriental (Pacific Island—if that
matters) Person, but it is the intersection of community and family, of
community as family, that is the feather of hope that ought to give flight to
uplifting American society from its centuries of tactic fascism. Historically,
there are blueprints from which to build : one being the recent (2011) record
written by Rev. Jerome G LeDoux, SVD, War of the Pews, which is the
memoir of a building—St Augustine Church in New Orleans—and of the winds of
history that have blown around the church, including those of Hurricane Katrina,
since its founding in 1843 by free people of color on the property of an
independent French (White) person, through the bumbling restoration efforts in
the storm’s aftermath.
Rev. LeDoux’s record goes to great pains to be both readable and
historically accurate, without ever loosing sight of his oft repeated thesis:
That St Augustine Church is the oldest integrated consecrated church in the
United States. Carefully detailing the social climate of the church’s
“168 years of service”(foreword), the memoir of the church becomes a
history of the social climates through which the church has stood, and the
efforts made by those who attended the church—often multi-generational
families—to attend to the oppressive storms of tyranny that beleaguered their
personhood. The text is an alternative history: a specific, nuanced history of
racism in the United States and how these policies were challenged in a
community and, in some cases, in the nation.
Rev. LeDoux’s work does not refute that of another alternative
(alternative to the omissions and glosses found in corporate—and often not
even American owned corporations—American history textbooks that are the
generic timeline foisted upon the educational system) text, that of Howard
Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, but elucidates and
makes personable events of our inherited story. Zinn describes, in his
chapter “Slavery Without Submission” how “A study of blacks in Alabama in
the first years after the [Civil] war […] that they began immediately
asserting their independence of whites, forming their own churches, becoming
politically active, strengthening their family ties, trying to educate their
children” (195). However, LeDoux’s chronicle details, rather entertainingly,
the founding of a school for slaves and free people of color by Marthe Fortiere
in 1823 –-nearly fifty years earlier than the note on the same topic in the
Zinn text (which, in all fairness, predates in publication LeDoux’s work, but
which was not apparently useful enough for LeDoux to cite). A further comparison
might be made between the two texts regarding The Niagara Movement: whereas
Zinn’s passage, in part, states that, “[…] to protest lynching, peonage,
discrimination […] W.E.B Du Bois sent out a letter to Negro leaders […]
calling them to a conference” ( 340), LeDoux’s text makes person-identified
this event through the historical personage of Homer Plessy—a St Augustine
parishioner, who challenged the Separate Car Act that went to the US Supreme
Court in 1896. LeDoux imagines Plessy’s meditations while recounting the
details of the organized challenge to this policy (230-240), while
maintaining detailed historical acknowledgement, such as in his reference to
“Le Comite de Citoyens […] the foremost of those civil rights organizations
and the prototype of the most effective activist organizations to
follow”(229). While both texts are scrupulous in delineating details of
American history—particularly details egregiously skimmed superficially in
standardized textbooks—LeDoux’s text takes an even more specific vantage
point than that of Zinn’s, is entirely different in tone without sacrifice to
scholarship, and is equal to Zinn with the concept that history is made by the
acts of people, that positive change is possible.
Of course, a religious leader ought to be a cheerleader for optimism, but
LeDoux’s text is never far a field from the lesson of the history he is
recounting. In detailing the actual War of the Pews that gives the book its
title--although LeDoux recounts a number of conflicts centered around St
Augustine that he dubs wars—LeDoux’s point reaches a didactic tone that is
fascinating in its charm:
Whites were crisscrossing in front of free people of color, and the latter
were constantly bumping into whites in every nook and cranny of Faubourg
Treme. There had never been that much social contact, however incidental and
fleeting, between free people of color and whites[…]. Now the frequent,
high profile social contact in the war of the Pews involved religious worship,
the most sacred activity of any person, or any people, of any nation. It had
taken a perceived racial crisis revolving around the newly built church to bring
the reluctant races together(177-178).
LeDoux reiterates both community activism and the force of history
through his memoir of St Augustine—and so focused is LeDoux on emphasizing the
history of the church as focal that he refers to himself in the history in which
he played a part in the third person. In the Post-Katrina Restoration of
St Augustine’s community (the building itself stood the storm well), LeDoux
discusses the donating of the paintings of Tom Feelings to the church: “
St Augustine Church, which at its very inception on October 9, 1842, seated
slaves in the short pews on both sides of the nave, was now housing the
masterful rendering on canvas of the horrific Middle Passage of those same and
other slaves” (300). LeDoux never looses sight of how it has been the
interaction of the church’s community—an integrated community than now hosts
tourists on special mass days—that has buttressed and maintained the longevity
of both the parish itself and the community the church quite literally serves.
Assaults to the St Augustine as a parish came from a variety of sources
in the two centuries of its consecrated function, most recently in the form of
thinly disguised racism from the Catholic organizational structure itself in
Post-Katrina Restoration. LeDoux details both the experience of the storm—he
did not evacuate—and the fubar governmental response, “The depth of
bureaucratic ignorance, feckless oversight of storm-prone areas of our country,
and callous insensitivity to the raw problems of our citizens were underscored
when President Bush told FEMA director Michael Brown […] ‘ Brownie, you’re
doing a heck of a job’ “(25), but the ‘February 9, 2006 bombshell of
Archbishop Alfred Hughes” (36) regarding the intended dissolution of the
parish is the opening salvo of LeDoux’s lesson. In these many, carefully
presented chapters, LeDoux depicts both an unfeeling, hegemonic structure making
a tyrannical decree and how a community of people—integrated people and not
all Catholic -- fight past exhaustion to keep their historic community from
obliteration. Through his text, LeDoux paints the parish of St Augustine’s as
a community not only of geography or ancestral affiliation, but as one of shared
concern for those things which are beyond the scope of numbers—the new deity
in our culture. St Augustine’s includes jazz music in its services, because
jazz was born in the neighborhood of the church (Faubourg Treme: LeDoux
discusses at length the music of church being found a few blocks later in Congo
Square, now called Armstrong Park), yet music is of unquantifiable value,
despite corporate music industry profiteering. Famous musicians are featured
performers at St Augustine’s and there’s no Ticketmaster taking the cream;
if LeDoux’s text is true, the parish survives on donation.
LeDoux’s text is both an alternative history text regarding the
oppression of racist policy and those who fought for their civil rights, as it
is a memoir of a historic building and the community in which it stands. Key and
twining these two points is the function of the church as a focal point for that
community and how it has become “the prototype and most effective activist
organization,” and how it has done so by remaining—with few
exceptions—integrated throughout its history. The existence of this example of
community solidarity is our lesson for contemplation: if we remain segregated,
vitriolic in our loyalty to powers that are insensitive to our raw needs,
spouting empty slogans of oppression and colonization, then we are not a
democracy, we are a hypocrisy. It need not be a historic building that is the
sun to the orbit of our lives, nor need it be an institution or sanctified
structure; nonetheless, our charade of a multi-cultural polemic is in rags and
it is up to our own hands to weave a truer society, even if by means of one
integrated barbeque bash at a time.
Informal
References
Bruns, S.
(interview) March 2012
Coleman, A.
(interview) March 2012
LeDoux, Rev.
Jerome G. The War of the Pews. Margaret Media.2011
Zinn, Howard A People’s History of the United States. Harper 1990
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