"Thank Your Grandpa For My Cotton Shirt"

I think that reported remark is very likely something that was actually said. It stands out to me not just for its stomach-churning racism, but because of what it says about historical consciousness and collective memory.

Scott Eric Kaufman made some interesting remarks recently about a radio host who was fired for saying that Condoleeza Rice was a “big coon”. The thing that Kaufman and others noted was that the context of the remark raises some really complex questions in that the speaker was trying to say that were Rice to be appointed NFL commissioner, this would be a big COUP for her. Not only was it the proverbial slip of the tongue, he immediately was mortified by what he’d said: “Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that”. As Kaufman observes, this came after the host had praised Rice as a “fantastic” potential President of the United States as well as a great candidate for NFL commissioner.

In the discussion of Kaufman’s entry that developed, some commenters followed on his observation that the reaction we have to this incident invokes a particular theory of language’s relationship to the unconscious, an assumption that the slip in this case reveals an underlying, concealed racism in the individual speaker, for which that speaker must be punished through losing his job. You could argue instead that the slip reveals a collective white unconscious, an accursed inheritance, and that the criticism of the speaker is not so much for his individual sin as a way to discipline and suppress that secret sin, to continue to pile dirt on its grave in the hopes of someday seeing its moldering corpse decompose into the dust of far-gone history. I think Kaufman is right that there is something empirically and humanly unfair in responding to this instance as a case of hateful, programmatic individual intention.

Even if you can make a case that there needs to be zero tolerance for what was said on the radio, you have to make that case as a kind of collective action problem, about how you change the relationship between language, consciousness and practice. As Kaufman and several of his commenters note, neither do you want to just brush this off as political correctness in action, because something potent and powerful is revealed in that slip: it is less a slip than a rip, a furtive, ashamed peek at the ruined foundations underneath the finished constructions of the present.

“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt” is in contrast a demonic revel in those same ruins. There is no mystery here about intent or agency. But there is still a historical unconscious at work, and that’s what really draws my attention most in this case.

I would be willing to wager a good deal that if the sick little punk who said those words was sitting in a course on American history at Duke and was asked to stand up and provide a narrative of the history of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, he would profess ignorance, or provide a kind of respectable potted Cliff Notes version sufficient to pass the US History AP but no more. Maybe his professed ignorance would be relatively genuine, or maybe it would be the suppression of the story he thinks he knows but also knows he cannot tell, because it’s not real or accurate history, only a shambles of racist tropes. In any event, he didn’t live it, not any of it, not even the events of the last fifty years which brought that history into the central consciousness of American national identity: the struggle for civil rights and racial justice, the cultural tableau of mainstream historical programs like “Roots” or “The Civil War”, the culture war of the eighties and early nineties and its address to race.

Where does that come from, then, that ability to shout in drunken, racist, misogynist rage, with the intent to deliver maximum pain to another human, “Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”? It doesn’t come from direct experience, likely doesn’t come from direct ideological or dogmatic indoctrination, it doesn’t come from the formal study of history or even traceable dissemination of historical representations in particular texts.

I’ve been teaching this semester about the history of West African societies in the era of the slave trade, and we recently read Anne Bailey’s new book African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Bailey at several points takes up the complex methodological and epistemological problem that tends to frustrate oral historians trying to study the memory of slavery in West Africa, that in many West African societies it is still a powerful insult to associate a contemporary person’s lineage with slave descent. This is partly because such an association still constructs forms of social power even today, but it is also partly because the memory of the slave trade is itself so traumatic and shameful within those societies.

What Bailey notes, and Africanists are well aware of in regard to many issues, is that societies do “memory-work’ in the secret spaces of the unspoken and unrepresented. These might be literal social spaces: secret societies in West Africa, or a gang of privileged male athletes in a North Carolina university. One has to suspect that this wasn't the first time that the Duke lacrosse team had wallowed as a group through the bilgewater of explicit racism.

But that work is also done through and in collective spaces of a thousand fragmented representations and texts: silent speech, blindness in plain sight. Things that everyone knows, and knows how to feel about knowing, but that cannot be found anywhere clearly or in a concentrated fashion. That knowledge is sometimes an innocent thing, in fact, most of the time it is. In my History of the Future class, I’ve been trying to point out to the students that even though most of the representations of the future we’re studying are now wholly “retro-futures” no longer in active circulation, the residual tropes are so integrated into so many cultural and social locations that they still “know” what it means when they see an automobile with a bubble top and rounded edges or a flying car, when they see a boxy humanoid robot or a geodesic dome. They know without knowing that those things are “futuristic”, even if they are no longer part of what we reasonably expect the future to be.

That Duke student had the same kind of knowledge of slavery’s accursed history, and its cancerous infestation within the American soul. He knows it without knowing he knows it, without meaning to set out to know it. It was his choice, his intention, to use what we all know and feel to hurt, his choice to be unforgiveably cruel. That was no slip of the tongue.

We do not bear the collective guilt of having that narrative within our minds, because we do not collectively choose to make it a curdled and vicious part of our hearts. That was this person, those people, them. But we all do need to do a different kind of memory work, now and always, to make silences speak, to excavate the ruins, to trace how the puzzle of collective memory gets assembled from pieces. That is the work of historians: popular and academic, everyday and scholarly, in our classrooms, in our books, in our dialogues, in our ordinary human business. At this moment, we should be reminded of the urgency of that work.