« Goffman Dissertation Update | Main | Faculty Hiring: Willamette University College of Law »
Ariela Gross: The Limits of White Liberalism
Our next contribution in the Watchman symposium is from Ariela Gross, who is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California. Ariela's extensive scholarship includes What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard 2008) and Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton University Press, 2000), which I always assign to my legal history class. Steve Lubet will wrap up the discussion in the next few days:
Like the previous bloggers in this wonderful symposium, I doubt that Harper Lee intended to publish Go Set A Watchman, and I agree with most of the public commentators that as a literary work, GSAW doesn't rise to the level of To Kill A Mockingbird. The characters speechify and the plot never takes off. I also agree completely that it makes no sense to ask whether Atticus is a coherent character from TKAM to GSAW – the book is not a sequel, and Atticus is not a real person. Nevertheless, I do think GSAW has important political lessons for us, particularly at this moment. Whether or not GSAW is the book Harper Lee's legacy as a great American writer demanded, it is the book white America needs at the moment, because it is a powerful corrective to the myth of the great white savior of black civil rights. From Amistad, Glory, and Lincoln to Mississippi Burning and the recent Broadway play, All The Way, the narrative of a great white leader setting free the slaves or ex-slaves is a stock trope in American drama, with Atticus Finch the leading exemplar of the upstanding white citizen taking a stand against racism. Yet, as Mary Ellen Maatman ably demonstrated, Southern lawyers as a group took their strong stand against Brown v. Board, and turned their efforts toward legal means to fight desegregation. The Southern law reviews in 1955 and 1956 were filled with articles about nullification – just as they would have been one hundred years earlier had there been law reviews at the time.
The greatest disconnect I noticed between the public commentary on GSAW, which has focused on Lee's portrayal of Atticus as a racist Citizens' Council member, is its glossing over of her portrayal of Jean Louise (Scout), which seems to be more nearly Lee's own voice. To me, what really made the book such an interesting artifact of its time is the expression of the protagonist's views. If Jean Louise is meant to represent the more enlightened voice of the liberal white Southern woman returning home from the North, able to critique the North and the South with her outsider perspective on both, she is hardly the "colorblind" liberal we imagined her to be. Indeed, although at several points the narrator declares Jean Louise to be "colorblind," and Uncle Jack calls her "colorblind" as well, the book brilliantly (and unintentionally) demonstrates what a hollow conceit "colorblindness" is.
There is no sense in which Jean Louise does not see race. She shares many of Atticus's negative views of "Negroes" in her hometown. She and the narrator both comment disparagingly on the marital and sexual practices of Zeebo and his wife Helen. She agrees with him that Negroes are "backward." And most of all, she acknowledges that she was "furious" at the Supreme Court for Brown v. Board because they had run roughshod over the Tenth Amendment. It is not even clear that she opposes nonviolent, legal efforts to turn back desegregation – what horrifies Jean Louise is the racist rhetoric of the speaker at the Citizens' Council meeting she overhears, the "shouting nigger" into which she believes good Southerners like her father have fallen. Would Jean Louise – or Harper Lee – have disapproved of the "colorblind," race-neutral means many "moderate" Southerners (and Northerners and Westerners) adopted to maintain segregation in schools and housing? GSAW suggests not.
Furthermore, GSAW does not invite the reader to disavow Atticus but to sympathize with him. By the end, Jean Louise comes to understand – thanks to the scolding of her Uncle Jack – that she has been as unyielding in her Yankee ways as the Citizens' Council members are in theirs. She needs to understand that Atticus is flawed but still worthy of her admiration. He may be wrong, but he is only trying to hold on to the Southern way of life. Uncle Jack tells her that she has been a "bigot" just as Atticus is; prejudiced against white Southerners as he is against "Negroes." (Only a "turnip-sized bigot," but still.) This "fair and balanced" approach is the essence of colorblindness. And it is this blindness that ultimately limits the moral vision of GSAW. It's a fascinating artifact of its time, a teaching tool, and an important –and very timely -- reminder of the limits of white liberalism in the pursuit of racial justice in U.S. history.
-- Ariela Gross
Posted by Alfred Brophy at 04:04 PM in Harper Lee Symposium, Legal History | Permalink
Really great post, Ariela. Thanks for joining us -- and thanks for Double Character, which is one of my very most favorite books of legal history and always a hit with the students in my legal history class. Looking forward to teaching it again this fall.
I've been wondering a lot about Jean Louise and thanks for focusing on her. She's obviously bound by her up-bringing (the concern over the Tenth Amendment is a great example of this, though I wonder how much this is she's just looking for common ground with Atticus). To your question, will she be largely a supporter of "race neutral" principles -- there's the slogan, which I guess is drawn from William Jennings Bryan? -- "Equal rights for all; special privileges for none." That sure sounds like color-blind jurisprudence.
But there are some other pieces of evidence that may suggest she'd go further. She criticizes Atticus for his cold justice that doesn't take account of humans -- and that sounds like something that's not just simple legal equal (color-blind), but more flexible. She urges "the time has come when we've got to do right." And she also asks "Has anybody, in all the wrangling and high words over states' rights and what kind of government we should have, thought about helping the Negroes." I'm a little unsure of how to think about this -- is this a part of her paternalism? Or is it more along the lines of what DuBois said, that legislation should be designed not just to regulate and control African Americans but to help them?
I agree that Jean Louise reveals the very distinct limits on southern liberalism -- but I also wonder if there was more space there for Jean Louise to support a robust civil rights agenda beyond "formal" equality.
Posted by: Alfred L. Brophy | August 03, 2015 at 07:13 PM
Ariela and Al, great points on Jean Louise. The most revealing passage to me was Jean Louise's meditation on her upbringing by Atticus and Calpurnia, an interracial but also Platonic couple, a point that Lee underscores by invoking classical motifs (Calpurnia Caesar's 3rd wife and Atticus a reference to ancient Greece). This stands in stark contrast to Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson, the failed couple who are condemned because Mayella tries to lure Robinson into physical intimacy. Jim Crow, we are left to deduce, allows for close, personal relationships that are emotionally fulfilling and spiritually sustaining, provided they don't involve sexual contact.
Posted by: Anders Walker | August 04, 2015 at 07:43 PM
The "equal rights for all; special privileges for none" slogan takes on a negative meaning in TKM. An anti-semitic teacher uses the slogan in an episode towards the end of the book. It can be a nice-sounding call to equality, but it also can echo segregationist complaints that African Americans were somehow being treated as "special favorites of the law" when courts handed down pro-civil rights rulings. I think its meaning and significance (or lack of it) depends on how you construe "equal rights": a segregationist would construe it in line with Plessy v. Ferguson, and would see modern equal protection rulings as granting unwarranted "special privileges."
Posted by: Mary Ellen Maatman | August 05, 2015 at 09:48 AM
Thanks for this, Mary Ellen.
I don't have TKAM in front of me now, but my memory is that Scout uses the "equal rights for all; special privileges for none" slogan as a way of defining democracy -- and her teacher (Miss Gates?) was not anti-semetic, but was like so many other people, anti-black. I'm thinking that in the 11950s the slogan might be taken as a call for formal equality (as I think I indicated in my first comment on Ariela's post -- looks like she's pointed in the direction of a color-blind jurisprudence). I don't know as anyone in the 1930s was thinking that the courts were granting special privileges to African Americans.
But as to the slogan more generally, I thought it was a paraphrase of Democratic party principles -- didn't William Jennings Bryan say something like this?
Posted by: Alfred L. Brophy | August 05, 2015 at 10:29 AM
It took me a day to dig up my copy of TKAM.
I'm remembering the teacher Miss Gates, in chapter 26. What I misremembered is that Scout (not Miss Gates) recites "equal rights for all, special privileges for none" as the definition of democracy. Miss Gates approves of this definition, and has the class recite "We are a Democracy." She then expounds on how America's status as a democracy differentiates it from Germany, and claims: "[O]ver here we don't believe in persecuting anybody. Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced." She further claims she does not understand why Hitler would persecute Jewish people.
A few pages later, Scout tries to square Miss Gates' outburst over Hitler with her racial animus, which was revealed after Tom's trial when Scout overheard her telling Miss Stephanie Crawford "it's time somebody taught 'em a lesson . . . the next thing they think they can do is marry us."
Although I definitely misremembered some key aspects, the chapter's ending makes me think that the democracy definition is something of an empty slogan if the teacher can so enthusiastically subscribe to it yet fall so far short of recognizing her own prejudices and the true nature of democracy and equality.
Posted by: Mary Ellen Maatman | August 06, 2015 at 04:46 PM
Agreed on this 100%, Mary Ellen. The grim reality fell far, far short of the slogan, and in the hands of unfriendly interpreters it might not have been much of hope -- as your show with Teacher Gates.
A last thought I had about the democracy slogan is that it parallels Atticus' TKAM closing argument. He talks about how there's one great equalizer: the courts. Yet, the courts of the Jim Crow era quite notoriously did not serve that function. Both the slogan and the closing reveal that simply talking about equality and "saying the right words" will not in themselves bring about democracy or equality.