The following is a review (written with assistance from L. Nower) of Subliminal Racismby Arthur J. Graham (Amen-Ra Theological Seminary Press, Los Angeles, CA 2005).
Introduction
rthur J. Graham is currently an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University. He is an educator, activist, and writer with a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of California San Diego. His doctoral thesis (1980), published as The Manichean Leitmotif (2000), is a groundbreaking analysis of “the ideology and psychology of racism in American fiction.” Not content with simply listing and discussing examples of racism in American literature, Dr. Graham delves deeply into the socio-political, aesthetic and theological origins of racism and, in the process, examines the writings of Americans such as Cotton Mather and Samuel Gilman, as well as other Colonial, and Eighteenth and Nineteenth century English and American theologians and aestheticians.
As an undergraduate at San Diego State University and as a community activist in the Sixties and Seventies, Graham distinguished himself as an initiator of the Black Arts Movement; a playwright (The Nationals, The Last Shine, and other plays); a founder of the seminal Black Student Council at San Diego State University (1965); and the theoretical initiator of “Black Studies,” first conceptualized in his play The Nationals (1968). Vitally interested in institutional as well as individual change, Dr. Graham was also directly involved in negotiations to acquire some Navy-owned property in Southeast San Diego, a largely African American section of the city, for the construction of a continuing education center, the Educational and Cultural Complex, or ECC. He was involved in its planning and writing the 8.5 million dollar funding proposal.
As a natural extension of his passionate investigation into racism and racist ideology, Dr. Graham co-founded Image Analysts All Media Services in Santa Monica, California, and co-authored with Serita Coffee Image Coverage, Academy Awards and other Movie Reviews (1992, 1995), a collection of movie reviews using a method called “tetranalysis,” developed by Graham in The Manichean Leitmotif. “Tetranalysis” (a four-pronged analysis) is a method he uses to examine closely the uses of color, motion, sound, and form in literature, film, and art.
Subliminal Racism
Arthur J. Graham’s latest book, Subliminal Racism, will without a doubt prove to be controversial. The phrase “subliminal racism,” invented by Dr. Graham, refers to the deeply imbedded racist cultural patterns that undergird Western civilization; these patterns, most clearly seen in art, literature, and, today, in film, make use of techniques that involve color, form, sound, and positioning, that divide the world into a Manichean duality of light and dark, good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, and so on. It is the kind of thinking that, instead of “I am black and comely,” translates “I am black, but comely” in “The Song of Solomon,” King James Version of the Bible.
Dr. Graham finds specific examples of subliminal racism in the common descriptions of putative early figures in African American history; these figures indirectly further a white supremacist agenda through the invention of what he calls “Negro ciphers,” such as Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley and Nat Turner, among others.
In his first book, The Manichean Leitmotif (Image Analysts, Los Angeles, CA 2000), based on his 1980 doctoral dissertation at the University of California, San Diego, Graham presents his unique analysis of “the ideology and psychology of racism in American fiction.” Subliminal Racism builds on that foundation, and should be read in conjunction with it. The book is divided into six parts.
Of most interest to readers in Parts l-V will probably be what Dr. Graham calls a “tetranalysis” of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a PBS documentary directed and written by Charles Burnett, both of which we touch on below, as well as the movie Monster-in-Law starring Jane Fonda. He defines “tetranalysis” as a method of analyzing form, motion, sound, and color in a work of art to tease out underlying cultural patterns.
Graham suggests a parallel in Schindler’s List between the main elements of the movie - Nazis and Jews - and Black slaves in America. The Director moves from initial shades of gray to black, which represents ultimate evil, while white represents good. And Jews, in their submission and acceptance of their “slavery,” acquire stereotypical “Negro-like” characteristics: the main character becomes servile, while a female servant becomes a sexual object.
Graham also refers to a jet black statuette that the Nazi rapist Goeth handles before he descends into the basement where the Jewish woman is confined. The statuette is a subliminal signal of the terror to follow. (Graham refers to this sort of signal as a “sublim,” that is, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t object or person forecasting violence to come.) There are other color-coded sequences (such as the use of the color “red”) and movements (such as “going down” the basement steps as if to hell) and music (“Negro” music) taken up by Dr. Graham. Graham says that what Spielberg would call “artistic techniques” “distort the path to our understanding of a tragic human predicament… .” They diminish “our capacity to extend sympathy... . Something terribly real took place in Europe and to the Jewish people. But we still await movies that reflect that reality through artistic integrity and cultural, ethnic balance.”
It seems to me, however, that we should consider several things before calling into question the entire artistic conception of Schindler’s List. First, there is the inescapable fact that in all cultures, in all times and places, nighttime or darkness has occasioned fear, mystery, even dread; and daytime, the known, is the less fearful. Artists, including film directors, know this, and use it. Of course, white racist ideology has indeed used color as a weapon; no doubt about it. The problem is ferreting out which is which. It may be of interest here that in a very recent issue of the San Diego Union-Tribune (11/18/05, p. E11), television critic Robert P. Laurence notes that in the NBC remake of The Poseidon Adventure “All the terrorists… are dark-skinned, “ while “…the only folks clever and agile…” enough to survive “…are white.” He adds: “We’re not seeing deliberate racism on the part of NBC… just thoughtlessly stereotyped casting.” And I am not totally convinced that Schindler’s List uses black and white coloring, etc., in a consciously racist manner. Furthermore, about the types of humans presented as slaves and how they behave: no matter what kind of slavery - American, German, African, Arab or Asian – it has produced a limited number of certain human types because of the limits of the situation: the sexually exploited, the servile ones, and those who are bestial; but also brilliant speakers, teachers, preachers, artisans, and scholars. As to behavior, most humans are cowed in survival situations: most are not heroic or stand up for the truth, etc. I, therefore, am not ready to give a thumbs down to Schindler’s List.
If the above isn’t controversial enough, try Graham’s review of the PBS documentary, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Graham’s perspective on Turner is that, since the 1831 Confessions were transcribed or written by a white man, all we probably have of Turner is a fiction and, therefore, a hoax perpetrated on “Black manhood” and perpetuated by historians. Thus, this essay is mainly a rebuff to the historians used on the project, as well as to the novelist William Styron’s rendition of Turner’s life (in which he adds gratuitous sex), since there’s not enough information about Turner to make a narrative, and certainly not enough to make something called a documentary.
But Dr. Graham sees this “documentary” as a continuation of the Nat Turner fabrication, a fabrication which Graham feels was originally concocted by whites to keep blacks and whites “at each other’s throats.” A statement supporting Graham’s perspective is William Lloyd Garrison’s article in The Liberator No. 51 to the effect that “Mr. Gray [the ghost-writer] and the printers of the pamphlet [the Confessions ]” should be arrested. Garrison knew what would follow the dissemination of the Confessions, and it did: more than 200 innocent Blacks were murdered across the South. And again there are no Black eyewitnesses to the truth, observes Graham. But one could well ask, Why would there be, since Death would be the reward? Perhaps we could look at it this way: if Nat Turner is a hero to African Americans, just as whites have heroes who are made out of thin stuff, why not? Which Dr. Graham might, of course, counter by saying that the image of Black men as instigators of violence must stop.
“Part VI: ‘Negro Ciphers in Mythology’ ” presents yet more of Dr. Graham’s controversial stances. Just as the story of Nat Turner, about whom nothing is known historically, is deemed by him to be fictionalized, so are the poets Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, both of whom I discuss below, as well as George Moses Horton, Samuel Eli Cornish, and David Walker. These characters are, according to Dr. Graham, “Negro ciphers” that have been created and molded to serve the ideology of white supremacy: control, psychological as well as political and economic. (A “cipher” here means a “symbol” or a “code”.) This “identity formation” (Dr. Graham’s term) originates in a “race-based mystical theology” and, therefore, these fictions of Hammon and others have been dressed up in identities dipped in Eighteenth Century modes of thinking: antiquity (Greece, Rome, the Bible), popular literature of the day, astrological happenings, and the “Master-Slave Rule of Law stemming from anti-insurrection propaganda, from covert and subversive activities, and from secret societies.” Here’s the mind boggle: According to Graham, Hammon and the others listed above are not real! They never actually existed. They weren’t born! There is no proof of their existence, outside of prefaces written by white folks. Rather, Dr. Graham says, these early Negro literary figures are the result of a carefully concocted conspiracy of certain white individuals and groups. But is there proof of these allegations in Dr. Graham’s essays, which are, granted, only the beginning of his research?
Take Jupiter Hammon (1711- c. 1806), considered the “First Negro Poet,” who wrote poetry that exemplifies the “good” slave – submissive, meek, mild, devoutly Christian. The story goes that he was born in 1711 on Long Island into the very religious slave-owning Lloyd family, and was early on identified as exceptional, and sent to school. He served in several capacities – clerk, farmhand, artisan - for three generations of Lloyds. His first published poem, written on Christmas Day, 1760, was "An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries."
As Dr. Graham notes, there is some evidence for the existence of a Jupiter Hammon, who is referred to as “brother Jupiter” in letters between the members of the Lloyd family, his masters. Although Dr. Graham feels that the use of the word “brother” “goes against the grain” of the mores of the time, place and social setting, thus pointing to a possible falsification in the interest of “perpetuating Pauline, Christian slavery,” it seems to me that such usage is consistent with the profound schizophrenia and hypocrisy inherent in a devoutly Christian slave-owning family.
Further evidence consists of a record of a talk entitled “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York” that Hammon made before the African Society (a mutual self-help organization) on September 24, 1786, in which he claimed he did "not wish to be free." Dr. Graham notes that the address was only made public in 1806 and pre-dated to 1786, one year before the date of the formation of what many consider to be the first society of former slaves, the Philadelphia Free African Society, 1787, a more militant self-help society. (This organization was founded by Richard Allen (1760-1831) who was also the founder of a breakaway black Methodist church in 1794, and the independent African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in 1816.) In other words, Dr. Graham maintains, the Hammon talk, including his alleged choice to remain a slave, was used as a counter to the greater militancy of the Philadelphia organization, thus contributing to the likelihood that the entire story of Jupiter Hammon was a slavery-promoting fabrication.
But to me it is not clear that these pieces of information add up to proof of a white conspiracy and the non-existence of Hammon. Getting dates confused is not unusual in history. Furthermore, Hammon, in his seventies in 1787 and at that age not inclined to stir up trouble or start looking for work, did add in his speech that slavery was unjust, and he would be "glad if others, especially the young Negroes, were free.”
What is to me a more compelling proof to the “identity formation” of Hammon is that there are no Black eyewitness accounts of his speech and his life, whereas there are accounts in a variety of documents of more militant leaders of the day, such as Richard Allen, mentioned above, and Prince Hall (1738-1807). The latter founded a Negro Masonic order and was openly condemned for it in the newspapers of the day.
Dr. Graham suggests that “slave owners in certain Masonic orders who wanted to stem the tides of freedom and justice for African Americans” were behind the creation of Jupiter Hammon. Is this perspective a stretch? While I may not be fully convinced of the totality of Dr. Graham’s point of view, having spent years in the various movements for social equality in the Sixties, I do not think his conclusions are necessarily a stretch. I feel, however, that more evidence is necessary to corroborate Dr. Graham’s compelling thesis.
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), the best known early African-American poet, continues to be an enigma. Kidnapped from Senegal, West Africa, at the age of eight, she grew up in the household of John Wheatley, a Boston tailor. Her precocity was observed by Mrs. Wheatley, and, as the story goes, she was given a typical education of the day which included Latin, Greek, and letters. Her very stilted and derivative poetry - tributes, elegies, and lyrics - is in typical Eighteenth Century style. Her first poem, dated 1753, a tribute to the English Calvinist George Whitefield who preached in England and America, might have brought her into contact with the English Countess Selina of Huntington (sometimes spelled “Huntingdon”), a pious woman of good works who had been converted by Whitefield. The story goes that Phillis, at age eighteen, went to England and met the Countess, who was instrumental in publishing a collection of her work, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). In another version of this story, she went to England with the Wheatleys to get her poems published.
According to Dr. Graham, Phillis Wheatley is a fiction, constructed by whites to push Christian meekness and subservience, as well as to demonstrate the benefits of slavery. The proofs marshaled include the following: the “suspect” make-up of the board of Inquiry to determine the authenticity of her authorship (one member of the board of inquiry was Reverend Mather Bayles, nephew of Cotton Mather, whose 1693 Rules for the Society of Negroes was current); the biography written by her master prefacing her poems; the lack of a black eyewitness to any of the events in her life; her lack of acknowledgement of the horrors of the “middle passage” she must have endured as a child of eight; and her devout Christianity, replacing a fairly benign African religion. Again, the evidence in both directions is slim.
Concerning memory of the “middle passage,” I can conceive of childhood trauma covered over with the patina of a new religion and the force of current circumstance, as well as a desire not to hurt the Wheatleys, who to her, after all, were her “parents.” I can also conceive of – and have known – exceptional youth who have mastered a foreign language, and its literary styles, within months. What seems a bit more curious to me is that there does not seem to be a definite record of Phillis Wheatley’s trip to England to get her book published, and furthermore, there seems to be no English account of her having been aided by the Countess Selina of Huntington, a very well known philanthropic woman of the day, and one of the best known of George Whitefield’s converts to Methodism. At any rate, the existence of the poet Phillis Wheatley remains for me an enigma.
But I know that Dr. Graham will, as he put it, continue to “smoke out” the rest of the “culprits” behind Wheatley, Hammon, and others. His allegation of eighteenth-century white racist conspiracy to create slavery-friendly myths must be taken seriously, especially when one considers the widespread fear of rebellion, a fear deep in the soul of those guilty of oppression. (See for example New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore.)
By the way, the first poem by an African American woman was written by Lucy Terry (Prince) in 1746. Called “Bars Fight,” it is about a violent incident between settlers and Native Americans in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1746. Lucy Terry, who generally followed the non-written oral tradition and did not leave any other written poetry, led a life independently verified, to say the least. In 1785, she appealed to and got protection for her family from the governor of Vermont, and she argued before the trustees of Williams College to admit her sons. They didn’t admit the sons, but they took note of the mother: apparently she spoke for three hours!
Reading the case histories in Dr. Graham’s book, I was moved to reread passages from the 1791 memoir The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. According to the memoir, Equiano was born in Benin in 1745, and kidnapped and sold into slavery when he was eleven. He, unlike Wheatley or Hammon, has many moving passages about what he experienced and saw while a slave. (This ugly picture should be required reading in every high school literature class.) Question: Why did he remember the Middle Passage so vividly, and write about it, and Wheatley did not? One answer, certainly Dr. Graham’s, could be that he was a real person writing his own real story. But it’s also possible that he lived a dramatically different kind of life than did either Wheatley or Hammon, and did his writing in the 1780’s in England when anti-slavery forces were getting the upper hand. Between the 1750’s and 1780’s, he traveled on ships in various capacities, was sent to school in London by his owner, saved money for years and bought his freedom in 1766, participated in the North Pole sailing expedition to find a northwest passage to India, participated in two experimental resettlement colonies, and finally, in the 1790’s, after the publication of his memoir, became an abolition activist in England. His ever-changing environments and companions did not subject him to a particular religious environment and conventional social norms, while both Hammon and Wheatley lived “stable lives,” each with one family in the North, where the slave trade prospered until 1776. (It is interesting that recently Gustavus Vassa has been alleged by historian Vincent Carretta, who has written extensively on slave narratives, to have possibly manufactured his African origins and that he was actually born in South Carolina. The motive could have been to lend greater force to his anti-slavery activism.)
Dr. Graham’s Subliminal Racism is not bedtime reading. Seemingly well-established Black literary figures are dismissed as fictions created by covert racist ideologues; a popular Steven Spielberg movie is labeled racist; Nat Turner is deemed to be a propaganda package; and so on. Controversial! Startling! And the prevailing Caucasian-American psyche is identified as racist and in the service of white supremacy. Tragically, too often true! And, of course, this is exactly what Dr. Graham is writing about. Because of the importance of the topic and Dr. Graham’s unique, innovative, and generally insightful approach, one would wish that he had written more for the general reader. I often felt as if I had entered into the middle of a monologue where the terms had already been defined and the absolutely necessary Five W’s (Who? What? When? Where? Why?) and How? had already been explained elsewhere. More prefatory material would have been helpful: names defined, actions described, media identified, cause-and-effect more clearly forged. For example, the material on astrological matters – the Grand Tour – was arcane, and baffling as to its relevance.
But Dr. Graham is clearly on to something, and he won’t let go. In an area of research where the path is narrow and the cliff is steep, he is exploring what is a pioneering, and unpopular, point of view in African American literary studies. Applying the last two words of his last essay to his future research and publications, we can only say – “Brace yourself!”
© Joyce Nower