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Josephine Baker: I knew so little

Genius in France

I knew that Josephine Baker was a famous black entertainer starting in the 1920s. Yes, I was aware that she left the United States because of its open segregation laws. She was a big star in France. That’s about it.

That is until I was watching CBS Sunday Morning while waiting for my train to arrive. This segment is rightly titled The legacy of Josephine Baker.

First a bit of biography. “She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, to washerwoman Carrie McDonald and vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson. Eddie abandoned them shortly afterward, and Carrie married a kind but a perpetually unemployed man named Arthur Martin.” After a brief and difficult career in the US, her career thrived in Paris.

I’m fascinated by how France has been perceived as this sanctuary, at least for a little while. Some of the notable transplants, at least for a time, included James Baldwin and Lenny Kravitz. My noted activist cousin Frances Beal lived there for a few years. And American soldier Henry Johnson, for years, got a lot more recognition for his World War I exploits by the French than by his home country, the US.

A star over there, but…

For Josephine Baker, a “1936 return to the United States to star in the Ziegfeld Follies proved disastrous, despite the fact that she was a major celebrity in Europe. American audiences rejected the idea of a black woman with so much sophistication and power, newspaper reviews were equally cruel (The New York Times called her a ‘Negro wench’), and Josephine returned to Europe heartbroken.”

She was active in the French resistance during World War II. “She performed for the troops” and… smuggled “secret messages written on her music sheets.” The French government later awarded her medals for her valor.

In the 1950s, “she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as ‘The Rainbow Tribe.’ aided by her third husband, composer Joe Bouillon. Josephine wanted her to prove that ‘children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.’ She often took the children with her cross-country.” She raised two daughters, from France and Morocco, and 10 sons, from Korea, Japan, Colombia, Finland, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Venezuela, and three from France.

Civil rights advocate

But she did make it back to the United States again. I was struck by this dialogue in the CBS piece.
Reporter: “How long are you going to stay?”
Baker: “You want me to stay, don’t you?”
Reporter: “I’d like you to stay. I think you could help the Negro movement in the United States.”
Baker: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Reporter: “Why not?”
Baker: “Because it’s not a Negro movement. It’s an American movement.”
True enough.

She spoke at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.”

Triumphant return

Josephine Baker “agreed to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall” in 1973. “Due to previous experience, she was nervous about how the audience and critics would receive her. This time, however, cultural and racial growth was evident. Josephine received a standing ovation before the concert even began. The enthusiastic welcome was so touching that she wept onstage.

“On April 8, 1975, Josephine premiered at the Bobino Theater in Paris. Celebrities such as Princess Grace of Monaco and Sophia Loren were in attendance to see 68-year-old Josephine perform a medley of routines from her 50-year career. The reviews were among her best ever. Days later, however, Josephine slipped into a coma. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage at 5 a.m. on April 12.”

And in 2021, she has been inducted into France’s Pantheon, the first black woman, the first performing artist, and the first American so honored. She joins Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie among the 80 so honored.

Am I more or less political?

rallies

Someone I knew peripherally three decades ago I got to know much better in 2021. They said he thought I was less political now than I was back in the day. I’m not quite sure about the definition of the word in this context. This, of course, got me thinking about my love/hate thing with all things involving politics.

I grew up in the 1960s and went to some civil rights actions. But from 1968 through 1974 I was more involved in opposition to the war in Vietnam, even getting arrested in 1972.

Meanwhile, I went to college in New Paltz in 1971. I was a political science major, so I’ve always paid attention to politics, sometimes with stunned disbelief. I joined the New Paltz Democratic Club c. 1973. There was an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for the massive reapportioned district of Howard Robison (R-Owego). I described my petitioning here.

I carried petitions again in 1980 for a guy running against a solid incumbent in Albany, which was almost impossible. And I was involved in some social justice activities. I know I went to the anti-nuke rally in June 1982 in NYCNY.

During the 1990s, I befriended my city councilperson and carried petitions. Also, I was involved with some anti-racism activities.

For the six months prior to the water in Iraq in March 2003, I participated in more than two dozen protests, including the big one on 15 February 2003.

Later that decade, I carried petitions for someone I had known for over 25 years. Did I mention that I really HATE carrying petitions, yet I’ve done it at least four times?

Since then, my public participation has been spotty. A rally for freeing falsely imprisoned persons here, a women’s empowerment march there. My daughter was heavily involved in Black Lives Matter rallies in 2020; I went to one, on Juneteenth.

But I do write about it, sometimes

I don’t know if blogging about inequity is DOING anything about it. Regardless, almost every January 15 and April 4 in the past decade, I’ve written about some of the less familiar works of MLK Jr. or tried to recontextualize Martin for the 21st century.

During the orange years, going back at least to 2015, I wrote about him. A LOT, actually, more often than I wanted to because he was so toxic. If you go to my blog and search for trump, you’ll see I probably wrote about him at least 400 times, such as here and here and here and here and here. And those are just some of the ones for 2016. Frankly, I grew tired of even thinking about him. But the process was cathartic, at least for me.

And occasionally, I’ve addressed a wide range of issues from global warming to voting rights.

I write about politics less so now because it’s a more normal, albeit dysfunctional time, your usual sausage-making. But just this summer, I got to suggest to my mayor, who knows me by name, to check out this video about inequality.

So I still pay attention, reading scads of information from differing POVs. If I have something to say, I have the pulpit of my own design. But I’ve never been that motivated to write/talk about politics all the time.

Sept. rambling: Suicide prevention

Way Less Sad

NAMI: Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. “It’s Okay to Talk About Suicide”

Food insecurity soared roughly 9% last year for Americans

The LMNOPs of Caring for the Nursing Workforce: Healthcare systems can do more to prevent staff burnout

A Guide on Racism, Inequality, and Health Care for African Americans.

Household COVID-19 risk and in-person schooling

Fines Double for Refusing to Wear a Mask on a Plane

‘I’m learning firsthand how difficult it is to be shunned by people you love’: The vaccine wars are getting personal

Once-in-a-Century Weather Events Every Week

Why ‘I’ Hurricane Names Are Most Likely to Be Retired

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind, -Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

How can America wake up from its post-9/11 nightmare?

Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy (Erik Prince, 2010)

A Dozen Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court

Power Move: Charles Blow wants Black people to reverse the Great Migration and form majorities in the Southern states.

Journey with Jesus: Richard Rothstein on “The Color of Law”

Is it Better Not To Know?

‘SNL’ Alum Norm Macdonald Dead At 61

Sporting News

every_data_table — **https://xkcd.com/2502/ Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.**

Pittsburgh Pirates lineup from Sept. 1, 1971, the first time an AL or NL team had fielded an all-Black and Latino starting lineup.

60+ Key Stats About the Olympic and Paralympics

The Woman Who Invented Stuffed Animals

John Green: My Two Favorite Jokes. From the comments: “I went into the library and asked the librarian for a book on turtles. ‘Hard back?’ ‘Yeah, with little heads.'”

How Much of the World’s Bourbon Is Actually Made in Kentucky?

Surf the Vintage Internet

ZOOM: Celebrating 10 Years of Zoom: “Some of you have only known Zoom since early 2020.” Including me.

What Is a Squinting Modifier?

A 13,654 stick bomb

Now I Know: The Friend on the Bench and The Man Who Gets People Out of the Hospital and The Magical Place Where Everyone Can Play

MUSIC

Elegy by Mark Camphouse

I heard this song called Way Less Sad by AJR this week for the first time last week. It came out in February 2021. For the life of me, I recognized but could not immediately place the horn riff. No, not Chicago or Blood, Sweat and Tears or Earth, Wind and Fire. Finally, it came to me, without looking it up: the way too sad My Little Town by Simon and Garfunkel! Paul Simon even gets a writing credit for Way Less Sad.

Times Will Be Better – Elena Romanova

I Bought Myself A Politician – MonaLisa Twins

Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Shepherd Converse, played by the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta

Michelle – Julian Neel

Arlington from John Williams’s score to JFK

17 Quotes on the Transformative Power of Music

What Is the word misogynoir?

a racialized nuance

Until 2019, I was unaware of the portmanteau “misogynoir.” Yet, once I saw it, even before hearing the formal characterization, I knew two things: the definition and how accurate it was.

From the Blackburn Center: “Coined by the queer Black feminist Moya Bailey in 2010, the term is a blending of concepts that combines ‘misogyny’ and the French word for black, ‘noir.’ According to Ms. Bailey, misogynoir is the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.”

Way back in 2015, the Guardian noted the reaction to a black woman complaining about treatment at a London nightclub. “‘Misogynoir provides a racialised nuance that mainstream feminism wasn’t catching,’ says black feminist commentator, Feminista Jones. ‘We are talking about misogyny, yes, but there is a specific misogyny that is aimed at black women and is uniquely detrimental to black women.’”

Sometimes it’s for speaking up to stand up for oneself or others. Here’s a good example from 2020: “Trump… spoke at two separate press conferences and harshly singled out Yamiche Alcindor, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour who is black… Critics argued that his treatment of the journalist amounted to misogynoir. Trump called her questions ‘nasty’ and lectured her to, ‘Be nice. Don’t be threatening. Don’t be threatening.'”

“Hello”

Often, it has to do with physical attributes. To the Twitter trolls, Serena Williams and Michelle Obama, to name two, are “gorillas,” “more manly than any man.” Far-right radio show host Jesse Kelly snarked on Faux News that Kamala Harris “cackles like a dead hyena” with Tucker Carlson laughing in the background.

According to the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman, “Research shows that Harris may be the most targeted American politician on the internet.” Why? She “checks every box for the haters of the fever swamps: She’s a woman, she’s a person of color, and she holds power.”

What reminded me of the word is, in the description of the late Gloria Richardson, An “Influential Yet Largely Unsung Civil Rights Pioneer.” She “was on the stage at the pivotal March on Washington in 1963 as one of six women listed as ‘fighters for freedom’ on the program. However, she was only allowed to say ‘hello’ before the microphone was taken.”

It isn’t necessary to agree with someone’s policy, position, or life situation to recognize misogynoir for the specific bigotry that it is.

Critical Race Theory

meaningless debates

Almost all social progress movements inevitably generate a pushback. The recent response to the march for social justice for people of color* has created a boogieman response about the Critical Race Theory.

And what is that? I’m not quite sure, but a writer in a Newsmax piece thinks he does. “Critical Race Theory is Marxist. Its real target is Christianity and the Bible.”

Sounds terrible. And here I thought it was a framework for a better understanding of systemic racism. For instance, Disney has launched a “diversity and inclusion” program, called “Reimagine Tomorrow,” which has Newsmax in a snit.

THE black Republican US Senator

Much of the recent discussion seems to center around the response by Senator Tim Scott to President Biden’s “Can’t Be Called the State of the Union” address. The Weekly Sift guy addresses this:

“The most quoted line of Scott’s response is ‘America is not a racist country.’ I have to agree with Matt Yglesias:

“Is America a Racist Country?” is the perfect meaningless culture war debate because it has basically no content at all. What is it asking? Compared to what?

“Scott clearly wasn’t claiming America has no racism, because he also said, ‘I have experienced the pain of discrimination.’ He even allowed that American racism is not entirely in the past: ‘I know our healing is not finished.'”

In fact, in a 2016 interview, the senator said he had been pulled over seven times by police; he acknowledged he was going too fast two of those times, but the other five times, the only thing he was guilty of was being Black.

“So the argument he started is basically semantic: How much racism does it take to count as a ‘racist country’? Today’s US is not as racist as the Confederacy or Nazi Germany or the old apartheid regime in South Africa. Is that good enough? How many angels of color have to be included before we consider a pinhead dance to be integrated?”

What IS racist?

Part of the problem is that race-focused “conversations derail when people are using the same terms in different ways.”

Or looking at it another way, the United States is a place. Can a location be “racist”? People can act in racist ways and clearly can create a system that perpetuates racism. So, no, Critical Race Theory isn’t ‘anti-American’.

“Remember: Meaningless debates serve the interests of people who have nothing to say. If you have a real vision of the future you want, avoid getting baited into arguing about nothing.”

The Department of Homeland Security produced a report in 2020, suppressed by the previous regime, identifying white supremacists as the leading domestic terror threat. In the past, the government told us violent white racists were few in number and weak in intent. Yeah, right.

Note the mental health issues facing the black community, sent to me by the publisher. Also, Race and Medicine from the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah explains Critical Race Theory as well as anyone. Check out the video near the bottom of the page.

Anniversary of George Floyd’s death

An article in Vanity Fair noted that less than 53 weeks ago, George Floyd was just an average guy trying to make it in this world.

Yes, there has been a lot of outrage over police violence in the past year. Eyes have been opened, hearts and minds changed. Lots of unexpected alliances have been formed.

While there is so much work to do, I’ve decided to be optimistic that things can never go back to the way they were. But change is slow; it usually is.

*or whatever term you prefer