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Bogus Social Media Outrage Is Making Authors Change Lines in Their Books Now
from Laura Miller https://twitter.com/magiciansbook

Elin Hilderbrand writes novels about people who summer in Nantucket and have lots of family secrets and complicated love lives. The books—whose covers feature beach scenes with women in sun hats and sherbet-colored towels fluttering in the sea breeze—reliably make the bestseller lists every July, snapped up by fans in search of vacation reading. Hilderbrand’s seems a dreamy life, raking in the cash by offering fans a few hours of harmless, sunny escapism. But don’t get too comfortable in that deck chair: Social media has arrived to harsh Hilderbrand’s mellow.

As described in an article in Publishers Weekly, readers on Instagram criticized Hilderbrand’s summer 2021 book, The Golden Girl, for a passage in which two teens, Vivi and Savannah, discuss plans for Vivi to hide out in the attic of Savannah’s house without Savannah’s parents’ knowledge: “You’re suggesting I hide here all summer?” Vivi asks. “Like … like Anne Frank?” The two friends laugh at this, but Vivi thinks to herself, “Is it really funny, and is Vivi so far off base?”

On an Instagram post in Hilderbrand’s publisher’s feed, a user who goes by the name “poursandpages” posted a comment (since deleted) denouncing this joke as “horrifically” antisemitic and demanding an apology. Others described themselves as “disgusted” and “gobsmacked in every way with the insensitivity” and accused Hilderbrand of thinking “antisemitism is funny.” After trying to put out these fires via DMs, Hilderbrand issued a formal apology and stated that the line would be removed from the book.

And this isn’t the only time this month that an author came under fire for something one of their fictional characters said. A few days later a Twitter user posted a passage from Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, a popular gay romance novel published in 2019, in which a supporting character who is the president of the United States complains, “Well, my UN ambassador fucked up his one job and said something idiotic about Israel, and now I have to call Netanyahu and personally apologize.” This, one user insists, “normalizes the genocide & war crimes done by Israel that will always be backed up & unashamedly supported by America.” It seemingly doesn’t matter that the line clearly reads as a gentle satire of the United States’ overly deferential foreign policy; another Twitter user explained that “mentions of Israel (especially when they’re completely unnecessary as well, such as in books/films/shows) normalize the occupation of Palestine. All mentions, even ones that don’t outwardly seem bad, are wrong.” Like Hilderbrand, McQuiston has tweeted that the line “will be changed for all future printings.”

Complaining about other, more successful writers is one of the most popular activities on Twitter, as is devising elaborately exacting standards of correct speech and vigorously, if informally, prosecuting those who violate them. What’s unusual about these two examples is how rapidly both authors caved in the face of what appear to be very small posses of critics. This is both absurd—Elin Hilderbrand sells hundreds of thousands of books, and she’s going to revise a novel post-publication for the benefit of a dozen objectors on Instagram?—and a little bit understandable. The irresponsibly gossipy nature of social media makes it all too easy for vague and unsupported slagging (“I heard she’s an antisemite,” “I heard they’re a Zionist”) to grow like weeds in the neglected corners of a prominent person’s reputation.

Why do silly things like this happen? I know some will consider Hilderbrand’s and McQuiston’s obeisance to be a sign that the “toxic drama” that prevails on YA Twitter—in which ambitious reviewers-cum-influencers revile authors for failing to toe extremely fine and perpetually changing lines on race, gender, and other sensitive issues—has spread to the world of commercial adult fiction. It’s not uncommon in those disputes for the critics to make the rookie’s mistake of confusing the statements and feelings of fictional characters with the author herself. This, of course, is nonsense; were fictional characters required to pass purity tests to exist, we’d be left with some pretty bland fiction. The president of the United States is, generally, obliged to behave as if the nation of Israel exists. And most schoolchildren in America read The Diary of Anne Frank; if you suggested to one of them that she hide in an attic for an entire summer, a comparison to Anne Frank would certainly come up. This doesn’t make the child an antisemite who thinks the Holocaust is funny, much less an author who puts such a child in her novel.

While it’s perplexing that people who are always rhapsodizing about how much they love reading can be so very bad at it, the truth is that the incentives for interpreting a book’s meaning in the worst possible light are high. Disparities in fame seem to encourage even more resentment than disparities in income, and readers canny enough to take advantage of that resentment have seen their clout increase. My little account may have only a few thousand followers, but if I can muster a handful of book ’grammers to second my accusations, then even an author as prominent and prosperous as Elin Hilderbrand can be made to dance to my tune.

https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/elin-hilderbrand-casey-mcquiston-antisemitism-israel-social-media.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%209%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list
 

The first paragraph of the article entitled: "white bears in sugar land: Juneteenth, cages, and afrofuturism",  end with the following in brackets <  Liberty, emancipation, independence, without brotherhood or equality or justice or peace, presume utopia. Any alternative imagining can only be fiction. > 
That paragraph ending encapsulate the theme of the article. The theme is freedom is not enough. Freedom must come with equality between all living beings, positive comradery between all living things, peace for all <with peace defined as happiness>, justice for all with the caveat that justice leads to emotional or spiritual redemption. 

The article author, Tochi Onyebuchi, uses an episode of the show Black Mirror to encapsulate said point.  The article author restates, I quote in brackets <  If your organizing principle is freedom, maybe all you’ve done for yourself is fashion another cage. And a cage does not need metal bars and concrete walls to be obvious. Count on the Brits to expose American absurdity. > 
But is it absurd? IT being, the idea that freedom is all that is needed. The question is, what is freedom, liberty, emancipation, independence? The character in the Black Mirror episode who is forced to be mentally tortured isn't independent, emancipated, liberated, or free. She is in a system that judged her and deemed her existence is to be totally enslaved. 
This is why I have always said that the Black American, Black American defined as people from modern day Canada to Argentina who look in the phenotypical range I label as Black, have only one instance of liberty, freedom, emancipation, independence in their modern history, modern history defined as the past 500 years; said one instance is in HAiti. 
To restate, Black Americans, people of the phenotypical range labeled black who live in what is modernly called Canada to Argentina,  only achieved freedom/emancipation/liberty/independence in the last 500 years in Haiti cause to achieve freedom/emancipation/liberty/independence one or a group can only achieve it in completion. 
What is absurd, or beyond the muted , in an enslaved woman being mistreated by her enslavers. 
The ability to do what you want from the most cruel to the most loving is the only sign that you have freedom. The moment any of your actions or yourself are judgeable or controllable by an external , you do not have freedom/independence/liberty/emancipation. 
Now some may argue, what about government? Government is however the free, in parallel the most powerful, in a community decide the rules of a community to be. 
Human government can have any set of rules within human imagination, no set of rules are right or wrong or good or bad; they merely exists as they must. 
The idea of a moral code/ an equalizer of justice, a loving of relationships being necessary for positive society is false. 
As the Haitian freeing proves, once free you can be cruel, cause you are free to be. 

The article author then explains the position in a temporal sequence, beginning with the unearthing of buried enslaved people in modern day texas in early 2018. The bodies were dated being between 1878 and 1910 at the time of death thus legally, they should not had been enslaved.

The next moment in time is June 19th 1865 , the source day for Juneteenth. I want to say as a mere sidenote, I don't see Juneteenth as a day of freedom for black people in the usa. The author quotes General Order Number 2 and states the truth that some at Galveston will be in that cemetery unearthed in 2018. The author state, I Quote in brackets < An even cursory reading of General Order No. 3 reveals just how conditional freedom was in the post-bellum Re-United States. Despite “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the freedmen “will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Nor will they be allowed to “collect at military posts.” Whether they served the Union or the Confederacy, they will be left with nothing but the scarred skin on their backs. There will be no government assistance, no 40 acres, no mule, no “help them get back on their feet” allowance. Liberation pure and simple. A typical American blunder to mistake emancipation for justice, liberation for peace. To mistake the light up ahead for the tunnel’s end and conclude that the hard work has been finished. >
The problem I have with the author's position is the suggestion that freedom is obtained but it is the absence of justice that leads to the abuses in the future. But again, haiti proves this is wrong. 
The problem isn't that freedom was achieved circa 150 years ago in the usa and justice was evaded. The problem is freedom wasn't achieved over 150 years ago by Blacks from whites. Slavery like all things come in levels/grades/ranks. 
A people don't need to be completely shackled or sold on auction by another to be enslaved. A people can have mayors/presidents/billionaires/sanitation workers/generals in the army or other modern overseers while they are all in truth, still enslaved , to another people. 
He cites a book I have not read, and I will probably not read. The posthumous work of Ralph Ellison, check the bottom of this post. I am very suspicious to any posthumous work. The book was originally titled: Juneteenth. I can concur with the article writer that Ellison was clearly going to make a critique of Black joy in the USA. But I oppose the idea that Black joy comes from the gaining of freedom while the absence of justice. Black collective joy in the usa or the greater Black American community or the greater Black world, please note my stated definitions as not all black people are african, comes from the lessening of slavery not the gaining of freedom. 
The 13th amendment to the constitution, the civil rights act, Juneteenth or other general orders, the emancipation proclamation, the golden law in brasil, the end of slavery in the british empire , or similar were not the gaining of freedom for black people; each stated instance was the lessening of slavery of blacks to whites , but not the absence of slavery of blacks to whites. Black people were and do cheer steps to something that has never been achieved absent violence/cruelty/hate. 

The next moment is July 22, 2013, where the author reveals experiences of his life in Ramallah, a palestinean city in Israel former Palestine, and after as a growing lawyer in various systems of incarcerations. I Quote him in brackets < Spend enough time on the outside looking at people held in cages and you might shake your head, look for confetti under your shoes, and begin muttering to yourself, “the whole thing was a hoax.” >
I will not speak for the author but based on my own personal journey I say that freedom isn't a hoax for those that truly have it. Too often people think they are free but to quote agent smith in quotations  "the problem isn't that we are free the problem is that we are not free" 
IT is the illusion plus allusion of being truly free that is the problem. An image of freedom is presented or freedom is suggested in communication that has no basis in reality. 

The next moment is September 15, 2018 where the author focuses on the United States of America. I quote in brackets < Liberation is one of the principal themes in the myth of the United States of America. ...  Clean-up is for later.>.
I concur, the USA was founded on myth over reality. But in defense of the USA, the founding fathers, all financially wealthy human owning men of white european descent, never told anyone not in their specific race to think they are free cause they are in the usa. 
It can be argued that the myth of the USA says more about the needs of some people to manufacture possibilities of freedom based on lies they tell themselves.
I have not read the George S. Schuyler book , Black No More, but the description from the author suggest it is afrofuturism based on the description of afrofuturism provided. I quote in brackets < [S]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture,” that is how Mark Bould defines Afrofuturism in “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.” > 
The author spends half of this section on his personal activities as a writer, events around modernity. The point is to state the potency or growth of black writers or moreover, writers of the militaristically oppressed. 
I quote the article in brackets < that liberation without justice is not liberation, it is simply a hoax. > 
In prior prose I stated a simple truth. Rightly or wrongly, positively or negatively, the black community of the usa has been led by a philosophy of merit side equality. Sequentially, when one desires a moral code of equality, they accept restrictions which by default is unfreedoms. Thus, of the writer or the many adherents in humanity who share a similar view, want all to accept a level of slavery that allows one to feel free while it doesn't deny any equality while it accepts restrictions or slavery to maintain said equality.

The last moment is May 30, 2019. Where he speaks of being inspired to write his second book by a friend, who the white owned system has guided into its negativities. 
I can add only hope that tomorrow is better. Real power is a fleeting thing in humanity, very few humans can touch real power in humanity. Absent that real power, one can only hope. Absent true freedom, one has to ask. 
Maybe in afrofuturism, someone will write the first fictional future where all humans are free while not in each others, or any other life forms, way. Maybe it will be me.  Maybe the author of the article. But the idea is needed. 

THE ARTICLE IN COMPLETION

We resist enclosure. Deer roam forests. Vines colonize abandoned Coliseums. A human being held in solitary confinement will self-harm, scream, plead, kick doors, smear feces on their cell walls, and refuse food if there exists even the promise of seeing the sun for fifteen minutes of their day. There are many words in English for what that human being quests for: liberty, emancipation, freedom, independence. So much of the American project has been dousing its cultural fabric in these colors. No mention of brotherhood and precious little of equality. Justice is nowhere to be found. Peace, somewhere far off in the distance. Over the horizon, in fact. Those messy words presume an After, and they presume that this After is other than post-apocalypse. Liberty, emancipation, independence, without brotherhood or equality or justice or peace, presume utopia. Any alternative imagining can only be fiction.

An episode in the second season of Black Mirror, titled “White Bear,” dramatizes precisely this conundrum. The protagonist, a woman played by Lenora Crichlow, awakens with amnesia, haunted by a symbol that flickers on the television screen in her room and hunted by unreasoning pursuers. People on the street catch sight of her and immediately raise their cameraphones to record. Even as her pursuers shoot at her and those who have decided to aid her, the spectators remain just that. Spectators. They’re being held captive by a signal from a transmitter at a facility called “White Bear.” Get to White Bear, destroy the transmitter, and free the world from their stupor. When she and her confederate reach the transmitter, two hunters attack. In what is supposed to be the episode’s climax, she wrestles a shotgun away from one of her assailants, aims, and pulls the trigger.

Out comes confetti.

The whole thing was a hoax. Her name is revealed, as well as the fact that she and her fiancé had murdered a child, her sentence for which is daily psychological torture. Relive the same day over and over and over again, with no memory that it has ever happened before.

Emancipation with no hint of peace. Some would watch the aftermath of that reveal, the woman being driven back to her compound while those spectators from earlier curse her and damn her and spit at her, and say that’s justice. They might say that, in punishing her, whatever justice system that exists in the world of this episode is simply operating out of procedural fidelity. Maybe the algorithm decided this, and an algorithm sees neither color nor sex nor gender nor faith, that renders us equally as numbers. But of the many things I came away from that episode holding in my chest, nowhere among them was any sense of justice.

Black Mirror places the episode somewhere in our future. An After, as it were. The paradox of progress here is that it takes our imaginations to create an After where there are no Afters, revealing the mistake inherent in founding your identity on the sole item of liberation. The light at the end of the tunnel, brought to you by lamps that have been hung up in the next portion of tunnel. If your organizing principle is freedom, maybe all you’ve done for yourself is fashion another cage. And a cage does not need metal bars and concrete walls to be obvious.

Count on the Brits to expose American absurdity.

In early 2018, the Fort Bend Independent School District broke ground in Sugar Land on the site of what was to be a new technical center. It was in February that the first remains were discovered. By July, archaeologists had discovered a total of 95 bodies. The bodies were buried in individual wooden caskets. Initial analysis places the youngest of the deceased at 14, the oldest around 70. Analysts deduced, early on, that the bodies showed evidence of severe malnourishment and physical stress, pointing to a history of hard labor. Prison labor.

A former prison guard, Reginald Moore, had told officials in the fall of the previous year that there might be a cemetery there. Since his term as a corrections officer in the 1980s, he had adopted as his mission excavating the land’s past and serving as caretaker for the Imperial Farm Cemetery, also in Fort Bend County.

It is speculated that the bodies were buried between 1878 and 1910. Technically, none of the buried could have been slaves at the time of their deaths. Slavery had officially ended in Texas 13 years prior.

June 19, 1865
Union Army General Gordon Granger stands on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa. Maybe there are banners commemorating the occasion. Maybe a flag hangs from somewhere. Maybe he has bathed, maybe he has not. The previous day, the General had arrived on Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops to occupy Texas on behalf of the federal government. Just over two weeks prior, on June 2, the last of the Confederate forces, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, had formally surrendered. Maybe they hadn’t believed reports of Robert E. Lee’s formal surrender on April 9 of that year. Maybe they thought it Union propaganda. Maybe the officers leading that corps had lost the mail. News, back then, didn’t travel as quickly as it does now.

But on June 19, 1865, General Granger unfolds a piece of parchment and reads aloud from what is marked “General Order No. 3”:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The once-enslaved rejoiced in the streets.

The 14-year-old boy, whose destiny is a shallow grave near the Brazos River, is one year old. Born a slave before the moral border crosses him, and he’s suddenly freed. In thirteen years, he will be buried alongside the rest of the prison labor.

An even cursory reading of General Order No. 3 reveals just how conditional freedom was in the post-bellum Re-United States. Despite “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the freedmen “will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Nor will they be allowed to “collect at military posts.” Whether they served the Union or the Confederacy, they will be left with nothing but the scarred skin on their backs. There will be no government assistance, no 40 acres, no mule, no “help them get back on their feet” allowance. Liberation pure and simple. A typical American blunder to mistake emancipation for justice, liberation for peace. To mistake the light up ahead for the tunnel’s end and conclude that the hard work has been finished.

The After that these freefolk walk into is a Texas whose economy depended heavily—too heavily—on sugarcane, a Texas whose economy had depended almost entirely on free labor. So two Confederate veterans, Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis, sign a contract with the state in 1878 to lease the state’s prison population. The Vagrancy Act of 1866, also known as the “Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants,” drafted and ratified by the Virginia state legislature, forced into imprisonment for a term of up to three months anyone who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. It is only one example of the type of legal regime that proliferated over the United States. So-called Black Codes declared, among other things, that if a freedman left employment without the employer’s permission, he would be denied his wages. Also declared was the fact that a worker could be fined $1 for acts of disobedience or negligence or 25 cents per hour for every missed hour of work. In Texas, a system of apprenticeship was enacted, along with a host of vagrancy laws.

Cunningham and Ellis suddenly had their workers.

In many instances, men were handpicked, noted for their heavy bearing or their workers’ hands or their strong backs, innocent men, targeted as they walked through the thoroughfare because they looked like good laborers, arrested, and swept into the machine of convict leasing.

That year, 1878, the 14-year-old boy, if he is not already serving time in a cell or on a plantation, will arrive at his destination and not last the year.

Out comes confetti. Emancipation? Freedom? The whole thing was a hoax.

By the time he died, Ralph Ellison had compiled thousands of pages of notes and drafts and pieces of drafts on what was to be his second work of long fiction, the novel that would follow his masterwork, Invisible Man. He never lived to see it completed. Looking at the themes it examined, perhaps unfinished is its most natural state. There is a dying race-baiting Senator who once was maybe a small black boy destined to be a preacher. There is a parodic exploration of filmmaking culture as an allegory for Franklinian ambition, the American ideal: reinvention. There’s jazz in the prose and in the story. There’s a tragicomic scene where Senator-to-be Sunraider, as a maybe black boy, is raised out of a tiny coffin by his adopted preacher daddy during the course of a rousing sermon only to see a white lady from the congregation loudly claim him as her long-lost son. The story is ostensibly a satire, but the shape-shifting of the maybe black preacher’s son to race-baiting United States Senator brings to mind more fantastical creatures, the werewolves and sprites and witches and vampires who all, in one way or another, embody our fears and hopes and lusts. The werewolf’s human form is a seduction, and so is the promise, in Ellison’s unfinished second novel, of whiteness. Of freedom.

Long after Ellison’s death, a near-comprehensive collection of what was supposed to be this novel was released, titled Three Days Before the Shooting. Previously, the material had been compiled, condensed, and published by his editor as a novel coming in under 400 pages.

Its original title was Juneteenth.

July 22, 2013
I arrive at the Ofer military court for the first time. It wasn’t that far from the office in Ramallah. We took a service taxi to the gates, offloaded and got into a van that operated much like a taxi the way a plainclothes cop is police and we crossed the first major threshold, whereupon we passed through the first metal detector and showed our passports to the bored guard behind the glass. When we came out from beneath the shelter of that first station, we walked down an outdoor corridor to a waiting room where waited family members of those whose trials were scheduled today, along with men and women in the process of attending their own hearings, often for parking tickets.

In May of 2013, I began work at an organization that represented and advocated on behalf of Palestinian Arabs detained in Israeli prisons. At the time, I occupied a flat in Ramallah with a classmate of mine from law school. She was working on women’s rights. I was at the Ofer military court on this day with a supervisor and a few colleagues, one of whom was a student like myself, from Harvard Law School.

My supervisor took our passports into the main booth and then after a wait, we went through. Shoes and belts removed, pockets emptied, then we came out on the other side with our belongings. Down another corridor and into a courtyard that looked very much like the prison courtyards in the US, only this was populated with family and friends of the to-be-incarcerated. Heat blanketed everything, and people bounced in and out of the shade, waiting, joking about what they’d do if they couldn’t get rid of the parking ticket. I talked career paths with this fellow intern and movies, I think, with another. Inside a small shack-like building that resembled a mini airport waiting station, I practiced my Arabic script and a fellow intern taught me some new words and I worked on my numbers. With us, at that time, were the wife and the brother of one of the detainees we’d come to see, a man who had worked and researched with our organization and who had been arrested and detained the previous September. We were here for his sentencing hearing.

Our colleague is being held in Trailer 4. There are four prisoners in the box here to our left. Less chaos than hearings earlier in the day. There’s one dignified hijabi woman who looks like defense counsel. New witnesses enter, and we play musical chairs to shuffle so that the men sit in an unbroken line.

The translator here has a wide, sharp face, stubbled, shiny blue eyes, looks like so many kids I went to school with. A Billy club hangs from his back pouch.

A dumpy middle-aged prosecutor charges his phone in the wall behind him.

The prisoners here are older than most of us in the audience. Much older.

One of the prisoners received word from his wife, behind me, seated amongst the spectators, that his friend had just died. “My God,” he said, “rest in peace.” The expression on his face is beyond my ability to describe. Before he can fully process the news, his attention snaps back to his hearing.

The prisoners are handcuffed in pairs and led out. That was it.

It turns out the hearing for the man we had come to see was now moved to July 29, 2013, a week from today. Four hearings in five minutes.

On July 28, 2013, the night before our colleague’s trial, I’m in Jerusalem with yet another colleague from work. The friend she’d brought with her had on a Metallica shirt.

It took quite a bit of cajoling on my colleague’s part to eventually get me to Jerusalem and while the three of us sat on the roof of the Austrian Hospice with the sun gilding East Jerusalem, waiting expectantly for the muezzin so that we could begin eating the sweets we’d picked up in the souk, she asked why I’d waited until my last week in Palestine to come to Jerusalem.

I thought of the Qalandiya checkpoint that I’d seen numerous times and had occasionally passed through and how the very sight of all those Palestinians herded like cattle through the stations, many of them waiting in lines in a shack reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Six Flags, made my hands start shaking. I thought of how comfortable I’d gotten in Ramallah, even as this place had begun to wear on my spirit. It was familiar. More familiar than leaving.

And I thought of everywhere else I’d traveled to. All the other countries where voyaging was an effortless thing. A wish was all it took to put me on a train in Paris that would spirit me to Amsterdam. Being stranded at the Kosovo-Serbia border and having to negotiate my way through Macedonia, cut a path through Bosnia, to wind up back in Croatia again, that was an adventure. Rabat to Tangier, an inspired odyssey.

Here, though, freedom of movement didn’t seem to exist beyond the contours of Ramallah. There were passable barriers, but the trouble of negotiating them overwhelmed me so that it took as long 10 weeks for me to see a city that was but 10 kilometers away. There was security behind bars. Should our imprisoned colleague eventually be released, this is what would have been waiting for him. More tunnel.

So, when my friend asked me why it took me so long to get to Jerusalem after I’d been in the Territories for almost ten weeks, I shrugged and said I was scared.

The next day, our colleague went on trial. Again.

After my ten weeks in Ramallah, I would return to law school where I would be put on the habeas corpus case for a man who had been wrongfully convicted and held in prison in my home state for over 18 years. I would write a long and heavily-researched paper on carceral philosophies fed and watered in the US and exported to El Salvador and the Occupied Territories. I would later graduate and spend a year at a job, part of which required observing minors held in solitary confinement. After that would come Rikers.

Spend enough time on the outside looking at people held in cages and you might shake your head, look for confetti under your shoes, and begin muttering to yourself, “the whole thing was a hoax.”

September 15, 2018
Liberation is one of the principal themes in the myth of the United States of America. Liberation from tyranny, liberation from savagery, liberation from taxes. Hell, early Americans even liberated themselves of imported tea. What a mess they must have made on those ships docked in the Boston Harbor. Clean-up is for later. As is the burial of convicts leased out for labor. As is the release of the modern American incarcerated. And with a largely monochrome literary lineage, American letters has largely allowed myth to morph into accepted wisdom, some facsimile of fact. American letters gave Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind a Pulitzer Prize. And though the film The Birth of a Nation is largely credited with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, it was adapted in part from the first two novels in Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Ku Klux Klan trilogy: The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the Whiteman’s Burden – 1865-1900 (published in 1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (published in 1905). Less sanguine a patrilineage but just as alabaster, one may start somewhere around Washington Irving or even Edgar Allan Poe and work one’s way through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Mailer, etc., etc. etc. American myth.

Those works that did exist to scrub away some of the varnish, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, more often than not written by those on the margins, largely concerned those on the margins. Even after the tiff between Henry James and H.G. Wells results into the greater beef between “literary” and “genre” fiction, that writing by the racially marginalized, in order to be seriously considered as a work of merit, need by definition concern the racially marginalized.

So the first alleged science fiction novel by an African American isn’t about aliens. It isn’t about other planets. The novel figures our own is strange enough.

Its author is one George S. Schuyler. Its title is Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940. And at its center is a scientific procedure. Protagonist Max Disher, after having been spurned by a white woman in a Harlem speakeasy on the simple fact of his blackness, reads of a scientific procedure that could result in the complete bleaching of his skin. “Black-No-More” claims to be able to turn a black man white.

The scientific procedure grows in popularity, throwing the social and economic order of the country—predicated on a strictly delineated racial hierarchy—into bedlam. NAACP leaders with their Talented Tenth aura hate it. Southern segregationists, desperate for a critical mass of Other to hate, despise it. Meanwhile, Max Disher, now Matthew Fisher, wins the white girl. The novel’s hijinks involve a potential mixed-race baby, a jet plane and mutilation at the hands of animalistic, atavistic Mississippi whites.

“[S]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture,” that is how Mark Bould defines Afrofuturism in “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.”

And lately, the word “Afrofuturism” has received a lot of purchase, eagerly slapped on any story in which black people and magic (or sufficiently-advanced technology) are co-pilots. It’s another attempt to categorize and catalog, some way to trace genealogy and link Schulyer with Octavia Butler with Tananarive Due with Sheree Thomas with Samuel Delany with Andrea Hairston with Colson Whitehead with N.K. Jemisin with P. Djeli Clark. A justification for putting them in the same cupboard, aside from the fact of their shared blackness. That would be too gauche a reason.

But the fact of the matter is that the aforementioned authors resist sameness. Time travel, galaxy hopping, climate catastrophe, zombies, broken cities with burnt skies, they are at the business of excavating myth and pulling humans out of it, same as any other bushel of writers. The fact of their blackness does not mean that they are obligated to allegorize black death or black anguish or black angst (whatever those reductionist terms may mean or entail) or that the entirety of their oeuvre must stem from the primordial wounding.

If they were to address injustice and un-freedom and the paradox of progress, it would be by choice.

It is a Saturday. September 15, 2018. At a place called Roulette on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Somewhere in the emails, perhaps on the Gala invite itself, there’d been dress code instructions, but due to characteristic failure of foresight, I arrive at the venue wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that reads “Abolish ICE.” My worries are assuaged by a young man in a rumpled, dark-colored button-down waiting in line just in front of me for the bar.

It’s my third time at the Brooklyn Book Festival, second time as a dude who wrote a thing. And, thus, my second time at the pre-Festival gala. So many of the writers I’d been lucky enough to have befriended or known over the previous two year are in attendance. Crystal Hana Kim, author of the Korean War love epic If You Leave Me; essayist and novelist Naima Coster; R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries. In the low lighting, I’m sure there are others I would recognize if only they came affixed with name badges.

After enough time has passed, we are urged to our seats. I and friends take our seats in the balcony. In June of that year, it had been announced that the Best of Brooklyn Award, given annually by the festival, would go to N.K. Jemisin. The previous honoree had been Colson Whitehead.

In the time between her name is called and she makes her way to the stage to accept her award and give her speech, everyone rockets to their feet. There can’t be more than a few hundred of us in that hall, but it feels like we are one thousand strong. Applause thunders. And thunders. And thunders.

The previous month, Jemisin had won her third consecutive Hugo Award for Best Novel, making history twice over as the first author to threepeat and the first to win for every novel in a series. For a series of novels quite explicitly about injustice and un-freedom, into which can be read with remarkable ease black anger and black pain and so many of those other complex weavings of emotion that stem from having buried somewhere deep in one’s genealogy that primordial wounding. In short, a series of novels that not only stars black people, but that thematically concerns itself with the business of being black in the United States of America. A series of novels about having too little and too much power simultaneously, about loving in the face of loss, about the separation of families, about containing in one calcifying body both God and woman.

UX Designer and theorist Florence Okoye writes: “Afrofuturism dares to suggest that not only will black people exist in the future, but that we will be makers and shapers of it, too.” < https://howwegettonext.com/there-are-black-people-in-the-future-d2fd9f1a38ea >She ties the Afrofuturist project to a reaching back. Far from operating from the blank slate baseline that results from the wholesale obliteration of one’s history by the triangle slave trade, “we can reach back to our past to inspire our futures.” We’ve snatched the pen, the tablet, the laptop from the hunter and type out, with our claws, the true story of the savannah. Oppression seeks to pulverize the possible, to atomize hope, to granulate not only dreams but the very act of dreaming. What control does one have over the slave, the sharecropper, the convict in a capitalistic enterprise if they can imagine another Now, if they can build, in the cathedral of their mind, an After? No, better to erase their name, indicate only their present physical features on the bill of laden, amputate their familial bonds by scattering the children into plantations all over the country. A century later, however, rappers walk the streets of New York City with Africa pendants hanging from their necks, at work, knowingly or unknowingly, repairing American injury. Telling story the way Schuyler told story, the way Butler told story, the way Jemisin will tell story. Afrofuturism is exhuming the bodies buried in Sugar Land and reanimating them. Afrofuturism, this imagining of Afters, pushes the laborer toward the tunnel’s mouth. That warmth? The feel of the sun on your face. Prison still persists, environmental racism aggravates illness, material and professional advancement will still be thwarted, but there is nothing like the moment when a prisoner the first night of the 1971 Attica Uprising, stares up at the sky from a D Yard crowded with other prisoners crafting a civil rights moment, and says, tears leaking down his face, that he hasn’t seen the stars in 22 years. We resist enclosure.

I think of the Broken Earth trilogy and the word that comes to mind is liberation. Authors from marginalized backgrounds may, to varying degrees of success, deny the more pernicious aspects of American publishing and refuse to write their marginalizations, to allegorize them even, or to reduce themselves and their demographic to suffering. What matters is the choice. Because should a black author face the plight of black Americans in the United States since before its inception and allegorize that, excavate from the mythmaking of Irving and Thoreau and Hemingway and Mitchell a series of humans the same color as her, the result can be a piece of writing so powerful and painful and daring that we can’t look away from that most essential truth it purrs, screams, weeps, shouts, whispers into our ear: that liberation without justice is not liberation, it is simply a hoax.

May 30, 2019
On this day, a Thursday, someone dear to me begins his jail sentence. He was convicted in Connecticut for a crime he is alleged to have committed in Connecticut, and when he is released, he will, absent permission from a probation officer, have to remain in Connecticut. His sentence is for one year. He will be eligible for parole in eight months.

He is a college graduate and a veteran of the Air Force. He enjoys difficult video games, then, bafflingly, replaying them at higher and higher difficulties. By turns brooding and articulate, reluctant and insistent. He loves potatoes, eats irregularly, and his metabolism is so powerful that whatever food he digests seems to vanish entirely, leaving no trace in his stomach or his ass or his chest or arms of its ever having been. If we are not plagued by the same haunts, the same principalities that swing us not from happy to sad but from ecstasy to sorrow, that render life for us in nine dimensions, that set whatever’s inside our ribcages on fire, if we are not whispered to by the same voices, then, at the very least, those phantasms, like the bodies hosting them, share DNA.

The afternoon of the first day of his sentence, I sat at a table in the Jacob Javits Center and, for ninety minutes, signed copies of a novel I’d written. It is difficult to say that anything other than providence had a hand in placing me here and placing him there, but there it is.

When he is released into probation and given his set of instructions, his list of constraints, and whatever methods they’re going to use to continue monitoring him, I hope I’ll be able to look at him and think of his time inside and now his time outside, his having lost a year in the prime of his life, him leaving a house of Corrections for a world of ankle monitors and check-ins, to look at him at the end of all of this, the entirety of his sentence, and not say out loud, “the whole thing was a hoax.”

Between the time he went in and the time he gets out, I will have published two books, the second of which is about, in part, a young man in jail. I wrote it because I think science fiction, fantastika, is one of the best tools I have to help build an After. Imagining justice. Imagining equality. Imagining peace. Cleaning up the mess American mythmaking has made of this place. I hope he is able to read this book. I hope he is able to read Riot Baby and know that I tried my best.

I hope he makes it to the end.

I wrote it for him.

Originally published June 2019.

Tochi Onyebuchi’s fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, and Omenana Magazine. His non-fiction has appeared in Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. He holds a B.A. from Yale University, a M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a J.D. from Columbia Law School, and a Masters degree in droit économique from L’institut d’études politiques. His debut young adult novel, Beasts Made of Night, was published by Razorbill in October 2017, and its sequel, Crown of Thunder, was published in October 2018. His next YA book, War Girls, will hit shelves on October 15, 2019, and a novella, Riot Baby, will be available from Tor.com Publishing in January, 2020.

Footnotes
1: Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (July 2007): 177–186.

ARTICLE URL
https://www.tor.com/2021/06/19/juneteenth-cages-and-afrofuturism/

Juneteenth from Ralph Ellison 
Text https://www.kobo.com/ebook/juneteenth
Audio https://www.kobo.com/audiobook/juneteenth-4

Three days before the shooting
Text https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/three-days-before-the-shooting
Audio https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/three-days-before-the-shooting-2

George s. Schuyler book
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/black-no-more-a-novel
 

Free Black men and women founded an Eastern Shore village to avoid attention. Now their descendants want to share the stories.

It’s a sunny late afternoon on Gran’Sarah’s Hill, Newell Quinton’s 40-acre spread in a wooded corner of northwestern Wicomico County, and the lanky 77-year-old is in his element.

His 50 goats scurry and bleat as he walks among them, tossing out feed. His female hogs, Laverne and Shirley, nestle in a pen, each pregnant with a litter of piglets.

He’ll sell the goats and butcher or market the hogs when the time comes, making use of every cubic inch of living inventory just as people have done in the remote community of San Domingo, Md., for more than two centuries.

“We’ve never wasted much of anything here,” he says cheerfully. “It’s one of the values that has kept us going.”

Quinton is a native son and ongoing champion of San Domingo, an enclave of a few hundred mostly African American residents just inland from the Nanticoke River on the Eastern Shore.

Established as a settlement of free Black men and women in the early 1800s, it is believed to be the first and oldest such community in the state. But that is not all that makes this out-of-the-way place unique.

In a place and at a time when the slave trade was at its strongest, and when most Black people classified as free lived on property owned by others, San Domingo’s founders owned and tended land, set up businesses, built a church and a school, raised families and generally created a close-knit, thrifty and self-sufficient community that coexisted peacefully with the White towns around them well into the mid-1900s.

When Quinton works Gran’Sarah’s Hill, he says, he’s not just earning a living. He’s carrying on a way of life that made the community possible for all those years, right into his childhood.

He pauses and leans on the hog-pen fence.

“Not everyone was lucky enough to grow up the way we did, and we’d like to keep those values alive,” he says.

It has been said that San Domingo, a census-designated place between Mardela Springs and Sharptown near the Delaware line, is not on the main road to anywhere, and a two-hour drive from Baltimore bears out the idea.

Cross the Bay Bridge, head south through Caroline and Dorchester counties, hit the successively smaller towns of Federalsburg, Eldorado and Sharptown, and you’re in the neighborhood.

You may spot a lone sign — “Welcome to San Domingo: A Community of Free Black Pioneers” — that residents put up in recent years. From there, a byway curves to its central gathering place.

Quinton and two contemporaries are already at the San Domingo Community and Cultural Center, a two-story frame building that once served as the area’s “colored school,” and ready to talk their hometown.

Told it was a little hard to find, they all burst out laughing.

“Oh, San Domingo was designed that way,” says Rudolph Stanley, 72, a retired math teacher who has been conducting genealogy research on his birthplace since 1999. “It can be tricky if you don’t have good reason to be here.”

And he, Quinton and Quinton’s older sister, Alma Hackett, 78, launch into tales about growing up in a place where you had to know every creek and clearing just to get from one place to another.

The Johnsons were free Black pioneers in Virginia < https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/anthony-and-mary-johnson-are-pioneers-on-the-eastern-shore-whose-surprising-story-tells-much-about-race-in-virginia-history/2019/04/29/aefaec8e-605d-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html > 

No one knows for sure exactly how and why San Domingo first came into being, but U.S. census records from the early 19th century offer tantalizing clues.

They suggest, for one thing, that no free Black people lived in the area as of 1810 but that more than 600 had settled there in 109 households by 1820. Residents were listed as having a range of occupations, from grocer and carpenter to shipwright and pastor. Several owned acres in the hundreds.

Historian Mary Klein was astonished to stumble on that information in the early 1990s while conducting research on the lives of free Black residents of the Eastern Shore for her master’s degree thesis.

It was remarkable, she says, not just to see a community of free Black people on the plantation-rich Eastern Shore nearly half a century before the Civil War but to realize it came together so rapidly and intentionally.

“You could see they had gathered together on purpose to form this large community, and it became this very successful, largely self-sustaining venture,” says Klein, now an archivist with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. “I’ve researched communities all over the state, and I’ve never come across anything like it, especially that early.”

Her efforts led to “These Roots Were Free,” a 36-page book that remains the only academic study of San Domingo. But a handful of people who grew up there have long worked to paint a fuller picture.

Research into church records and family trees by Stanley and by Eubert G. Brown, a retired Air Force officer, confirms that a James Brown who is listed as a mariner in the 1820 Census was its founder.

Image without a caption

The headstone for San Domingo founder James Brown in the woods at the edge of the community. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun)

Brown’s children and grandchildren became community pillars, and his descendants — including Eubert Brown, 85, his great-great-grandson — have proliferated alongside a few other families, the Stanleys included, ever since.

Many residents believe that James Brown and others first came to the area by boat in the aftermath of a notoriously bloody slave revolt that took place in Santo Domingo, Haiti, around 1800 and that they named the community as a nod to that uprising.

Eubert Brown disputes that — he believes the founder was a different James Brown, a free Black man born in Somerset County — but he agrees with most that the name was chosen as a tacit warning to “intrusive Whites,” as he puts it.

“We feel the community avoided trouble out of fear of the name,” Brown says.

True or not, it’s clear the community prioritized keeping a low profile, a fact Quinton is sure helped foster the tranquility it enjoyed right into the 1960s in a region not known for its solicitude toward African Americans.

Though many San Domingans worked in nearby White communities — Quinton’s mother did “day work” in family homes in Sharptown, for example, and Stanley was a part-timer at a packaging plant there — their lives overwhelmingly centered on supporting and taking care of one another.

Someone was available to provide just about every important skill, Quinton says, whether it was delivering babies, digging wells or helping hogs through the mating process.

Eubert Brown’s grandfather, Hargus, couldn’t read or write, but he built sturdy houses, crafted headstones and used a dowsing stick to find water. Stanley’s dad, Rudolph Abraham Lincoln Stanley, owned the trucks that carried many to work, and Quinton’s father, George Bernard Quinton, raised soybeans and felled trees for firewood.

Brown recalls a group of ladies who moved from house to house, making quilts for families for the winter. Quinton remembers that someone always seemed to be preparing to harvest a hog in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.

“The whole community had that independent spirit, helping each other to be successful,” he says.

San Domingo was so self-reliant, Quinton and others say, that growing up in the 1940s and 1950s they had little experience with the Jim Crow realities that prevailed just beyond its borders. Children heard almost nothing.

Harriet Tubman’s lost Maryland home found < https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/20/harriet-tubman-maryland-home-found/ > 

Ask about their childhoods and each becomes a griot. Hackett remembers the “Sharptown Colored Elementary School”as a place with classrooms full of children, caring teachers who lived in the community and May Day galas that brought out the girls’ finest dresses. It was in San Domingo but served surrounding areas, too.

The school was the local version of the Rosenwald Schools built for Black children , https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/we-refuse-to-let-people-forget-in-virginia-a-push-to-remember-historically-black-high-schools-before-they-disappear/2020/01/03/3ddd3dea-2e2f-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_57 >  across the South in the early 1900s — facilities made necessary by segregation. But Hackett says the children had no clue about such things.

“Everyone there was totally committed to us succeeding,” says Hackett, who attended the school from 1948 to 1954, three years before it closed as part of desegregation. “We were blessed to go there.”

Church, too, was central. Nearly everyone attended services for hours each Sunday at New Zion United Methodist, and the building hosted community dinners, emergency meetings, even raccoon and squirrel hunts.

Quinton’s great-uncle Norman T. Brown, a school bus driver, also ran the town’s general store, where he peddled everything from coal oil to wheels of cheese, often extending credit.

Quinton worked there when he was 13. “If Uncle Norm had to leave me in charge, he’d say, ‘Give them what they want and put them on the book — they’ll settle up Friday,’ ” he recalls. “If they had no money Friday, they’d come in with some eggs or potatoes and say, ‘Will this take care of it?’ ”

“It always did,” he says. “I never, ever saw a disagreement.”

The children of Quinton’s generation became successful in life, he and others say. They cite the long hours they spent working nearby farms each summer — which taught them what they didn’t want to do — and the way their parents pushed them to get educated.

Most graduated from Salisbury High School, the county’s all-Black high school nearly 20 miles away. Quinton, his seven siblings and Stanley all went on to graduate from what is now Morgan State University.

Quinton joined the Army and turned the experience into a four-decade career with the federal government. One sister, Barbara, became a doctor. Stanley had a 42-year career teaching math in Wicomico County schools, and Hackett taught biology and chemistry for 38 years in Somerset County.

Once segregation ended, San Domingo’s young adults began leaving the area in search of greater opportunity. Many sold inherited land. Some houses were razed or abandoned. But some old-timers, like Stanley, never left the area for long; others, like Quinton, returned decades later.

Image without a caption

San Domingo, nestled between the Nanticoke River and Sharptown Road in rural Wicomico County. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun)

Today, Quinton leads an effort to preserve San Domingo and share its story. The John Quinton Foundation, a nonprofit group he and Barbara established (and named after their great-grandfather), got the Rosenwald School restored in 2004, reopened the building as a community center in 2014 and continue to use it as, among other things, headquarters for an annual Founders Day gathering each April that has drawn crowds as big as 200 for lectures and historical reenactments.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced its cancellation for two straight years, but Quinton is planning to host one in 2022. Donations to the nonprofit help underwrite that effort or can be directed toward scholarships and life-skills tutorials for local youths. “Everything we do is to continue teaching the value and character we believe our founders and grandparents instilled in us so that younger people can benefit from the same things we originated from,” he says.

Gran’Sarah’s Hill, meanwhile, is a living testament to those values. It’s named after Quinton’s great-grandmother Sarah, the granddaughter of community founder James Brown, and was one of his favorite places to play as a boy.

Quinton plans to slaughter two or three of his hogs this year and use the meat for pork loin, sausages, scrapple and more. And one day this November, he and a few other residents will follow a more recent tradition, offering the food to whatever friends and neighbors decide to drop by.

For Quinton, San Domingo is worth sharing.

“It had virtues that should not be lost,” he says. “We want to make sure people remember what created this community we love.”

— Baltimore Sun
ARTICLE
< https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-blacks-san-domingo-eastern-shore/2021/05/24/86ed2760-bca5-11eb-9c90-731aff7d9a0d_story.html >
 

How are you readers? On Earth day what do you think on the idea on all life on earth being children of Earth? 

Here are some dates you may have missed and can reflect on and some dates you can consider

April 4th - Linus YAle jr was born in 1821, he invented the cylinder lock, and you actually have used that lock a lot
April 6th - 1896 the first modern Olympic games occurred in Athens, Greece
April 8th- the birthday of Baseball Pitcher , JAmes Catifsh Hunter, 1946, he was the first pitcher since 1915 to win 200 games by 31 years of age. He told his wife when he became a free agent by court order: "We don't belong to anybody", two weeks later he became the highest paid pitcher or baseball player. 
April 9th - in 1981 the Nature magazine published the longest scientific name ever, a circa 207,000 letters long name of DeOxyriboNucleic Acid, or what some know as DNA
April 16th- Konwatsi'tsiaienni died in 1796, she was a Mohawk leader who sided against the Colonies in the war of independence but gained land from the british in what is not Canada
April 19th - Roger Sherman was born in 1721, the only person to sign the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution
April 20th- Christopher Robin Milne , friend of Winnie the Pooh, died in 1996
April 21st- Rome was founded by Romulus, friends of countrymen, lend me your ears
April 23rd- William Shakespeare was born 1514... William Shakespeare died 1616... All's well that end well
APril 24th- Rovert B Thomas the founder of the Farmers Almanac was born 1768
April 26th - the first weather report was broadcast in the usa  in 1921
April 28th - The first space tourist , carried on a SOyuz TM32 to the International Space Station occured in 2001, his name was Dennis Tito

Photo Story 
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