SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD K B7
white supremacy tumble.
Reed writes curiously little about the deseg-
regation of New Orleans’s public schools. In
November 1960, federal marshals led 6-year-
old Ruby Bridges into William Frantz Elemen-
tary. All but a few White families pulled their
children from the school. Mobs formed each
morning to threaten those parents who dared
abide integration. This was the most conse-
quential event of the civil rights era in New
Orleans. What did Reed, 13 years old at the
time, think of it? His family might have been
living in Pine Bluff at that moment, but they
returned soon to New Orleans. Whites boycot-
ted some of the public schools through the
early 1960 s, and that event shaped public
education in the city for years to come.
Ruby Bridges walked bravely into the Frantz
School just nine months after the student
sit-ins began. That was the same year James
Baldwin traveled to Ta llahassee. All at once,
young children like Ruby, together with col-
lege students like those Baldwin interviewed,
enlisted in an epic struggle that would bring
down the old racial order.Reed is attuned to their absence. Still, “that
victory left the undergirding class system
untouched and in practical terms affirmed it.”
While middle-class Blacks ascended in the
post-Jim Crow years, impoverished African
Americans continued to suffer.
Reed views Southern history, convincingly,
as a series of ruptures — not as “an unbroken
arc of racial subordination continuous from
the segregation era, the Civil War, or slavery.”
He has little patience for a “simple polarity of
racism/anti-racism,” a not-so-subtle criticism
of Ibram Kendi’s schema, which sorts most
every idea, action and policy into one of two
categories: racist or anti-racist. (To be fair,
Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning” in-
cludes a third category: assimilationist.) Such
a perspective, Reed writes, “flattens history
and context” and “reduces politics to an un-
changing contest of black and white.”
Another momentous change arrived when
New Orleans’s Confederate monuments came
down. The towering monument to Robert E.
Lee had watched over the city for more than a
century. Reed returned to New Orleans in the
spring of 2017, to be at his mother’s side during
her last days. Coincidentally, the Lee statue
was to be removed just then. This is a poignant
and affecting story, as Reed endures the death
of his mother while watching the symbols ofdeveloped a “collective hankering” for those
fantastic beignets, they would convince his
grandmother — t he only one among them who
could pass for White — to go and purchase a
box. Despite her “kvetching,” she experienced
no deep trauma from the fleeting act of pass-
ing.
The beignet story notwithstanding, Reed’s
chapter on passing is one of his least effective.
He wants to make the point that passing in the
Jim Crow era was merely pragmatic and in-
strumental, yet he does not engage with any of
the recent work on the subject — most notably
Allyson Hobbs’s brilliant book, “A Chosen
Exile.” Hobbs, in contrast to Reed, argues that
passing was fundamentally about “losing what
you pass away from.”
“The South” rises to its best in the final
chapter, as Reed examines the changes
wrought by the demise of Jim Crow. When
Reed traveled through rural Louisiana in the
summer of 1993, he noted that African Ameri-
cans held many elected offices while “vestiges”
of the Jim Crow world remained visible. Most
important, large numbers of African Ameri-
cans were still stuck in grinding poverty. Yet
this was a much different social order than the
one that reigned u ntil the 1 960s. The white-su-
premacist regime had been defeated. Because
he lived the everyday outrages of Jim Crow,ing the past or turning it into a lesson. The
effort to remember often leads to abstraction,
Brooks knows, and she is determined to insist
on a specificity that will evoke meanings for
others. “Every statistic,” she writes, “can be
unpacked so that the story at its heart emerg-
es.” One of her favorite pictures, she writes,
“seems oddly unmoored, with nothing to hold
it in place.” That’s part of why she cherishes it;
every time she looks at it, she is surprised by
something. By preserving the capacity to be
surprised, she concludes, we may be more
open to keeping memory alive. With her
caring but purposively unmoored essays, she
has done just this.consciousness.
In each of her brief “pure acts of attention,”
Brooks is paying her respects to fleeting but
meaningful episodes in our history, pushing
back against our culture’s waves of forgetting.
We turn to the past sometimes for accurate,
objective accounts, and sometimes to glean
lessons we can apply to the future. And some-
times we turn to the past simply so that it
won’t d isappear; we pay attention to it because
it was meaningful to us, and we acknowledge
that meaning with reverence. Paying one’s
respects to the past, through memorialization
of some kind, is an act of piety. For all the
melancholy ironies in “Stuck in the Present
Tense,” Brooks’s ruminations are such acts.
The final section of the book, called “Snap-
shots,” is a photo/text collage that is the purest
expression of the author’s desire to hold on to
time without being concerned about explain-with the sadness.
But Brooks herself doesn’t dwell on any
episode very long. She touches on our chang-
ing relationship to the military over the last
several decades and how that relationship has
given rise to new forms of surveillance — the
background to shifting attitudes toward se-
crets and privacy. She also recognizes that
while catastrophe lurks in our national con-
sciousness, we are encouraged not to think
about it all that much. She sees this in our
responses to the threat of war, domestic vio-
lence and, most recently, to epidemics. “Wor-
rying about the virus, like worrying about
nuclear weapons or climate change, was ex-
hausting,” she wrote in the early days of the
coronavirus outbreak. “A merica decided to
change the channel.” Then she changes chan-
nels and briefly considers extreme diary writ-
ers and, after that, the sea of data flooding ourBook World
TRAPPED IN
THE PRESENT
TENSE
Meditations on
American
Memory
By Colette
Brooks
Counterpoint.
230 pp. $26THE SOUTH
Jim Crow and
Its Afterlives
By Adolph L.
Reed Jr.
Verso.
160 pp. $24.95Jason Sokol is the author of three books on the
history of the civil rights movement, including
“There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in
the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.”I
n the Jim Crow South, “ a gesture could blow
up a town.” So wrote James Baldwin in a
1960 essay about student civil rights activ-
ists at F lorida A &M. At the Ta llahassee a irport,
Baldwin watched as a White woman beamed
at the Black chauffeur who had come to meet
her. “If she were smiling at m e that way I would
expect to shake her hand,” he wrote. Such an
action, of course, would have spelled disaster.
“Danger, even the threat of death, would
immediately fill the air.” Black men did not
shake the hands of White women; to do so was
to upend the “folkways” of the Jim Crow South
and to threaten the foundations o f that society.
Six decades later, Adolph L. Reed Jr. ex-
plores and explains those “folkways” in “The
South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives,” a book
based on his personal recollections. Reed is a
political scientist known for his Marxist inter-
pretations and combative polemics, but “The
South” is a different kind of book.
Though he was born in New York City in
194 7, R eed spent many of his formative y ears in
New Orleans as well as Pine Bluff, Ark. He
recounts stories of everyday life under the Jim
Crow regime and illuminates the region’s “dis-
tinctive brew of continuity and change.” Reed
comes down firmly on the side of change. He
argues that the fall of Jim Crow transformed
Southern life. If some observers today are
tempted to look at t he racial injustices that still
abound — White violence, mass incarceration,
segregated schools and neighborhoods, sys-
temic poverty, the return of restrictive voting
laws — and claim that little has changed since
the days of Jim Crow, Reed shows the folly of
such a conclusion.
He opens with penetrating insights into the
nature of the Jim Crow order — how it operat-
ed, for whom and what anchored it all. Reed
contends that to associate Jim Crow merely
with bigoted sheriffs and “Colored Only” signs,
as many Americans now do, is to misunder-
stand this part of our nation’s history. An
emphasis on the familiar images reduces seg-
regation “to its most superficial artifacts, like
reducing the image of an iceberg to its visible
tip.”
That metaphor challenges the reader to
consider what lay underneath, namely the
systems of economic exploitation and racial
terrorism. Yet Reed also refuses to minimize
the “relatively superficial mechanisms,” like
“the petty apartheid of Jim Crow takeout
windows.” Such mechanisms were “never less
than massively inconvenient and humiliat-
ing.” And everyone understood that these
“extrusions” were “inseparably linked — as the
tip is to the submerged 90 percent of an iceberg
— to that larger system.”
Reed and his family endured those humilia-
tions. But in New Orleans, a city that was
comparatively cosmopolitan, there were mo-
ments when racial barriers could seem more
permeable or less suffocating. The McCrory’s
Five and Dime store made an ice cream soda
that was so good that the Jim Crow lunch
counter “hardly registered” to the young Reed.
He also tells the story of a beignet shop that
served Whites only. When his family membersHow the South was transformed by the fall of Jim Crow, and how it wasn’t
HISTORY REVIEW BY JASON SOKOLASSOCIATED PRESSU.S. marshals
escort 6-year-old
Ruby Bridges from
William Frantz
Elementary School
in New Orleans in
November 1960.
Adolph L. Reed
writes that the end
of Jim Crow
segregation
transformed the
South, though
“vestiges” of the
system remained
decades later.E
ssayist Colette Brooks fears that we
Americans are so saturated in informa-
tion (and disinformation) that our mem-
ories have been swept away. We a re in a state of
uneasy presentness, “like Zen moments with-
out the mindfulness,” she notes in the preface
to her book “Trapped in the Present Tense:
Meditations on American Memory.” Brooks
does not try to explain how we got here, nor
how we might escape the seductive temporal
traps intensified by contemporary technology.
Instead, she offers resonant reflections as
“true acts of attention” that are meant to help
us slow down and remember things that
matter too much to be consigned to oblivion.
“Trapped in the Present Tense” is made up
of a half-dozen sections of varying lengths that
are only loosely related. These are rumina-
tions on diverse subjects such as mass murder
and mass statistics, the militarization of our
culture, and family snapshots infused with
nostalgic pathos.
Brooks is drawn to what she has called
“A merican darkness” and the seemingly bot-
tomless capacity of our country to forget its
horrific relationship with violence. She begins
by recalling Charles Whitman, who in 1966
fatally shot 16 people and wounded dozens
from the Tower on the University of Te xas
campus in Austin. Whitman was 25, and he
also died — on a day that for a while was called
“unforgettable.” But it was (largely) forgotten,
as shooting after shooting punctured our
consciousness. Each violent event is crowded
out by the next, until it seems we just expect
that somewhere soon there’s bound to be
another mass shooting. Awash with guns,
Americans are conditioned to believe that
there is nothing they can do to stop what a
generation ago would have been recognized as
madness. Today, we want to move past trag-
edies as quickly as possible. Indeed, Brooks
describes new companies that promise the
kinds of deep cleaning that will bring the
environment (school, home, hotel) to its “pre-
trauma” condition. “It’s a way,” she writes, “to
reverse engineer catastrophe so that routines
can be resumed, property values restored,
lives rebuilt.”
Some of the most moving pages of this book
are about Nancy Lanza, the mother of the
shooter who in eight minutes killed 26 chil-
dren and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in 2012. Lanza struggled for years to try
to help her very damaged son and even went to
shooting ranges with him. She was his first
murder victim. Brooks pays attention to mel-
ancholy ironies like this. She doesn’t try to
explain them or even tie them together. She
just asks the reader to remember and to sitPushing back against the American tendency to forget and move on
ESSAYS REVIEW BY MICHAEL S. ROTHJULIO CORTEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESSDays after the
Sandy Hook
shooting in
December 2012, a
memorial in
Newtown, Conn.,
included a flag with
the names of the 26
victims killed at the
elementary school.
Essayist Colette
Brooks asks her
readers to also
remember the
gunman’s first
victim: Nancy
Lanza, his mother. Michael S. Roth i s president of Wesleyan
University. His latest book is “Safe Enough Spaces:
A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech,
and Political Correctness on College Campuses.”