“It happened whether it offends you or not.”
“It happened whether it offends you or not.”
Some thoughts about Octavia Butler's genius and the evils of censorship, in anticipation of MLK Day.
“That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished”
“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?”
—Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)“I would like to honestly say to you that the white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon […] What I'm trying to get across is that our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on the question of racial justice and racial equality. But over and over again at the same time, it made certain backward steps. And this has been the persistence of the so called white backlash.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America” (1967)
“…no monies shall be used by any school district or school to provide instruction in, to teach, instruct, or train any administrator, teacher, staff member, or employee to adopt or believe, or to approve for use, make use of, or carry out standards, curricula, lesson plans, textbooks, instructional materials, or instructional practices that serve to inculcate any of the following concepts: …meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race”
The late author Octavia Butler’s novels have seen a recent surge in popularity due, probably, to the way her clearly realized fictional worlds more and more resemble our own.
She wasn’t a prophet.
She was clearly a keen observer of her own times, a student of history, and a literary visionary. When she published Kindred in 1979, it had been three years since a school board in New York banned a list of books that included works by Langston Hughes, Kurt Vonnegut and Eldridge Cleaver. Her book takes place— in one of its timelines— mainly in June 1976, the same year as the book ban and the same year as the country’s bicentennial; at one point the time-traveling narrator is called back to the antebellum South on July 4, 1976.
Butler’s work seems timeless because she was acutely conscious of parallels and of the ways history repeats itself.
When her protagonist makes one of her trips back to 1976, “The news switched to a story about South Africa— blacks rioting there and dying wholesale in battles with the police over the policies of the white supremacist government”. Butler was likely writing about the real-life Soweto Uprising of 1976, where according to Britannica, “between 400 and 700 people, many of them children, were killed”.
“South African whites,” Butler’s narrator says, “had always struck me as people who would have been happier living in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth. In fact, they were living in the past as far as race relations went. They lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt”.
How many Americans in 1979 might have read about the riots and thought, I’m glad we don’t have these problems? How many others might have read about the same riots and seen grim similarities with their own daily reality? And how many might have shared the attitudes of those “South African whites” Butler describes, wishing they could “live in the past as far as race relations went”?
Butler’s protagonist, after being ripped out of her own present and into the early 1800s, has a crucial debate with her ancestor Rufus, a young man seemingly designed to take on his father’s position as a slaveholder. She brings with her from 1976 a book on the antebellum chattel slavery era, and he is appalled by the “abolitionist” ideas contained in the factual history of the period in a way that, 47 years later, sounds eerily like the arguments of anti-“woke” politicians and activists.
“You’re reading history, Rufe,” she says. “It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
After Rufus convinces her to destroy the book, partly by making a dubious promise to help her deliver an important letter, she throws it into the fire: “I tore the book into several pieces and threw it onto the hot coals in his fireplace. The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts drifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of ‘wrong’ ideas.”
In 1976, the school board in New York, in real life, was also banning books with “‘wrong’ ideas,” claiming that their list included books which were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy”. Three years earlier, Vonnegut’s book had been literally burned in the furnace of a high school by a school board member, prompting Vonnegut’s famous, pithy letter responding to the censorship. In the letter he wrote, “Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.” Vonnegut, a World War II veteran, was likely contemplating the same Nazi’s as Butler’s protagonist.
The reason it’s important to remember that Butler wasn’t a prophet is that those of us with eyes to see can easily observe that the perpetual censorship train has arrived at our station again, and that the parallels Butler draws between the era of chattel slavery and the 1970s are parallels we can see in our own time, as well.
Over the last few years, right-wing thought police have been trying to legislate their own preferred history and ideology, frequently under the very thin pretense of doing the opposite, of removing “bias” and “partisanship” from schools and libraries. Of course, it is patently ridiculous to argue that the best way to avoid bias is to limit the number of available perspectives, and it is incompatible with what we know about the human brain to pretend anyone can actually tell a story or recount a historical event without bias. (Just ask South Carolina “Freedom Caucus” chair Adam Morgan, who tried his best when he came to speak to my students last year but who, like every human teacher before him, said all kinds of stuff that betrayed his political, ideological, moral, and personal biases. Since then, he and the “Caucus” have been on a campaign to sue a school district because it works with a contractor who it claims— without much in the way of evidence— has somehow promoted “‘wrong’ thoughts”.)
The real goal is the goal of Butler’s budding enslaver, the goal of any repressive regime: gain a monopoly over the narrative in order to consolidate or preserve power. What people believe is not really the point; I seriously doubt the Freedom Caucuses of the world genuinely believe most of their own talking points. As Hannah Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism, repressive regimes aren’t interested in logical persuasion but in repetition of an idea to show their own power over ideas
.Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie calls this control over narrative “a single story”:
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
(That much of the recently passed and currently proposed censorship legislation potentially makes it illegal to teach and discuss many of the pieces I’ve mentioned above to or with students goes a long way towards proving Adichie and Arendt right.)
Martin Luther King, Jr., was not a prophet, either, although he has become something of a secular saint in a country that has deified the ideas of “colorblindness” and “equality”. A major part of the SC “Freedom Caucus” lawsuit centers on the explicit argument that telling students or teachers that the nation is not “colorblind” is a violation of a pro-censorship budget proviso introduced by a member of the “Caucus”. King, who consistently argued during his life against the idea that passing a law or integrating a school, alone, could relieve America of its burden of historical and systemic racism, has been frequently and paradoxically used by pro-censorship forces as an example of someone who is supposed to somehow exemplify colorblindness:
The sheer power on display to turn King against himself— a process that has been underway since the first day this holiday was celebrated— is a grim reflection of the way opponents have long subjected antiracist thinking and activism to distortion, misappropriation and redefinition.
—Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “King Was a Critical Race Theorist Before There Was a Name for It,” 2022.
As sociologist Gary Younge writes, about the eventual adoption of a federal holiday honoring King, 15 years after his death and four years after the publication of Butler’s book,
Congress would pass the bill, but not without a fight. In 1983, the year Ronald Reagan grudgingly signed Martin Luther King Day into law, he was asked if King was a communist sympathizer. “We’ll know in thirty-five years, won’t we?” he said, referring to the eventual release of FBI surveillance tapes.
This King Day, we’ll almost certainly see “celebrations” of King (mostly in the form of cheap social media posts) from the same pro-censorship politicians and others who have championed an ahistorical, bad-faith, intentionally simplistic version of King. The King they champion is a humble man, patient and peaceful, who only wrote a few paragraphs of note (the ones which, out of context, support the argument that America is foundationally “colorblind” and that the goal of the civil rights movement was simply to get people to ignore skin color while also ignoring structural inequalities) and who then apparently ascended into heaven.
There will be no mention of the FBI’s sustained campaign against him— which included blackmail efforts and illegal surveillance, no mention of polling that showed how unpopular he was at the time of his death
, no mention of the way today’s far right culture warriors’ 1960s equivalents sought to paint King as a communist agitator. No mention of the intense danger of physical violence which he and other activists lived under. No mention of his violent death or of the efforts in which he was involved, at the time of his death, to support striking sanitation workers. (The censors who will pretend to honor his legacy tomorrow are frequently the same politicians who have fought to crush and vilify organized labor of all kinds, who have ignored labor advocates, who have fought to roll back federal programs designed to address racial inequities in the workplace.)
This is of a piece with the goal of promoting an ahistorical version of King: creating a whitewashed, cleaned-up history that is unbiased only in the sense that the people doing the whitewashing have presented their perspective is the objective truth— even when that “truth” is impossible to square with the historical record or with the everyday reality of life in America.
King was a radical: in the same speech today’s censors are most likely to selectively quote, he openly celebrated a nonviolent “marvelous new militancy” and set out tangible goals that have, objectively, not been fully achieved in our own time
:There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
And this is the power of censorship. Everyone should read King’s speech, but they should read the whole speech. Not an excerpt in a textbook. Not a sentence in a tweet. Not an out-of-context citation in an intentionally false revisionist history
.If I have learned anything as an English teacher, it is that everything is context. No word, no sentence, no paragraph, can stand alone. This is why good faith arguments contain citations and evidence; they do not pretend to be able to capture the entirety of a thought or a stance or an ideology with a phrase or sentence. This is why intentionally misleading arguments (like the South Carolina “Freedom Caucus” lawsuit against Lexington School District One) use quotes out of context and include haphazard, at times incorrect citations: the intellectual discipline to make a good faith argument is beside the point, and these people aren’t stupid, but arrogant. They believe that can con and gaslight the public by changing the meanings of words, by removing the context from history, by using the words of great leaders against them when they are not longer present to correct the record.
My advice to everyone on the day that bears King’s name is to watch or read one of his speeches or essays from beginning to end. Sit with both its inspirational qualities and its deliberate discomforts. Consider the amazing but imperfect human beings who wrote those texts. Allow yourself to reflect on what they said in the 1960s: what applies today? What seems outdated or even wrong? What other perspectives can add additional textures?
Reading King makes me believe that this is the approach he would have advised. As he wrote in 1967, nine years before Octavia Butler sent her fictional protagonist into a fictional past informed deeply by historical fact:
“To lose illusions is to gain truth”.
Arendt wrote, “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” I talked about the parallels between her observation and the censorship movement of today’s far right here.
According to Gary Younge, “In 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him as a favorable one. Life magazine branded his anti–Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church “demagogic slander” and “a script for Radio Hanoi.” I highly recommend reading Younge’s entire essay.
Younge goes on to write, “But to the extent that the speech was about ending racism, one can say with equal confidence that its realization is not even close. Black unemployment is almost double that of whites; the percentage of black children living in poverty is almost triple that of whites; black male life expectancy in Washington, DC, is lower than in the Gaza Strip; one in three black boys born in 2001 stands a lifetime risk of going to prison; more black men were disenfranchised in 2004 because they were felons than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment ostensibly secured their right to vote.”
The 1776 Project Report, commissioned hastily during the Trump Administration, was of a piece with the same Trump-era Executive Order that was later copied and pasted to created South Carolina’s budget proviso 1.93. Ironically, the report quotes King’s words about the “marvelous new militancy,” but only to criticize later civil rights advocates who supposedly “rejected” King’s desire to work together with white allies. What this framing ignores is King’s long history, across many of his most important writings— notably, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) and “The Other America” (1967), where he pointedly criticizes allies, including white supporters of early civil rights goals, who deny the realities of oppression or who caution black Americans to wait. (He wrote a book called Why We Can’t Wait in 1964; this criticism was never intended to be subtle.)