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Aesthetic
Realism Seminar
From "Respect, Contempt, and
Individuality" by
Nancy Huntting
Part
III. Individuality and Relation
[ From
Part I:
Eli Siegel explained what individuality really is--and I believe that
every
person’s personal happiness and our collective future depends on this
great,
true explanation being known. He writes in his essay titled “There Is
Individualism”:
“Individualism
is the
whole world rightly in ourselves, and welcome there. It is reality
working
with a sweet lack of interference, through us….It is the self thriving
on what it has to do with, making beautiful what it has to do with.” ]
Early in her
autobiography Pauli Murray
quotes a "study" published the year of her birth, 1910, in a Columbia
University
text, titled "Social and Mental Traits of the Negro," that is sickening
to read: "The Negro...has few ideals...little conception of the meaning
of virtue, truth, honor, manhood, integrity." This is blatant, vicious
contempt--which Eli Siegel explained is the cause of all racism.
He defined contempt as "the addition to self through the lessening of
something
else." It is, he wrote, "the vile, cruel,unfeeling presence in the
nature
of man." He showed that contempt caused slavery. And slavery was
one of the most horrible assertions of false individuality -- of one
human
being's supposed superiority over others -- that has ever been.
Though
slavery was abolished, the same unfeeling, vicious contempt continued
in
segregation and continues now. Yet contempt can change, when people
really
see what it is, and that it does not strengthen them -- it weakens them
to have it.
In
1922 when Pauli Murray was 12, Eli Siegel was living and working in the
city where she was born, Baltimore. He was 20 years old when he
wrote
"The Equality of Man" which was published in the Modern Quarterly--I
think these are some of the greatest sentences ever written, and are
instrumental
in ending racism:
"And I
say it is wrong,
to say that any one's mind is inferior, until it has been completely
seen
that it has been given all the nourishment, care and training that it
needs
or could get...men have not had an equal chance to be as actively
powerful
as they might be. And if they had been given an equal chance to
use
all the powers they had at birth, they would be equal."
This has never been said
before with
the clarity and conviction Mr. Siegel had, and one of the reasons is
that
people have felt if everyone is truly equal, their very basis for
individuality
is threatened. In Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel proved gloriously
how false this is. Segregation was supposedly "separate but
equal,"
but in fact was an ugly attempt to separate many people from their
right
to the wealth and goodness of the world.
In
1937 Miss Murray was a graduate of Hunter College living in New York
City
and among the thousands of jobless. In a chapter titled "Saved by
the WPA" she tells of getting a job with the WPA Worker's Education
Project,
through which she learned she had a relation to many other people she
hadn't
known she had:
"I had
never thought
of white people as victims of oppression, but now I heard...white
workers
tell...of being evicted, starved out, beaten, and jailed when they
tried
to organize a union... The study of economic oppression led me to
realize
that Negroes were not alone...Seeing the relationship between my
personal
cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of
isolation...and
gave me an unequivocal understanding that equality of treatment was my
birthright and not something to be earned."
"For a Negro
to act on this conviction," she continues, "was considered almost
suicidal
in many parts of the South." However, from the time in 1938 when
she applied to her state university, North Carolina, for graduate study
in law, knowing no black person had ever been accepted, she decided to
fight segregation. Pauli Murray was to receive a letter that read
"members
of your race are not admitted." And when President Roosevelt visited
North
Carolina University that year and "hailed it as a great liberal
institution
of learning," she writes, "I sat down immediately and poured out my
indignation":
"12,000,000
of your citizens
have to endure insults, injustices, and such degradation of the spirit
that you would believe impossible...Have you raised your voice loud
enough
against the burning of our people? Why has our government refused
to pass anti-lynching legislation? "
Though
she was cautioned by persons close to her not to be so intense and
outspoken,
something was happening inside Pauli Murray and it was a turning point
in her life--a decision that she as one individual needed to fight for
justice for all people; a fight she had to believe could
succeed
in this world:
"I
had sullenly
endured [the] indignities [of segregation, she wrote] when I could not
avoid them. Yet every submission was accompanied by a nagging
shame
which no amount of personal achievement in other areas could
overcome.
When I finally ...took a concrete step to battle for social justice,
the
accumulated shame began to dissolve in a new sense of
self-respect.
For me, the real victory...was the liberation of my mind from years of
enslavemen."
Miss Murray
was Class of 1944 at Howard University Law School, it's president and
the
only woman. That year she proposed "a radical approach" in a
Civil
Rights class: that the "separate but equal" legal doctrine on which
segregation
was based, which had existed since the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme
Court Decision, could be knocked down in its entirety. Her
proposal
met with astonishment and disfavor from her professor and other
students--it
was "too visionary," and "likely to precipitate an unfavorable decision
of the Supreme Court." But her final paper that year proposed a
frontal
attack on the segregation doctrine.
Ten
years later this "radical" 1944 Howard Law School paper, and her later
book comprehensively researching and citing racial laws, were of vital
use to the lawyers preparing for Brown v. Board of Education, the
historic
1954 case in which the segregation "doctrine" was stuck down.
Thurgood
Marshall, then NAACP lawyer, said her book States Laws on Race and
Color
was their "bible" in the final stages of the legal attack. She
asserted
in her paper of 1944 the effect of "separate but equal"--"is to place
the
Negro in an inferior social and legal position" and "to do violence to
the personality of the individual affected." And in the historic
1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren
wrote
these moving words:
"To
separate [children]
from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their
race
generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community
that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be
undone."
In "There Is
Individualism" I was so
affected as I read these beautiful sentences of Eli Siegel, central to
the truth of both Miss Murray's statement and Earl Warren's:
"The
critical question
here is: Is relation something outside the self only; or is it as much
a part of self as blood, bones, skin, personal memories?...The self is
a wanting-to-have-to-do- with thing; and denying, corrupting, diluting
its wanting-to-have-to-do-with is like stopping, interfering with,
meddling
with the growth of an infant."
As segregation
hurt the minds and hearts of so many men, women, and children, insulted
and denied their possibilities, so today, whenever we have contempt --
for a mother, a classmate, a co-worker, people of another background or
race -- we are denying and corrupting our very own relation to the
world
as well as theirs, insulting our own possibilities as individuals.
Understandably,
Pauli Murray had doubts and bitterness as time went on. She was
deeply
troubled in the early 1980s, as indicated by the title of her
auobiography, Song
in a Weary Throat --that though important legal advancements had
been
made, there was still as there is now widespread racism in America. And
so I believe she was cheering with many others when on August 16, 2002,
the city of Baltimore and state of Maryland celebrated "Eli Siegel Day"
for his "great contributions to humanity," by proclamation of Mayor
Martin
O'Malley and Governor Parris Glendening!
The knowledge exists to end racism and prejudice everywhere, and for
every
human being in the world to be able to have their full power as
individuals,
through the study of Aesthetic Realism, so beautifully, courageously
come
to by Eli Siegel--and it must be known now!
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to Part II
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