Links looking at racism from the points of view of Wendell Berry, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor.
If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself…. I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured.”—Wendell Berry
The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor? It Never Should Have Happened
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell writes at Commonweal Magazine about the removal of Flannery O’Connor’s name from a building at Loyola University Maryland.
The deed is done. A week after the decision by Loyola University Maryland to remove Flannery O’Connor’s name from one of its buildings, the cherry-pickers arrived on the school’s bucolic campus in northeast Baltimore and, letter by letter, the name of one America’s most iconic Catholic writers disappeared from the dormitory that had been known for more than a decade as Flannery O’Connor Hall.”
Who Was Flannery O’Connor and Why Is She Being Canceled?
Lorraine Murray writes at National Catholic Register:
By the time of her death in Georgia in 1964, O’Connor had come to express strong support for the civil rights movement and applauded the gains already made in racial relations. Today she’s being accused of racism.”
What to Do About William Faulkner
Drew Gilpin Faust’s book about William Faulker is reviewed at The Atlantic by Michael Gorra.
A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.”
Recommended by Katy Carl, “Interesting resonances with the debate over O’Connor. We need to come to a full understanding of what these writers saw, how and why they saw it, and why perceptions that seem clear to us now were by no means so easily available to them then.”
Author William Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, stand outside Rowan Oak, their home near Oxford, Mississippi, in the spring of 1955.
As I sit here I am shocked there is not a flood of outraged response preceeding mine on the deconstructing of Flannery O’Connor. I remember my first acquaintance with Paul Elie’s utter failure to understand a depression era Southern Georgia O’Connor in his book on Catholic writers, I guess he was demanding a perfection of attitude in O’Connor he did not demand in the writing of Walker Percy, who himself had racial flaws of being raised in Mississippi and Louisiana or in the imperfections of Dorthea Day and Thomas Merton that lead them in evolving faith. There is often a moral evolution in a person’s life, one I have to undergo in my own life, when I knew some of the racial feelings I acquired living pre-integration Mississippi were wrong,I find myself having to pray against those prejudices. My father gave me as a Christmas gift two of Flannery O’Connor’s books shortly before her death, and I am not sure 16 and angst-ridden are the best environments for first exposure. They were much more impressive than my de rigueur sub rosa reading of Catcher in the Rye (which sadly has become required reading in some schools taking all the impact of reading it away). I have always wondered if my grandmother, who taught school in Millegdeville knew Flannery. But I have never once wondered if she were a racist. Her writing testifies against if. It almost makes me sad I have degree from a Jesuit school that such a closed minded attitude exists. But then I was often exposed to unforgiving, closed minds in the unreconstructed South.
Good post, Mike.
I read everything she wrote, and it’s hard to imagine why anyone thinks she was a racist. She was a realist and poked fun at anybody’s pretensions. I recall more than one story of hers that satirized white liberals simpering condescension to blacks. The Geranium, her first published story, illustrated without approval the racism of an old white Southerner who finds himself transplanted to a New York City apartment with black neighbors.