Spirit in Action
Racial Innocence - Civil Rights, Racism, Dolls & Uncle Tom's Cabin
Robin Bernstein traces the roots & mechanisms of racism in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin's piercing analysis and thorough research ferret out gems of both fact and insight, providing powerful resources for those working to reduce racism and its propaganda.
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Dec 2011
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[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Another treat for you today for Spirit in Action. Hopefully an experience you're used to if you're a regular listener. Today, we'll be speaking with Robin Bernstein, author of Racial Innocence, performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights. Robin's thesis and writing are insightful, powerful, and valuable. Valuable for those of us who look to see clearly and reduce racism and its tools in propaganda. Robin Bernstein is an Associate Professor at Harvard University in African and African American Studies and of studies of women, gender, and sexuality. And Racial Innocence deals with the Supreme Court, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dolls, Minstrelsy, Uncle Remus, and much, much more, providing solid intellectual and heart material for those working for social justice, especially in the area of racism. Robin Bernstein joins us from Boston, Massachusetts. Robin, I'm so pleased to have you with me today for Spirit in Action. Thanks for having me. I'm very glad to be here. This book is quite a work of scholarship and depth. First thing I have to ask you is, did you like playing with Dolls as a literal? When I was a child, I loved playing with Dolls. I was absolutely devoted to Dollplay, yes. Well, I think it comes through in the devotion that you put to this study. Fundamental to this whole thing is really what comes out at the end of the book. There's the Clark's study about the Doll study that was so influential in the Supreme Court decision in 1954. I think we need to start with that so that people can understand what the deep motivation for analyzing all these racial messages that we've gotten through physical things. Could you talk about the Doll tests of Mamie Phipps, Clark, and Kenneth Clark? These tests that were so influential, I think, in that 1954 Supreme Court decision. Sure. My book is about how ideas about childhood became useful to ideas about race in this country, from the late 19th through the first half of the 20th century. So, I'm looking at moments in history when childhood became really, really important in contests over race. And one of those moments was, of course, the Civil Rights Movement. Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark did what they called the Doll test, where they showed African-American children a brown doll and a pinkish doll, which the children identified as black and white, raciality. And Kenneth and Mamie Clark asked the children a series of questions. They asked them which is the good doll, which is the bad doll, and which doll is more like you was the last question. This is very familiar to a lot of your listeners. The majority of African-American children identified the white doll as the good doll and the black doll as the bad doll. And then when it came time for them to say which doll was more like them, a lot of them just burst into tears because, of course, there's no good answer to that question once you've given those previous answers. And this became very important in Brown versus Board of Education, because it was taken as evidence of African-American children's poor self-esteem that was caused, the NAACP argued, by segregation. So, this became a very positive and very important part of the Civil Rights Movement. But what I argue is, let's pause for a moment and let's take this temporarily. Let's look at it not only in the context of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, let's also look at it in the history of dolls. What did dolls mean? What did racialized dolls mean in 1939 when the clerks began their experiments? So, what I'm interested in is what the common sense was among the children about how you're supposed to play with racialized dolls. I think that children have a lot of knowledge about how they're supposed to play with different kinds of toys, and, of course, children do a million different things. Children do all sorts of things because they have free wills, just like adults. So, I'm not so much interested in only what children did do, but what the common sense was that you were supposed to do with dolls in 1939. And what I found was that black dolls for a full century, leading up to 1939, for a full century black dolls had figured in play that involved scenarios of servitude and scenarios of violence. And so, the very quick summary of my argument is that when a child rejects a doll or accepts a doll, the child is not only accepting the physicality of the doll, the child is accepting or rejecting practices of play that are associated with that doll. So, I think that the children in the Clark doll experiments were actually resisting. They were resisting a history of play involving violence and servitude and black dolls. And this is a way of thinking about the children in the Clark doll experiments, not only as victims of poor self-esteem, but as people with agency, people who were resisting a history of racism. Let's step backwards from the doll test then to Daisy and her speech before the class. I thought that was so poignant. Was she well-known outside of circles or is this something that you dug up? I dug this up. You're talking about Daisy Turner, who was an African-American woman who lived most of her life in Vermont. She was born in the 1880s and she died in the 1980s. She died at a very advanced age. And she was a woman with an extraordinary memory. You can see her on Ken Burns's Civil War documentary. She recites Civil War poetry that was taught to her by her father, who was a former slave. So, this is not well-known. I mean, she's a little bit well-known because she was in the Kenneth Clark documentary. And she's somewhat well-known among folklore circles in Vermont because she lived such a long time and she had such a wonderful memory. And starting in the 1980s, folklorists became very interested in interviewing her. And there are many dozens of hours of videotape interviews with Daisy Turner at the Vermont Folklor Society. But no, this is the first scholarship that I'm aware of on Daisy Turner. I'm not aware of anybody else who has written about her in a scholarly way. Well, what happened with her when she was just a child, when she was asked to be part of this program with dolls from different countries and all, is quite stunning. I mean, it's amazing and she, I guess, makes the argument for you about what happened in these doll tests. Yeah, in the very early 1890s, I believe it was about 1891, when Daisy Turner was a young girl. She was in an integrated school in Vermont. Her teacher, a white woman, devised a pageant for the end of the school year. And it was a doll pageant. And each girl was to dress identically with a doll, get on stage and recite a little poem that the teacher had written. A little poem about the doll and about the girl. And the teacher gave Daisy Turner a black doll and wrote a little poem for Daisy to recite with the doll on the stage. And Daisy did not want to do it. And she went home to her father and her father talked her into doing it. Her father felt that Daisy's feelings about the doll reflected her feelings about herself. So this is the same idea that the clerks had, that a black child's feelings toward a black doll must be the same as the child's feelings toward his or her race self. So she didn't want to do it, but her father talked her into it. So she reluctantly agreed, she memorized the poem, and she got up on stage on the day of the pageant. But at the last moment, she changed her mind. And instead of reciting the poem that the teacher wanted her to recite, she made up her own poem on the spot, a rhyming poem. So this was drawing upon her family's tradition of extemporizing verse. She extemporized furious verse in which she rejected the doll and she threw the doll down. Then she put herself on stage and just sat there and just refused to perform as the teacher had wanted her to. And this became a favorite story in her life, and she told it many, many times. And it's one of the highlights in the video recordings of her interviews. So my question was, what was so terrible? What was so terrible about reciting a poem with this doll? Other people had asked her this question, but she had always refused to answer in any sort of direct way. And she had not been willing either to say what the poem was. She claimed that she couldn't remember the poem, which is ridiculous because this is a person with an extraordinary memory for verse. This is a woman who recited without hesitation from memory a 17-minute poem on the occasion of her 104th birthday. So it's implausible that she couldn't remember the poem. And so my question was, what was so terrible that she didn't want to talk about it close to 100 years later? I looked at all of the things that she did tell us about the doll. What she told us about it was that it was black and that its name was Dina. She also told us that she, Daisy, was wearing a red dress and she had her hair and braids, which means that the doll must have been wearing a red dress and had its hair and braids because each doll matched the girl in costume. So that indirect evidence of what the doll was wearing. The argument I make, what I do is I look at the history of black doll's name, Dina, and there's a very, very clear history. Black doll's name, Dina, were associated with slavery and associated with servitude. The name, Dina, was associated with servitude. We can think of someone's in the kitchen with Dina. So this was a doll that wasn't just a black doll. This was a doll that was encapsulating a history of slavery and was confusing the girl with the doll. They were doubling together. And Daisy, of course, was freeborn. She was born long after emancipation and she was born in the north, but she was the daughter of two former slaves. And so to get on stage and perform in a way that was visually confusing her with a doll visually confusing her with a slave character was very threatening. And I argue that that is what she was resisting. So in other words, in some ways it's the same thing that the kids who were involved in the Clark doll tests were facing to it. It is about essentially identity with a black doll in themselves. Yeah. Well, the Clark thought that however a child felt toward a doll that was similarly raised to the child, that that was necessarily the child feeling that way toward him or herself. That's exactly what Daisy's father thought. Daisy's father was distraught that his daughter didn't want to perform with a black doll because he thought that that must mean that she had poor self esteem. But I'm suggesting that actually there's a lot of history in black dolls, especially at the turn of the 20th century. And much of that history is well worth resisting. Well, coming back to this fascination you have with dolls, was that the motivation for you getting into this study or was it concerns about racial prejudice, racial discrimination, slavery? What was your entry point into this study? My entry point was definitely an interest in childhood and race. And I did not realize that I was going to write about dolls for a really long time. But dolls are very important to the history of race because dolls are, they are like people, but they are not people and they are property. They are physical objects. But the minute you start to play with a doll, it animates. And the minute you start having literature about sentient dolls, literature about dolls that are alive, what you have is property that is sentient. That contradiction, that paradox, property that is sentient, that's the same paradox that is at the heart of slavery. Slavery is what legally defines some people as property. And this is an epistemological outrage, this confounds logic. This is a kind of logic that should not ever exist. And it's deeply disturbing. So literature about live dolls in the 19th century when you were living in a world in which some people were defined as property. Literature about dolls that are alive signals the same set of anxieties that are wrapped up in slavery itself. So dolls became, in the 19th century, a very powerful way to talk about slavery and to talk about the anxieties that slavery arouses about the borders of humanity, about what a person is. So no, dolls were not the point of entry. I was interested in childhood and race and then dolls just kept coming up in everything that I was reading and so I followed the trail of the evidence. Well, it's a mass of evidence. I am sometimes, as you were going through and explaining your points in the book, I was sometimes a little bit incredulous. I was saying that seems stretching it that the doll could have that much effect or this ad or the way of thought or action that maybe you're making too strong a point out of that. And then you would proceed to quote from someone's diary from someone's book. Every time I had a thought that went counter to your argument, you brought me up with solid evidence. How did you amass that evidence? Have you memorized everything from the last 150 years? Oh my goodness. Well, first of all, thank you so much. No, I worked really hard on this book. I knew that I was making some strong and powerful claims and I knew that I was also making some counterintuitive claims. And so I knew that I had to really back up everything I was saying. I worked very, very hard and I did an enormous amount of research and I tried to have multiple levels of evidence for every claim and the claims that were more counterintuitive. I needed to have more evidence in order to be persuasive. So really, I just, I worked enormously hard. That's the honest answer. Well, it's work that was fruitful clearly. Thank you. I think that before I go into any more depth about the book, I want to put out to you one of my own thoughts and see how this resonates with you. I think that one of the most powerful mental, emotional exercises that we can do in terms of addressing prejudice or the ways that we abuse anyone in society is to take a historical example and get ourselves really into their shoes and understand how well-meaning, normally upright, compassionate, good people, God-fearing people, how they can participate in something that, from our point of view, looks evil. So you could think about Germans during World War II, or you could think about those who were slave owners, slaveholders. And I think that if we can really understand in their shoes the mental forces, the emotional forces, that would motivate someone, for instance, to say, I'm a good God-fearing person and I'm willing to die to protect our right to have slaves. If someone can understand that, we can understand then how today in our world we're living out discrimination and abuse of individuals. I think that is exactly right. I completely agree with everything that you just said. And so did you have some idea in writing this book that by illuminating some of how this, I could call it propaganda, this mental influence, this emotional influence on people, how it becomes part of the soup that we live in, and therefore supports institutions like discrimination? Did you have some idea that by illuminating it that we would be decreasing its force and maybe see how we're doing it today? In terms of seeing how we're doing it today, definitely, in terms of whether knowing more about the past can help us change the future, that's anybody's guess. That's really hard to say. What I do think is that we don't have a prayer of changing the future unless we understand the past, whether actually knowing the past will enable us to change the future while not without hard work and not without a lot of conscious effort. Part of what drew me into this project was, for me the question was, how is it possible for a huge number of people, including a very diverse group of people, to believe something that is false? And the false thing that I was interested in was the idea of white supremacy. So for me it was, and still is, this enormous question, how is it that a huge number of people of different genders, of different regions, of different classes, and even of different races could be convinced that one race is superior to all others? How is that possible? When I first started this project, I thought, what if there was a machine, a giant machine, that could, by enormous effort, reverse gravity within the machine? There could be such a machine because we can create zero gravity forces on this planet, it just requires enormous machinery. So what if we had a machine that could reverse gravity within the machine? That is to say, a machine that could convince everybody inside the machine that down was up and up was down. I thought, how much energy would it take to run that machine? How much energy every second would it take to keep this machine going? And then what would happen in those inevitable moments with any machine when the machine clutches up a little? When the machine doesn't quite work perfectly, because we know that all machines do that, what would happen to the people inside the machine? How would they negotiate it? How would they manage it? And the machine, of course, is a metaphor that helps me to think about white supremacy and to think about the enormous energy that it takes to maintain the belief among a huge number of people that something that is false is true. And what happens in those inevitable moments when the truth becomes visible? That's one of the ways that I entered into this project. I wanted to understand how people could believe that something false was something true. I'm a little bit curious about the pieces of this, how it came together. Clearly dolls figure into it, you know, the 1954 decision, the doll test. You can go back from that. A very key part of this from the beginning of your book is Harriet Beecher Stowe's book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. And I think I had no idea what a major work of literature that was, how influential in our society, not only in terms of the good work it did, but the counter work that it did. The whole Uncle Remus and Tails came out of it kind of as the dark side of it, if you will. I had no idea. So how did those pieces come together for you? Did you discover them in them? Are they pretty obvious if you look at the history? No, Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of my points of entry into this project. I am trained in the theater historian and Uncle Tom's Cabin was a massive theatrical phenomenon in the 19th century and well into the 20th century. What happened was after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin immediately, dramatists and actors, they started putting the stories on stage. And this was incredibly popular throughout the United States and also throughout Europe and beyond. It was a massive phenomenon. At many points in the 19th century, there were 100 different traveling troops that were performing Uncle Tom's Cabin. They would have an Uncle Tom's Cabin show, they would pack up, they would go to a town, they would perform Uncle Tom's Cabin, they'd pack up, they'd go to the next town, and they did this for 75 years. And at certain points, there were 100 different troops doing this in the United States alone, doing this simultaneously. Uncle Tom's Cabin is arguably the most often performed play in human history. So this is a massive phenomenon, not just a massive American phenomenon, but in terms of global human history. This is a massive phenomenon, and the phenomenon largely petered out around 1930. So now a lot of people have forgotten how massive it was, but it was Harry Potter and Star Wars and NASCAR, beyond, it was all that for 75 years. The thing that I thought was amazing about the analysis you did is how it became perverted to really achieve the opposite of what I believe that Harriet Beecher Stowe was intending. She was intending this play to help free us from discrimination, to move us away from slavery, but then somehow it got to be used for the opposite purpose. That's exactly right. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin as part of an abolitionist politic. She wanted to see the end of slavery, but a lot of the dramatists who put Uncle Tom's Cabin on stage, some of them were anti-slavery, some of them were pro-slavery, and some of them just wanted to make a buck, and really most of them just wanted to make a buck. They were perfectly happy to take these characters that had become very famous and very recognizable and very popular, and to use the characters in any way that would bring in the audiences. At first, many of the Uncle Tom's Cabin shows some of them stuck fairly close to certain parts of the plot, although of course they all edited, because Uncle Tom's Cabin is hundreds of pages long, and if you actually staged all of the novel, it would go on for days if not weeks. So they all edited a lot, but as time went on, they moved further and further from the novel, and so by the 1880s, there started to be really wild things on stage, animals. At first, it was donkeys and then dogs, and then it was elephants. They had elephants on stage during Uncle Tom's Cabin. I can't explain this. It makes no sense. They also had what were called double mammoth productions, which had two of certain characters. It was sort of like a three-ring circus. There would be more than one thing going on at once, and so you'd have two topsies, for example. Topsy was one of the key characters who really changed a lot from Harry Beecher Stowe's novel, and then from the theatrical productions. Topsy moved into popular culture, and as she moved further and further away from the novel, she became more and more of a denigrated character. She became less human. She became less of a person, and ultimately she became a very powerful libel against African Americans. I think this is a good point to enter in and explain what the title of the book is. Again, racial innocence, performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights, and we're speaking with Robin Bernstein. My question is, do you want to explain to people what racial innocence is? I think it's key in the play. That's why I think it's maybe appropriate to bring it in here. Oh, sure. The idea of racial innocence refers to the idea that any political argument can be made stronger and more persuasive if you can convince everybody that whatever it is you're arguing for is good for children. So I can take any stance in the whole world, and whatever it is, if I can convince you that my position is good for innocent children will help protect the children, then that instantly becomes so much more persuasive. And it's useful within racial arguments, for example. It's useful in racist arguments, and it's useful in anti-racist arguments. And I'm looking at the history of how that happened. I'm interested in the way in which the idea of childhood innocence that this way that we can invoke the innocent children became useful to just about any political argument, and the book is about how it became useful to arguments about race. There's all parts of this that get illuminated throughout the book. Some of the phases of your argument and your analysis include talking about Topsy, talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin, talking about Raggedy Anne, talking about blackface minstrelry. All of these things are part of how our culture dealt with, propagated, and turned, I think, essentially the beauty that was Uncle Tom's Cabin, or the beauty of the motivation behind it, into something that was used to justify the oppression of African-Americans. And I guess Africans, too, just by international relations, too. Which pieces do you feel like highlighting, which there's so much richness there, and I do hope people read it. It's not a light read, but it is a compelling read, especially because, you know, you pull out things like the picture of the Cataline girl, and you say, "Oh, see those with black skin. They're happy harvesting cotton." And then you put a white woman, a white girl, out there, and clearly she's suffering in it, and we use that for compassion, like we have to help these poor children who are being abused, poor white children. One of the arguments you make is that white children were innocent and pure, and black people of young age are not children. It is racist to suggest that only white children can be innocent. And that is exactly what happened in the 19th century. White supremacists argued that black juveniles were not innocent and were not children. And that's why Frederick Douglass wrote in 1855. He wrote, "Flave children are children." And the reason he had to write that was because white supremacists were claiming that slave children were not children. So this is a crucial component of white supremacy. The idea that black juveniles are somehow not children is an enormously painful racist claim. And this fact of history, it's enormously painful. It's a terribly difficult one to think about even today. One of the places that we can see this libel enacted is in popular culture that made African American juveniles appear to be invulnerable to pain. So there were a lot of visual images in the 19th century, and really I'm sorry to say well into the 20th century, in which African American children were subjected to terrible tortures, dismemberment, burning, drowning, horrible things. And the implication was that they would be fine. It was a very cartoonish like violence. And in fact, that's one of the places that cartoon violence came from. It came out of these images of black juveniles not being pained by things that would of course pain any human body. So if you have lots and lots of images of black children enduring torture and just laughing about it, and I'm talking about in visual art, in cartoons. And also on stage, if you have images of Topsy being beaten on stage, and this is not tragic, this is comic in Uncle Tom's Cabin shows, this is part of a very serious and very painful libel against African Americans. The key way in which children were central to white supremacist arguments about who got to be not only a child, but who got to be a person, who got to be counted as a full human being. This is a configuration that goes back to slavery. Slavery did not, under slavery, enslaved people were not counted as full people. And when slavery ended, the argument over who got to be a full fledged human being just to continue. And it went into other venues and one of the special places that it went into was children's culture. One of the things I had trouble with in the book, you talked about violence perpetrated against stalls, and there's some really graphic examples of it, so I'm certainly not dismissing it completely. But one of the things that I'm aware of is 100 years ago, or 150 years ago, attitudes about violence to children were considerably different. That is to say the idea that you're going to get a weapon and someone's going to be whipping you with a belt, or in other ways, disciplining you. That was considered, I guess, normal in a way that our society views with horror. And I think that that violence was perpetrated on children regardless of skin color. Am I wrong about that, or was there just a special level of violence towards those whose skins were darker? That's a great point. No, you're not wrong. The difference is it's absolutely true that a level of corporal punishment was acceptable for all children in a way that it is not acceptable anymore. That's completely true. The difference is the purpose behind the violence. So if a white child was beaten, it was considered an acceptable thing if the purpose of the beating was to teach the child something or to cause the child to behave in an acceptable manner. So there was a purpose behind it that wasn't just to beat the child. Whereas for African American youth in popular culture, and I'm not talking about actual people, what I'm really talking about here is images in culture. Images of black children being beaten, they didn't have to be any sort of purpose behind it. It wasn't to teach the child anything. It wasn't even to punish the child for something. The reason that black children were beaten in culture was to provide laughs, to provide white supremacist laughs, and that was completely different from representations of beatings of white children in culture. When you were talking about cartoon violence and how acceptable it is, my mind went immediately to Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner, and the dynamite blows up in Coyote's face, and he's not harmed. Are you saying that this was first tried out on black-faced people in either cartoons, children's dolls, and/or, you know, black-faced minstrelie, that that's where it was legitimized, that kind of violence? That's one of the sources. Comic violence is really old. We can find comic violence. Comic violence is older than the United States. Comic violence is part of humor on many, many continents. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that comic violence comes from black-faced minstrelie. However, in this country, in this situation, black-faced minstrelie is one of the sources of a tradition of comic violence that moved into cartoons. If you look at very early animation, racial humor was an absolute integral and open part of early animation. So if you go online, you can look at this on YouTube, and you do some searches for early Mickey Mouse or early Bugs Bunny. What you're going to see in these old black-and-white cartoons is a lot of really open minstrel humor, because at the time, it was totally acceptable. So a lot of cartoon characters that are very familiar to us, in fact, grew out of black-faced minstrelie, and those black-faced minstrel styles of humor, including comic violence, violence that does not cause pain, black-faced minstrelie is one of the places where that kind of humor has origins. As we're talking about this, I'm looking forward in time to current day. Certainly, I've looked at the 1950s and how all of this played out in terms of brown versus sport of education, but I'm also looking about how it comes forward today. Has that item of violence, you know, blacks aren't hurt by violence, white-faced people are hurt by violence? Has that changed? Has that disappeared? Has that modified? What's happened as it's moved forward in time? Or maybe you only look backwards? Well, it's definitely changed, and this is one of the great triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement revealed a lot of truth. Among the truths that the Civil Rights Movement revealed were that black children, most certainly are children. When all people feel pain, and also children's culture that represents mannies, that represents Uncle Remus, that represents Topsy characters, this is not okay. This is not innocent. Before the Civil Rights Movement, comic Topsy's who got beaten on stage were completely acceptable. They seemed innocent. They seemed racially innocent. And the Civil Rights Movement revealed the fact that comic Topsy's who got beaten on stage were always political. And that was a triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, so a lot has changed. For those who have just tuned in, I'll mention that you're listening to Spirit in Action, which is a Northern Spirit radio production. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. Our website is northernspiritradio.org, and on that site, you'll find our archives. The last six and a half years, you're going to find connections to our guests, like to Robin Bernstein, who's our guest today. She's author of Racial Innocence, Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. You'll find links to guests like Robin, and you'll also find a place to leave comments, comment on her show, and on the other shows there, and help us produce better shows for the future. Again, we're with Robin Bernstein. She is Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. And I meant to ask you earlier on, Robin, do those titles go together, being Professor of African-American Studies and Studies, Women, Gender, or is that two different posts or departments that you're uniting in your person? Well, I have a joint appointment. African and African-American Studies is a department, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality is a program, and I travel back and forth between those two entities. And by the way, I found it very fascinating, the whole genre of publication where they put out a doll, and then they put out the stories to go with the dolls. It's kind of like Star Wars and its action figures and that kind of thing, how that evolved in the early 1900s, and how it became such a powerful force for the way that people were raised thinking. It was just fascinating to me to see how our side is changing that way. So how has that come forward to today, particular racial-related black dolls, white dolls, all different colored dolls? Do we still use them in those ways, or has that been mostly eliminated, or are there subtle messages that are still being carried through those kind of tools? Dolls still carry enormous racial weight. We can see that every now and then a story hits the news that a store is selling black Barbies, cheaper than white Barbies, for example. I think that people know that dolls have enormous power to tell stories about race, and that's one of the reasons that people really, really care about dolls and race. I'll tell you a story. At one point, I wrote a lot of this book in a local coffee shop, and one morning I was working on the chapter on the clerks, and an African American man and his daughter came in and shared my table with me. He was reading a book, and the daughter, who was probably about five years old, was coloring in a coloring book, and I was watching out of the corner of my eye as she colored all the hair of all the people in the coloring book blonde. I should say yellow. She had a yellow marker, and she colored in all the hair yellow. There was a part of me that thought, "Oh, how terrible." Of course. Oh, how terrible. Why is she doing that? Exactly the kind of thinking that was forged by the clerks and by many other people, that if you have a child who is preferring their figures with blonde hair, that somehow is saying something about her self-esteem. But I tried to sort of bracket it and just look and open myself up to other possibilities besides this child as a victim of society. What other possibilities are there? And certainly, this child has poor racial self-esteem as one of the possibilities, but I just tried to open myself up to other possibilities. And I thought, "This child's mother could have blonde hair. This child's mother could be an African-American woman who chooses to have blonde hair, or this child's mother could be a non-African-American woman." There are a lot of possibilities. I was just trying to bracket it and to not jump so quickly to an assumption of victimhood, asking myself, "What other possibilities are there?" So with dolls, I think that we are very quick to jump to an assumption that if a black child wants to play with this doll or that doll, that it automatically means poor self-esteem or good self-esteem, depending on what the child chooses. And I would like to suggest that maybe we can bracket our own assumptions and actually listen to children and ask them, instead of asking, "Which is the good doll and which is the bad doll?" Instead asking, "Why do you like that doll? Why don't you like that other doll?" And by asking these open-ended kind of questions, we might hear some very interesting things. I think one of the answers we might get is, "I like the color yellow because it's like the sun." Who knows? I didn't ask the girl in the coffee shop why she was coloring in the hair yellow, but if I had asked, maybe the answer would have been something completely unlike any answer I could have made up. Yeah, it's important not to make too many assumptions. I have to say that with respect to your book, you track down the assumptions. When you make your points, you document them with a wide enough range of evidence that I'm very impressed that racial innocence is a solid piece of both scholarship and insight into how our society works. So again, thank you for that. Oh, thank you so much. Another piece I want to bring in, because after all, this is spirit in action, is the spiritual and/or religious background. Yours, what was happening in society, I don't think you spoke specifically about how religion was being used to uphold or work against slavery and its aftermath and racism, but I'm sure you encountered a lot of it along the way. What can you share with me about that, and of course, given that that wasn't the central feature of what you were studying? Sure. Well, Christianity was enormously important to Harriet Beecher still, and it was central to her abolitionist politics, her abolitionist agenda. Christian abolitionists were, of course, among the major movers and shakers and Quakers that brought slavery to an end, and that's both white abolitionists, white Christian abolitionists, and abolitionists of color. So Christianity was an enormously positive force in the abolitionist movement. Christianity was also used to justify slavery and was used to justify all sorts of oppressions, and as we know, it is still sometimes used and misused in that way. So you're right that it's not a central feature in the book, but it does run throughout the book. The idea that children are innocent, that came about specifically in relation to Christianity. The previous idea was that children had original sin, and this was the Calvinist idea. This was the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of infant depravity, is what it was called. And as Calvinism declined in the United States from the 18th century into the 19th century, this new doctrine of childhood innocence was able to emerge. So it was very much Christianity that enabled the idea of childhood innocence, and that idea of childhood innocence was crucial in abolitionist arguments and also in pro-slavery arguments. So Christianity is at the absolute root of everything I'm talking about in the book. Do you see Christianity from the outside? I think you were probably raised in the Jewish family. Maybe practice says to Jew. How does it look from the other side? I've always thought that if an alien race came down to earth and saw the idea of infant depravity or original sin, that they might be fairly aghast at the idea that we could do that. Yes, that is definitely not my belief system. I do not believe in infant depravity. I do approach Christianity from the outside. I am Jewish. So I think that what I bring from my own tradition is a sense of social justice, which was central to my own being raised Jewish. I was raised to believe that Jews stand up for social justice, and of course historically that has happened very, very frequently. And I brought to this project a social justice agenda. I brought to it a commitment to fight white supremacy and to fight it by understanding it, to fight white supremacy by understanding its history. And I think that was very much related to how I was raised as a Jew. Well, it ended up being a gift to us. I'm so pleased that you wrote racial innocence. I hope people will check it out. Where should they go find it? Is it just Amazon or should they be coming right to your doorstep picking up a copy? They can get it on Amazon. They can get it in soft cover or hard cover or Kindle, and it's also available from the NYU website. And of course you can also order it from your local independent bookstore. They can get it for you too. And let's emphasize that again. Your local independent bookstore is a great source for so many books. They can get you anything that they don't have. Talk about building local businesses and allowing for a diversity of opinions to be out there in the world. It's a really important step. So maybe that should be number one on our list, but the others are fallback positions. So again, thank you for writing racial innocence. Your social activism agenda is well received in this corner of the world. And I'm so thankful you could join me for spirit in action. Thank you so much for having me. I've had a wonderful conversation. Our spirit and action guest has been Robin Bernstein, associate professor at Harvard in African and African American studies and in studies of women, gender and sexuality. Author of racial innocence performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights. And I've got a song to send you out with that is completely apropos of Robin's book. This song also has dolls, civil rights, and opening minds. It's by David Massingale, and it's called Number One in America. I'll meet you next week for spirit in action. In 1963 in my hometown Bristol, Tennessee, a sitting on my mother's knee, watching him as an ending on TV. Even with Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, little girl is tugging at his sleeve, singing "I have a dog, my own color, please." He said, "Honey, you can't make the leaves." Just then came a call on a telephone. It was the mayor asked if my daddy was home. This was for his ears alone. Mom and me listened on the second floor. May you say the freedom rides on their way. They'll be here by Christmas day, our laws they found to disobey. 'Cause our school's as wide as the Milky Way. Well now we're really in a fix. Can't let them show us our black country heads. But once we let the races meet us, it's goodbye Jim Crow politics. First it's 40 acres and a mule. Then they wanna swim and I'll swim and poop. Pretty soon they'll be wanting to go to school. Where we would talk the golden rule. Imagine them telling us how to live. Imagine them telling us how to live. Win number one, in America, number one, in America. Beat the drummer up and sing. Oh, the calming bird he had. Oh, to be number one, in America. Facts handles first a right to vote. Oh, I'd share it as all she wrote. Back at the bus, don't rock the boat. Separate the equal by the throat. That was 20 or years ago, with change in the status quo. The freedom land is lying low. It shackled down on a rotten rule. Better black skin man still gets the snub. But he applies to the country club, but he's still his hybrid to trim the shrubs. Get down on the floor and scrub. And there's a business man held on his yacht. He's a arena sunshine failure. And all he's told about four kinds. He says it's all calming flies to beat number one. In America, number one, in America. Beat the drummer up and sing. Oh, the calming bird he had. Dynamite in a balanced church. Fourteen eight girls lost to the lurch. Firehoses and the billy clubs. All his dogs and the racist thugs and not the writers. And the lynchy and mob. Long men say they're only doing it tonight. To stay number one, in America. A club's clan is still around with a permit to march in my hometown. But only on Virginia's ground, the Tennessee side turned him down. The sheriff stood there with his deputy license, a play to keep the peace. But he made us this guarantee. Like I feel not marching in Tennessee. Network cameras were a triple team. We lied to cry to food and cheer. But mostly we stood there with fear to the club's clan. Disappeared. In some fall of distant dawn, when the black is president. Inside a pond where they burn crosses on the White House along. Then talk for those days by dawn. Imagine them telling us how to live. Imagine they're telling us how to live. When number one, in America, number one, in America. The drummer of the same overcoming burning hand. Oh, to me, number one, in America. Last Christmas Eve at the Kmart store. A white family there, they was dirtball. Father, say kids, pick one toy no more. Even though we can't afford it. I'll watch the sun, choose a basketball. The oldest girl, a crea social. The little is girl, chose a black scandal. And she held it to her chest and all. I watched to see how they've reacted. Since they were white and the door was black. But the mom and dad were mad. In fact, they just checked to see if the door was correct. So may you make a reference game. With black and white, go ahead. Till they reach the freedom bank. Where the lion lies down in the bank. Oh, number one, in America. Number one, in America. Beat the drummer of the same overcoming burning hand. Dynamite in the Baptist Church. Four teenage girls lost in the church. Firehoses and the filly clothes. All his dogs and their vases thugs. Back o'clock. Little rock. Bulbas wood on the auction. Block night riders. And the linchy and mama. Long in, say, they're only good linchy. To stay. Number one, in America. The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will fill the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)