The New Yorker Radio Hour - Teju Cole on Blackface and Valeria Luiselli on the Border Crisis

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

When depictions of Virginia politicians in blackface surfaced this month, the New Yorker contributor Teju Cole was unsurprised. “A white man of a certain age in the U.S.,” he reflects, “is found to have done something racist in his past; well, yes.” As a photographer and photo critic, he is acutely aware that a photograph captures the thinnest sliver of time, half a second or much less. So any photograph of a man in blackface—or in any other offensive image—always indicates that “there’s a lot more where that came from.” And Valeria Luiselli, a writer born in Mexico, struggles to depict the experiences of children arriving alone at the southern border, in circumstances unimaginably different from her own border crossings as the daughter of a diplomat. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Teju Cole is a novelist and an essayist who writes widely about photography and many aspects of the culture we live in. He's the author of Blindspot and many other books. Last week, Cole joined me to talk for reasons that are pretty obvious about the history and the meaning of blackface. I tell you, I've got to ask, what went through your mind when you first saw the photo that everybody's been talking about, the governor of Virginia, either in blackface and a photograph of his medical school yearbook or his admission that at one time he had dressed up in blackface in the 80s? Right. Well, I think like many of us, I received that information and kind of a second or third hand. What I mean is that I was already seen commentary about it. before we even understand what the facts of the case are.

In this case, the facts were not clear at all. And since Ralph Northam kept changing his story, it wasn't actually clear what kind of responsibility we were talking about here. Was he the one in the picture? It wasn't clear at all. The only strange thing about seeing this particular little thing explode was how unsurprisingly, It was.

What do you mean about that? What I mean is that a white man of a certain age in the U.S. is found to have done something racist in their past. Well, yes, this is a racist country. And we seem to think that each time it happens, it's somebody who is a bit of a, it's a unicorn. But the only thing that happened here is that it was caught. Do you think he should resign? It sounds terrible to say so, but I actually don't care what he does one way or the other. What I'm interested in is what kind of conversation is possible out of an incident like this.

That is not the same old groundhog day. Because what I really see here is that it was bad to do what he did. And it was bad for his attorney general to also be in blackface. but how far does that badness go? The public reaction is interesting to me because we think these are bad actors and they should be punished for what they have done.

We seem to have an automatic way of talking about that. This person should resign. It's offensive and they're racist. We don't know if they've changed. In other words, that it's isolated an individual. Well, what do you do about somebody who, let's say in the 1980s, refuse to rent to black people?

What do you do about somebody who acted in such a way that they got black people fired or blocked their access to mortgages. How do we talk about the fact that right now in this country, wealth inequality between black people and white people

is cavernous. It is immense. That is racism. And yet, I don't suppose most white Americans wake up in the morning and feel personally responsible for that. state of affairs. So if Northam resigns, on the one hand, it's the right thing to do. On the other and if he resigns, it serves a kind of a valve function of which this country seems to

frequently require an example. In other words, it takes the pressure off and we move on and fail to deal with the heart of things. It takes the pressure off. It seems to me that this is, obviously this is the symptom of a much deeper, more widespread, disease, and it has been with us for hundreds of years in one form or another. With blackface, just this one manifestation, blackface seemed to recede from the culture during the civil rights movement. And then during the rise of affirmative action, you started seeing it more and more on college campuses. Clearly, it's some kind of reaction. Right. I mean, it's sort of how, you know, it was after reconstruction that all these Civil War Confederate monuments went up, right?

So there's a sort of like delay or there's a sort of a sleeping virus. But the thing with Blackface is that it never really disappeared from popular culture, right? I mean, you know the long list of people that we might otherwise admire who have in one form of the other done black faces, Ted Danson, of course, Fred Astaire, there's Billet Crystal, you know, Shirley Temple, Frank Sinatra, and so on. So I think what it shows is that black people could always be insulted or could always be assumed not to be in the audience that the joke was for. Because after all, this is what it comes out to a kind of who are we addressing here.

And if we say, well, what Ralph Northam did was problematic, what's problematic about it is not shoe polish on his face. It's that he somehow didn't. not see his black neighbors as fully equal. And he did not imagine a future in which he might have to deal with them as fully equal. Tadjia, you were born in the United States in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but you didn't grow up here. You grew up in Nigeria and came here as a... Yes, I was 17 when I came to the U.S. for university. Do you have memories of coming here as a teenager and encountering some of this racial imagery for the first time.

What were your first memories of that? Well, I came to the U.S. and I came back to the U.S. as a college student in 1992. And I think at that time, when I came here, I did not really understand American racial politics or America's racial history. And this is a peculiarity of the way that African-American, history has gone out into the diaspora. So much of it comes to us through a white filter. So for example, this might sound very odd to you, but when I was growing up, one of my favorite movies was Blazing Saddles, with its extremely foul language and very, very broad humor, very often at the expense of black people or stereotypes about them.

And it was Mel Brooks humor. It was gross out humor. Of course it would appeal to a 10-year-old. So being in the U.S., and I've been here for about 27 years almost now, has been about learning how insidious racism in this country is. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about this is because you're a deep student of photography. and this issue got raised yet again because it shows up in a photograph. That's particularly potent. That's right. When you look at as a critic of photography, as a historian of photography, how does that help you understand American racism, these countless images?

Well, one of the things that I'm most convinced about when it comes to photography, is actually a kind of definition in the negative, which is that it is an extremely limited art form. A photograph is made in 1.25th of a second, 1.60th of a second, you know, if it's a long exposure, maybe half a second or one second. Everything before that moment, everything after it, we really don't have.

And so if I do see somebody in, a photo doing something that seems to be racist. My first assumption is that, well, there's a lot more where that came from. Not only in that person's personal life and in their history, but in the society that created that. You know, we use this phrase all the time over and over again, but is Northam in any way a tipping point? Is there the possibility that this can be used beyond him? beyond his survival, non-survival in his office, that it can be used in a useful way. He's talking about a reconciliation tour, for example.

Forget his reconciliation tour. What should reconciliation look like? David, I think I've learned that when it comes to race in America, there is no tipping point. I mean, it's not tipping point with cesspools. It's just going to be this very, very slow cleanup process. But people have to be willing to do that. I don't see that willingness, really. Do you think somebody like Barack Obama was overly optimistic?

He would talk about, you know, he would employ the king phrase about the arc of justice and feeling always that it's two steps forward, one step back. But there is progress. You seem much darker in your view. Yeah, I think president. President Obama mistook his remarkable personal story for a general truth. And it's just not one that really holds. When we consider who succeeded him in the presidency,

we already see that that was not the case. Now, it's also possible that there is a samba going on here. There's like two steps forward, one step back. It's possible. But I don't know. Maybe it's one step forward, two steps back. You know, the samba is also kind of a recent samba. Right.

The samba is a complicated dance, and then there's all kinds of improvisation and there's sideways moves. But I don't want to end on a negative note because, I mean, you are a keen observer of history, and so maybe you'll agree with me on this, is that when societal change happens, it happens at such a velocity that it takes even the exact. experts in that particular area by surprise. If you consider the speed at which public acceptance for the rights of queer people has happened in this country, it does feel precipitous also. And yet that's like, you know, 50, 60, 100 years of an overnight success.

Exactly. Tad Jukal, thank you so much. It's good to talk to you. It's good to talk to you, David. Thank you. Teju Cole contributes to the New Yorker and many other publications, and he teaches creative writing at Harvard University. The writer Valeria Louis Selly came to this country as the young daughter of a Mexican ambassador. And living here as an adult, much later,

Louis Selly began hearing about children crossing the southern border alone as refugees. And she began thinking about how to write about these children, whose experiences of migration are so radically different from her own. She published a non-fiction account called, Tell Me How It Ends, and she takes up that theme in her new book, which is fiction. It's called Lost Children Archive. Critic James Wood said that Valerio-Louiselli wrestles with these difficult questions. What does activist writing, writing that wants to make a real difference look like?

And how does the privileged author gather the stories of impoverished others and not commit theft? While the children travel, asleep or half-sleeping, They do not know if they are alone or if they are together. The man in charge sits cross-legged next to them, taking puffs from a pipe and blowing smoke into the dark. The dry leaves nested in the bowl of his pipe hiss when he inhales, then kindle orange like a tangle of electric circuits in a sleeping city seen from above. A boy lying next to him moans and swallows a gulp of thick saliva.

The wheels of the train spits sparks. A dry branch snaps in the dark. The pipe pit crackles again. And from the metallic intestines of the train, a sound like a thousand souls shrieking can be heard all the while. As if to pass through the desert, it had to crush nightmares and clusters. That's Valeria Louis Selly,

reading from Lost Children Archive. She spoke with the New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treesman. So your new novel, Lost Children Archives, it tells the story of a family of four that goes on a road trip, which is set against a backdrop involving immigration at the southern border, and there are sort of stories within the stories that involve undocumented children who are lost or displaced. You started working on this book,

I think long before Trump made the southern border a big item of headline news. And I'm wondering how it all started for you. I did. I started the novel in 2014 when the children's refugee crisis actually erupted for the first time, where the unaccompanied minors had arrived in large numbers at the border. there had been a surge, 60,000 kids stuck in the border. And in that moment, I was just starting to go on a road trip with my family. And did you actually go to the border? Yeah.

I made successive road trips after that one. But what I did have at the end of that road trip and other trips were a series of Polaroid pictures of the country that told a story on their own. and a lot of notes about the crisis at the border and a kind of calling to write about the absolute solitude and horror that so many children were experiencing in the border. Well, so let's go to tell me how it ends because that is in a way part of this novel. So you spent a period of time, I think maybe after that road trip, working or volunteering as an interpreter in the New York City Immigration Court for undocumented

children. How did that come about? Was it a result of what you saw while on the trip? Yeah, definitely. It was a result of the deep shock and rage and kind of uselessness that I felt knowing that there were all these kids in the situation. And I asked a lawyer if there was anything, I could do in any way to get involved. And she told me, yes, actually, we need a lot of volunteers in court, translating the stories from Spanish to English that the kids tell their testimonies so that a lawyer may or may not take on and decide to represent. So I ended up doing that for a long time and then wrote, tell me how it is.

I stopped writing the novel at some point because I, realized that I was trying to use the novel as a kind of vehicle for my own politics and also as a space to kind of tell the story of American interventionism in Central America. And I was really messing up the novel. So I stopped writing the novel. I wrote Tommy Howard-Dens, which is a much more straightforward narrative of the problem back then, I mean, which is unfortunately still present. And Even graver. So, and tell me how it ends is nonfiction, sort of documenting that time you spent volunteering. After having the experience of volunteering, after writing, tell me how it ends, you went back to this novel you'd sort of begun and then put aside.

Yeah, I, when I was able to finish that, I was able to go back to the novel and not feel that it was my duty to tell that exact story in that novel. but right, fiction. Did you feel that there was something that you could do with the subject matter in fiction that you couldn't do in the nonfiction? I mean, I am interested in fiction that doesn't merely mimic or reproduce the world. But fiction that understands that it has a role in the way we reckon, the way we understand and approach the world, and that is self-questioning about that. this novel constantly asks itself how to bear witness. How do you make audible the voices of those who are not regularly listened to?

And you used not only elements from your own life, but actually elements from Tell Me How It Ends, from your experience. There's one story in particular of these two girls whose grandmother was sending them. across the border to find their mother and who sewed the mother's phone number into their dresses so that they wouldn't forget it. Why pulled that story into the novel? Well, this is a very personal reason, I guess, which is that it's a story that has haunted me forever

that obsesses me because I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened with those two girls and I was a translator for their case and had the feeling when I was interviewing them, that no one was going to be able to help them because they weren't able to articulate their story. They were five and seven years old, so they weren't being able to tell the story the correct way, so to speak, so that a lawyer could then represent them in court and defend them from deportation. And I had that feeling. Then a lawyer came and kind of reviewed my notes

and asked them a few questions and also said that it looked like a very difficult case, that there probably wasn't a case. And that was it. That was the last I ever knew and heard. So, yeah, there is, of course, this kind of, like, this, like, beating pain somewhere there that I came back to in the novel. Yeah. And, of course, things now may be even worse for children at the border than they were back then.

Do you feel, I mean, I don't think you've been there recently, but do you feel that things are radically worse for children arriving now? I think they are. I think that the only positive thing in all of this is that more people seem to be preoccupied about it, that the sense of crisis has shifted from thinking that the crisis is the surge in arrivals to the inhuman way that you. children are treated. And at least that the presence and the visibility of what is going on, I think, I believe, I want to believe, will not allow for too much impunity on the side of political actors that execute violence on this population.

Well, thank you so much, Valer. Thank you so much. Valeria Louis Selly spoke with the New Yorkers, Deborah Treisman. Her new book is called Lost Children Archive. That's it for our show this week, and if you're not following us on Twitter, you really should. We'll keep you posted on everything that's going on here at New Yorker Radio. I'm David Remnick. See you next time.

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