Category: Krazy: George Herriman – a Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand

Delight

Delight

Posted on by jabittan
“Delight,” writes Michael Tisserand in his biography of George Herriman, Krazy, “was herriman’s strongest point in a world where most artists had lost it.”
When I was in college there was a spring morning where I went for a run at a local park. I didn’t have a lot going on that day (maybe some classes or work after my run) and I didn’t have to rush home after my workout. The park was up on a hill with a great view of Reno and I was able to sit on the grass and stretch as I cooled down from the run. At the time I was bored, not doing enough to engage with my university or local community, and I had lost a sense of delight with the world around me. As I sat and stretched I thought to myself, “is this really it? Is sitting around stretching after going for a run really all that I am going to do in life? Am I going to be this bored forever?”
It seems to me that as we move through life it is easy to lose our sense of delight. It is easy to become accustomed to the amazing technology of our time, to take something as enjoyable as stretching in park after a run for granted, and to be discontent with lives that by all objective measures are full of enjoyment. Somehow we lose our delight in the marvels of the world, mistaking them as simple, boring, and pedestrian.
George Herriman, Tisserand writes, never lost his sense of delight. His artwork did not turn scornful, sour, or stale. He continued creating comics, continued to brighten the world for others, and never failed to appreciate the position he was in as a cartoon artist.
Keeping delight in our world helps us maintain a sense of presence and helps us approach the world in a grateful manner. If we can be delighted with something as simple as a cup of coffee, a day with good weather, or something funny that a pet does, then we can find something to be happy about and a reason to continue to engage with the world. If we lose our sense of delight, then we risk being overcome with cynicism and selfishness. For Herriman, a man of black and Creole descent passing as a white man in the comics and newspaper industry, perhaps his continually precarious position and the luck and opportunity afforded to him by his light skin color helped him maintain a sense of delight. Perhaps that is what helped him learn to appreciate everything, since he lived a life that so easily could have been denied to him by racism and bigotry.
In my own life I have learned to greatly appreciate the simple moments of stretching in a park after a run, of drinking coffee in the morning, or of walking with my wife and our pup in the evening. These are not exciting moments and are experiences I have almost every day, but by learning to appreciate and find delight in them, I have learned to be more comfortable being who I am and where I am. I have learned to overcome some of my fear of missing out by finding delight in every moment, even if there is nothing remarkable about the moment. I still remember how I felt that day during college, but I look back and appreciate that moment rather than feeling as if my life was not or is not enough.
A Navajo Beauty Prayer

A Navajo Beauty Prayer

Posted on by jabittan
In his biography of George Herriman, author Michael Tisserand includes a Navajo Beauty Prayer that Herriman learned in Arizona and found ways to incorporate into his artwork. The poem goes:
“In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk…”
I really like this poem and find it to be a powerful way to find presence, gratitude, and a sense of calmness. The poem reminds me of stoic ideas that I first learned about reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Meditations is a collection of notes that Aurelius wrote to himself, to remind himself to be thoughtful and considerate in all that he did. One of the ideas he returns to throughout the book is the power of being present, of not worrying about a future that hasn’t arrived and not being caught up in regret or sorrow over the past. Focusing on nature, Aurelius notes, can be a powerful way to stay grounded in the present moment and to recognize that much of what troubles us is in our minds, and not in the present world around us.
The Navajo poem focuses our attention in a meditative way on the present, especially if we can be outside in nature to recite the lines of the poem. We can appreciate the beauty of trees, the sky (even if cloudy), and the world around us. What we focus on will become our reality, and looking for beauty no matter where we are will help us see the world through a more positive lens. Our world is defined by how we use our mind and the poem reminds us of the power of our mind as it focuses it on positivity and beauty.
The People Don't Know What They Want

The People Don’t Know What They Want: Art & Design

Posted on by jabittan
Apple, especially late co-founder Steve Jobs, has often been criticized and mocked for approaching products with the mindset that they know what is best for consumers and what consumers really want. Whether it was creating a phone without buttons, removing the headphone jack,  or possibly removing the charging port altogether, apple has pushed consumers in a way that says, “we know what you really want, and trust us, we are right in the end.” Instead of maintaining clunky technology or being afraid to push forward, Apple pushes the consumer by dropping old tech in favor of new advances, even if people are not quite ready to let the old tech go. Each time Apple does this it creates controversy and anger in the consumer base, but soon enough everyone adapts and moves forward with Apple, including their competition.
It appears that Apple may be correct. The trite line in the world of business is that the customer is always right. Apple certainly doesn’t buy into this mindset, and the world of technology is not the only space where people don’t know what they want. Michael Tisserand demonstrates this by quoting George Herriman in his biography of Herriman, Krazy. Herriman was interviewed in the late 1920’s by a journalist named Mary Landenberger. The quote from Herriman that Tisserand includes in his book is from Landenberger and reads, “The people don’t know what they want. And if they get an entirely new taste of something that’s good, they’ll want it until they find something better. But we’ve got to give them the initial taste before they start clamoring for more.”
Herriman shows that the Apple mindset was mirrored by cartoonists in the 1920’s. Art styles and fads change and are influenced by many social and cultural factors. People don’t always understand what they like and why, and according to Herriman, it is in some ways up to the artist to show people what they want. I’m sure that Jobs would have thought of himself as an artists, and the way he designed and styled his company’s products certainly fits with the mindset that Herriman, a cartoon artist, expressed.
In television shows and popular media and culture today we still see echoes from creatives of the Herriman and Jobs point of view. The idea that people don’t know what they want is easy to mock and ridicule, but it often turns out to be correct. Companies, artists, and movie studios who buck trends and give people something they didn’t know that they wanted can change the course of events and the form and function of art.
Crass Art

Crass Art

Posted on by jabittan
Tyler Cowen recently interviewed Dana Gioia for his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Gioia is a noted poet and writer and was once the Poet Laureate for California. In the podcast, Cowen asked Gioia an interesting question and received a response from Gioia that I can’t stop thinking about:
“Cowen: Is rap music simply the new poetry? It’s very popular. It is poetic in some broader notion of the term.
GIOIA: Rap, hip hop without any question is poetry. It is rhythmically structured words moving through time. … if I go back to 1975 when I was leaving Harvard, I was told by the world experts in poetry that rhyme and meter were dead, narrative was dead in poetry. Poetry would become ever more complex, which meant that it could only appeal to an elite audience … what the intellectuals in the United States did was we took poetry away from common people.
We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away, and the common people reinvented it.“
This passage is fascinating because it looks at rap music, something that is often hated for its misogyny, drug/sex culture, and general shallowness and appreciates it as a true art form. Gioia’s answer takes our distinction between high culture and low culture, what we consider fine art and crass art, and turns it upside down. Gioia says that poetry was deemed too complex for simple people and that it was taken away from them, only to be reinvented in pop culture through rap music.
Since listening to this podcast I have thought a lot about popular culture and high culture. I always feel a temptation to engage with fine art and to look down my nose at what we generally consider crass art, but at the same time I often find a great pull and fondness toward that crass art. I enjoy Marvel movies, I find myself reflected in the characters of the Harry Potter books, and when I workout I like to listen to rap music or even trendy K-Pop with nonsensical and often ironic lyrics.
What Gioia noted about rap music, and what I have felt with regard to popular mega-IPs and trendy music, has been seen with different artforms and media in human history. In the 1920’s, writes Michael Tisserand in his biography of cartoonist George Herriman Krazy, comics were already seen as crass art. However, a quote from Gilbert Seldes’ book The 7 Lively Arts that Tisserand includes in the biography defends comics in much the same way that Gioia defends rap music. To quote Seldes Tisserand writes, “Reading a comic, Seldes noted, is seen as a symptom of crass vulgarity, dullness, and, for all I know, of defeated an inhibited lives.”
In the 1920’s, when Seldes wrote his art review, comics were already seen as crass art. Their value was misunderstood, and the people who read them were seen as failures. Yet, looking back at comics and pop art from the time tells us something important about the era and the people. We enjoy seeing commonalities between ourselves a century later and the art, worries, thoughts, and ambitions represented in popular culture. We can understand a lot by looking at what was derided as crass art.
When we think about popular culture today, we shouldn’t simply scoff at it as crass art. There are forces the drive the popularity of certain forms of music, cinema, art, television, and media. Understanding what those forces are, recognizing what values, challenges, and life views are present in those forms of art can tell us a lot about who we are. Rather than simply dismissing popular culture as crass art, we should strive to be like Seldes and Gioia who work to understand that art and see its value and merit, even if it appears simple, vulgar, and ephemeral. We don’t have to like it and spend all of our time with it, but we should not simply dismiss it and the people who engage with it.
Pessimist, Optimist, or Just Mist? - George Herriman, Michael Tisserand, Joe Abittan

Pessimist, Optimist, or Just Mist?

Posted on by jabittan
In his biography of George Herriman, author Michael Tisserand included numerous comics from Herriman to demonstrate his artistic skill, wit, and general approach to comics. One of the book’s chapters started with the written words from one of Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics from April 23, 1921, and stood out to me:
 
 
“Ignatz: Now, “Krazy,” do you look upon the future as a pessimist, or an optimist?
Krazy: I look upon it just as mist–”
 
 
I really enjoyed this line of dialogue when I first read it in Tisserand’s book, and still get a chuckle as I read it now. It is a witty pun, an accurate reflection of our predicament with looking toward the future, and feels entirely fresh 100 years after it was written.
 
 
I feel like I notice false dichotomies everywhere. It is easy to see the world in black or white and tempting to live in a world defined with dichotomies. They make our lives easier by slotting things into neat categories and helping us reduce the amount of thinking we have to do. Unfortunately, living a life that accepts false dichotomies is dangerous and deluded.
 
 
The false dichotomy that the comic pulls apart is the false dichotomy of pessimism versus optimism. If pressed, probably all of us could say we were more of an optimist or pessimist, but it is probably not very accurate to really define ourselves as one way or the other. At any given time we may be more or less optimistic or pessimistic on any number of factors and our views for any of them could change at any moment. We may also be deeply pessimistic about one important area, but very optimistic in another area with no clear reconciliation between those two optimistic and pessimistic feelings. For example, you could be very optimistic about the direction of the economy, but pessimistic about the long-term sustainability of current economic practices given climate change. It is hard to pin yourself as either pessimistic or optimistic overall regarding the economy in this situation.
 
 
Some of us may try to avoid this false dichotomy with a trite response that we are neither an optimist or pessimist, but a realist (or nihilist or other -ist). This dodge acknowledges that the distinction between optimist and pessimist isn’t necessarily real, but fails to provide a legitimate alternative. Is there any exclusionary factor between a realist and an optimist or pessimist? A nihilist might be optimistic that society is going to collapse, even if they feel pessimistic about what will happen to them. My suspicion is that people who call themselves realists simply want to avoid looking like they are optimistic or pessimistic without merit, and as if they base their optimism or pessimism off data and not vague feelings.
 
 
I think that Krazy in the comic is addressing the dichotomy in the most reasonable way possible, by acknowledging the difficulties of predicting the future and accepting that he is overwhelmed with the mist. His answer rejects the false dichotomy of optimism and pessimism and embraces the conflicting factors that might make us happy or sad, financially well off or ruined, or lead to any number of potential outcomes. Rather than trying to hold positive or negative views regarding our futures, the best thing to do is admit that we don’t really know what will happen, but to try to place ourselves in a position where we can have the best outcomes no matter what takes place, even if all we see is mist.
On "The Media"

On “The Media”

Posted on by jabittan
“The media” is a  term that is frequently used to categorize journalists, newspapers, and broadcast news shows. We often use “the media” in a negative way, complaining about coverage of events in unfair and oversimplified ways. “The media” always seems to have an agenda, a narrative, and a specific concern plucked from the zeitgeist that will fade away without a real resolution. But this idea is a bit misleading. Categorizing only news sources as “the media” misses out on a lot of media consumption that we engage with every day. It also lumps together news organizations and sources that have vastly different ways of operating, different profit motives, and different general beliefs. Even within a single news or media source there can be things that are terrible, things that are marvelous, and things that we barely notice.
Challenges with “the media” have existed as long as news and media have existed. Books, even fiction books, have been burned and banned almost as long as books have existed. People expressing heretical views against churches or governments have also received the same fate across human history.  But “the media” has been a lens through which we have understood the world past and present. Expanding our view of media to include books, movies, podcasts, and even TikTok videos shows us how media consumption can be cultural cornerstones of our highest values and simultaneously cesspools of rot.
In the George Herriman biography Krazy, author Michael Tisserand includes a quote from a critique written by Gilbert Seldes in the Pittsburgh Sun in the 1920’s. Tisserand’s passage reads:
“In his initial appraisal of Krazy Kat [George Herriman’s celebrated comic strip], he wrote that the cult of the genius of the comic strip who has created the fantastic little monster is a growing one. He added if we have to condemn utterly the press which demoralizes all thought and makes ugly all things capable of beauty, we must still be gentle with it, because Krazy Kat, the invincible and joyous, is a creature of the press, inconceivable without its foundation of cheapness and stupidity. He is there to enliven and encourage and to give much delight.“
I really like this quote when viewed through the lens of “the media” that I have been trying to lay out in this post, even though Seldes uses “the press” in the quote above. Categorizing “the media” as entirely worthless or negative or alternatively categorizing “the media” as a cornerstone of democracy is an overly broad brush with which to paint news and information ecosystems. There are things we may hate about “the media” but there are also things we may find invaluable and necessary. Thinking clearly about the media requires that we delve into the particulars, understand the profit motives, understand the competition, and understand the forces that drive the things we like and dislike.
Individually, we are probably powerless to change the course of “the media” or how we talk about “the media.” However, we can think about the choices we make in relation to “the media” and to our friends, family, and colleagues. We can engage in meaningful and deep topics, or we can become enraged over shallow and meaningless topics. We can enjoy the cultural reflections of the shallow or we can criticize them. Ultimately, “the media” is a product of our humanity, and we can project onto it what we want, but we shouldn’t categorize an entire institution as rotten or democracy saving as a whole. “The Media” is complex and has multiple layers running throughout each interconnected element.
Nihil Sub Sole Novum Series: Fat Shaming

Nihil Sub Sole Novum: Fat Shaming

Posted on by jabittan
[This is a new blog post series of mine. The idea for this series is partly from Tyler Cowen’s blog where he does informal series such as That was then, this is now or Markets in Everything. The idea is to have an ongoing discussion through blog posts tied together by the Latin phrase Nihil Sub Sole Novum – There is nothing new under the sun. Each day is a new day, but so many of the problems we face have deep roots and historical precedence. We constantly face new challenges and it can feel as if no one has faced what we or society face today, but the reality is that much of what we deal with has been part of humanity for centuries, and this series will explore that long past.]
– – –
In 1901 Frank Andrew Munsey purchased a newspaper in New York called the Daily News. Around that time Munsey was purchasing a lot of newspapers in an effort to compete with Pulitzer and Hearst, two titans of the news industry. Michael Tisserand writes about Munsey’s purchase of the Daily News in his biography of George Herriman titled Krazy because Herriman had recently started at the paper as a cartoon artist and illustrator. Herriman was born in New Orleans to mixed black and Creole parents, but passed as white, giving him a precarious position in a newspaper industry that was brutal toward its employees. To demonstrate this brutality, Tisserand shares a quote about Munsey who purchased the paper which employed Herriman:
Tisserand quotes Allen Churchill in writing, “As soon as Munsey purchased a newspaper, he ordered all fat men on the staff fired, for he considered them lazy as a breed. Munsey even demanded that no smoking signs be put up, as he considered smoking a waste of time.”
Tisserand offers this quote to show that Herriman, who would not have been able to get his job if he could not pass as white, was always on edge about his identity and appearance. What I want to focus on, specifically for this article, is the idea of fat shaming in the quote regarding Munsey.
I am a fan of Marvel’s movies, and I admit that I found Fat Thor from the Avengers Endgame movie pretty funny. I am guilty of repeating the line “You look like melted ice cream” which was issued to Thor to criticize his appearance. However I am able to recognize the fat shaming, prejudice, and mockery which takes place in that scene and with Thor’s character through the movie. I recognize how an innocent joke can be quite harmful to individuals who find themselves in a similar situation in real life.
In our world today, we put a lot of emphasis on our weight and appearance. One aspect of Neoliberalism, a term used characterize the general political and philosophical approach of most people in the United States today, is a sense of hyper-responsibility of the individual. The individual is responsible for maintaining good health, for being productive at all times of the day, for paying taxes, walking the dog, playing catch with their son, attending every dance recital, and having an opinion on all current events. Society is not expected to provide anything, the individual is expected to be responsible for all of their affairs. Thor, facing PTSD and survivor’s guilt, couldn’t handle the personal responsibility that his failures placed on his shoulders, and his outward weight gain reflected his inward tragedy, but was played for laughs more than it was used to really explore the pressures he was crumbling beneath. Thor was fat shamed rather than counseled and supported by society.
Fat shaming is receiving more attention today (the name itself is relatively new) but it has existed for a long time. Munsey’s quote shows that fat shaming and the personal responsibility of Neoliberalism were present at the turn of the 20th century. Being fat was taken as a projection of laziness by Munsey. A person was judged from their body shape and weight, without regard for who the person was, what factors contributed to their health, or how hardworking the person actually was. Munsey may not have had anyone around to call his behavior fat shaming, but that is clearly what he was doing by firing the fat people at the newspapers he purchased – nihil sub sole novum.
We will see in future Marvel movies if Thor returns to being the muscular manly-man that he was prior to Endgame, or if he retains a body weight and shape that is not typical of superheroes. Either way, Thor can help teach us that our weight and body shape doesn’t just reflect how worthy we are but is influenced by trauma, by challenging life circumstances, and by complex social factors. Fat shaming is something we should be aware of and something that we should recognize has been a problem for a long time. We can continue to display coarse prejudices against fat people, or we can think about what being healthy really means and requires, what our body shapes say about us, and work to build more healthy communities that integrate healthy spaces for activity, healthy communities to appropriately work through trauma and stress, and healthy systems for eating. These are complex areas, and the struggles around them and resulting fat shaming is nothing new.
George Herriman and the Complexities of Racial Identity

George Herriman and the Complexities of Racial Identity

Posted on by jabittan
Race is a social construct. Genetic studies reveal how misplaced ideas of racial differences truly are. Individuals on the African continent sometimes have more genetic differences than individuals across continents, yet race throughout human history has been used, at a genetic level, to explain the differences between people, and in the worst of  times, to justify discrimination and biases. However, even though race is more of a social construct than a biological fact, humans still identify differences in appearance, customs, behaviors, and psychologies and treat individuals differently based on how they are perceived.
The book Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White demonstrates the power of this discriminatory way of identifying people, and how complex racial identities can be when we insist race is more than a social construct and use it to define people. Michael Tisserand, the book’s author, explains that Herriman existed at an intersection of white and black, and that he was able to pass as white to enter a professional world that excluded blacks. Doing so, however, meant that he had to abandon other identities, including those of his mixed Creole and black family from New Orleans.
In a sentence that demonstrates just how complex racial identification can be, Tisserand writes the following, “when questioned as part of court proceedings if he was colored, George Herriman Sr.’s {Herriman’s grandfather] brother in law, Charles Sauvinet, replied, when I go among strangers I am received as a gentleman. He added I never inquire whether I was received as a white or colored man.” Herriman’s family displayed ambiguous racial characteristics for several generations, and much of their racial identity was dependent more on how other people treated them than on how they chose to identify. Race was not within their own control and varied from place to place and situation to situation.
The implication in Charles Sauvinet’s response is that he was received as a white man, that people identified him and treated him as a white gentleman. His non-answer was effectively a way of saying he was white while simultaneously acknowledging that white did not capture the full complexity of his racial background. His identity, the race assigned to him, and whether he was considered a valuable and worthy gentleman or something less than was not dependent on his own personal qualities, but on how other people perceived his race. These ambiguous edge cases are helpful in exploring the role and power of race in the United States. The racial state of America today is improved over the days of Charles Sauvinet and George Herriman, but discrimination and racial bias still exists, and still fails to address the realities of people’s lived experiences and racial backgrounds, even if race is nothing more than a social construct.
Racial Passing

Racial Passing

Posted on by jabittan
The idea of passing is fairly common in the United States. A common American refrain is fake it till you make it, an idea that you can pretend to be something until you become that thing in reality. For white people in the United States this is a common strategy, especially among young or entrepreneurially ambitious individuals. In my own life, I have been guilty of passing to try to fit in with the cool kids in high school, as passing for someone who knows more than they do to try to get a job, and of passing to try to impress elders with deep knowledge when I only have surface deep knowledge. However, this kind of passing is different than racial passing, a type of passing that many people in the United States have turned to in order to get by. I was using passing to try to hide weaknesses and to try to impress others in an effort to improve my social status. I was not passing to try to avoid discrimination and prejudice.
Racial passing includes elements of trying to improve ones social, economic, and political status as I was trying to do, but not in the same fake it till you make it way. I was trying to work my way into social groups and jobs that I was mostly qualified for, but for which I might have some weaknesses. Racial passing is not about hiding weaknesses or being unskilled, it is about hiding ones racial background to prevent others from discriminating against you for no reason other than your skin color. Throughout American history, racial passing has also been a way to avoid violence against oneself and to preserve ones life, very different from any passing experiences I have had.
The book Krazy by Michael Tisserand is a biography of cartoonist George Herriman who spent most of his life in a state of racial passing, hiding his family heritage from everyone he knew. In the book he writes about Herriman’s passing in the following paragraph:
“Racial passing was – and remains – a controversial practice. Only a select number of blacks had the opportunity to pass. Although there are no existing photographs of George and Clara Herriman [George Herriman the cartoonist’s parents], photos of George Joseph Herriman reveal a shade of skin and general physical characteristics that might, to some eyes, render him racially ambiguous. Members of the Herriman family, it appears, were what some Creoles called nations able to present themselves in many different lights.” 
Herriman’s family tree included Creole, black, and white people from New Orleans in the decades before the Civil War. This unique racial background created the ambiguous racial appearance of George Herriman, allowing him to engage in racial passing.
Without being able to pass as white, Herriman would not have been able to get a job at a nation-wide newspaper and would not have had a nation-wide circulation for his comics. His art and skills were fantastic, but never would have been possible if he had not been able to hide his family background and pass as white. He found a lot of success as a cartoon artist and newspaper illustrator, allowing him to buy a home in a good neighborhood in Los Angeles. If he appeared more black or Creole he would not have been able to attain the same level of career success, would not have been able to buy a home and begin building wealth to pass along to his children, and might have been at risk of violence in an unlucky police encounter. This has been the cost of not being able to pass for many people throughout American history. On one hand for those who do pass, they risk alienation from their family and friends who cannot pass, having to hide their association with anyone who was not white out of fear of discovery. On the other hand, passing opened up a world free from discrimination and full of career, wealth, and general life possibilities. Passing has been much more than just trying to impress people to get ahead or be popular, it has been about living a life that would not be possible if one was identified differently based on their skin color.
The Long Lasting Legacy of American Racism

The Long-Lasting Legacy of American Racism

Posted on by jabittan
If you are white and don’t make an effort to study the history of racism in the United States it can be hard to imagine just how serious the country’s racist past is. In an age where a black man has been president, where black sports stars have multimillion dollar contracts, and when clear outward displays of racism are (almost) universally condemned, it is easy to believe that racism is a problem of the past. In our country we place a lot of weight on the idea that the individual is responsible for their own success. Whether it is their financial success, their physical shape and weight, or their intelligence, we put the determination and responsibility of the individual at the center of how we understand people, and that doesn’t leave room for racism. We look at successful black people and argue that racism can’t be a problem now, because clearly some black people have become successful. Racism, our current ideology says, can’t be holding people back anymore. The only thing that can be holding them back is a failure to take responsibility for their own actions. Racism is simply an excuse in this view.
However, if you are not white or if you make any effort to study racism in the United States, you see the long lasting legacy of American racism and how it continues to shape the lives of people today. Exclusionary housing policies of the past, policing policies, and education policies are areas where racism deliberately impacted the lived experiences of black people in the United States, clearly limiting opportunity and less clearly limiting the potential to pass on wealth and knowledge to future generations. The results of this discrimination never truly left us.
In his biography of 20th century cartoonist George Herriman, Michael Tisserand explores how the long lasting legacy of American racism can be seen in the life and work of George Herriman. Writing about New Orleans around the Civil War, a time when Herriman’s grandfather and father lived in the city, Tisserand writes, “From 1879 to 1917, there were no city-run public high schools available for blacks. Robert Mills Lusher, the state superintendent of education, infamously declared that the purpose of education was for white students to be properly prepared to maintain the supremacy of the white race.”
Herriman’s family left New Orleans for Los Angeles when he was 10, but throughout his life he hid the fact that he was of black and Creole descent. His light skin color allowed him to pass as white, and opened the door to a career in newspapers and comics. Without having light skin, and without having a family that could move him away from New Orleans, Herriman certainly wouldn’t have had the opportunities he did in California, and racism would have been the limiting factor.
Without studying American racism, it would be easy to look back at a time when there were no city-run public schools for blacks about a hundred years ago and dismiss that fact as irrelevant for the world today. If it had simply been an omission to teach black children, then the situation could have been rectified relatively easy, and black education could have gotten underway to prepare black children for the future. However, the quote shows that benign neglect was not there reason why there were not any schools for black children. It was deliberate racism, in full force from the highest levels of education in the state, that limited the educational opportunities for black people. This malignant attitude created the lack of schools, and it was not simply a matter of establishing schools to facilitate black education.
Opening schools would have been step one, but this would have been done 100 years ago in a climate that was actively hostile toward black students. It is not hard to imagine that high quality materials, resources, and educational opportunities, the things we would all want in our own children’s education, would have been rare among any black schools opened in this type of climate. Once you see the type of animosity that American racism fostered, by influential individuals like Robert Mills Lusher (who there is still a school named after), it is not hard to understand the long lasting legacy of such racism. Deliberate efforts to hold people down and create a system of supremacy for white people is not easily overturned, even 100 years later. The deliberate delays of educating black people has long-term consequences, as it takes time for educational opportunities to come along and for the people who receive good education to grow, accumulate wealth and power, and further invest in their communities. White people had this opportunity starting well over 100 years ago, but black people did not. Black people could not pass on their knowledge, could not connect their children with people to help advance their careers, and could not take on jobs that would help them build wealth that would support their families for generations to come. Instead they were constantly put down, blamed for their own failure, and never give the public support that while people developed for themselves and over time restricted under the premise of conservatism.