Latest on Universities and Slavery

The following originally published on The Faculty Lounge.

Loyola Law School Professor Yxta Maya Murray's article "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie Mae Weems' Challenge to the Harvard Archive" has just appeared in volume 8 of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. It tells the really interesting story of a dispute between the artist Carrie Mae Weems and Harvard's Peabody museum over the use of photographs that Louis Agassiz took of enslaved people that he hoped would support the theory of poly-genesis that he embraced (along, I might note with Alabama's Josiah Nott). The article explores Agassiz' purpose in collecting the pictures, their re-discovering in the 1970s at Harvard, and the controversy over their use. While I usually emphasize Harvard's contributions to the anti-slavery cause, this story reminds us again of the connections between Harvard and racial thought in the pre-Civil War era.

Cribbing a little from the article:

In the same year as the enactment of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Agassiz toured South Carolina plantations and decided to defend his polygenesist position by resuming his collecting habit. But this time he would collect live people, not animals, bones, or plants. For this purpose he enlisted Dr. Robert Gibbes, a Morton acolyte, who led Agassiz on a tour of the plantations. On this expedition Agassiz selected Delia, Jack, Renty, Drana, and others for their supposedly instructive appearances. He ordered Gibbes to "gather corroborative photographic evidence" of them, and then retreated to Harvard. Gibbes hired one J.T. Zealy to take nude pictures of them at Zealy's studio in the two attitudes that make up the series, being headshots and full body shots. The record of what happened to the pictures here dwindles. .... [T]he daguerreotypes fade from history until their discovery in the Peabody attic in 1976.

Agassiz would trigger Carrie Mae Weems' show, From Here I Saw What Happened. Weems found much to comment on with photo-metrists like Galton. ... Inspired by Georges Cuvier's 1815 dissection of Sarah Baartman, the original, doomed Hottentot Venus, Galton conducted his own infamous study of yet another "Venus." He encountered this second goddess on his journeys, and measured her every square inch with a sextant. In 1859, when his cousin, Charles Darwin, had published The Origin of Species, Galton's enthusiasm for measuring racial attributes merged with a conviction in White supremacy he felt was assured by Darwin's work. Back in Europe, Galton expanded on his practice of measuring people he believed resided on the lower reaches of the Great Chain of Being.

Prof. Yxta Murray on Anglo-American Radical Feminism's Constitutionalism in the Streets

By Professor Yxta Maya Murray

From "You're Creating New Categories:" Anglo-American Radical Feminism's Constitutionalism in the Streets, to be published Spring 2012 by the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal

On September 7, 1968, a battalion of the feminist group New York Radical Women bombed up the Garden State Parkway in their VW buses to make a ruckus at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At a "consciousness raising" session (essentially a rap group session) several weeks previous, they had discovered that patriarchal beauty standards -- and their expressions in the meat markets that were beauty contests -- had damaged their own self-images and liberations. Thus enraged, they leapt off the buses, crowding around the boardwalk in front of the Atlantic City Convention Center, hoisting picket signs and papier mache puppets. They crowned a sheep -- a proxy, of course, for Miss America herself - and sang out bawdy songs that poked fun at the pageant organizers and the contestants. A dark ops group within N.Y.R.W., having "dressed up" to look like "normal women," purchased tickets to the Center. Once inside, these rebels unfurled a banner that read Women's Liberation, and some of them set off stink bombs. They were promptly nabbed by the police and shoved outside. The radical feminists did not resist arrest -- but, as they mostly hadn't seemed to really break any laws, only one stink-bomb thrower would be charged with "releasing a noxious substance." Jubilant at the success of their action, the rest of the feminists jumped back in their love buses and went back home.

It was pretty heady stuff, and seen by many as ushering in the new era of second wave feminism - but as it turned out, it was nothing compared to the riot that occurred two years later in London.

On November 20, 1970, an assorted group of radical British feminists arrived at the Royal Albert Hall in London with plans to sabotage the Miss World pageant. Though a radical anti-capitalist group called The Situationists had set off a bomb outside of the Hall earlier that morning, the feminists were not deterred from executing their raid on this fleshly fiasco. Having come armed with flour bombs (small sacks of flour that would detonate in a fluffy cloud upon impact), ink bombs, plastic mice, rotten produce, whistles, and rattles, the London rads' first acts of anti-beauty-pageant resistance was to camp outside the Hall, crown a stuffed cow, hoist placards, and scream "You poor cows!" and "They're exploiting you!" when the contestants arrived to London by bus and skittered inside the amphitheater. Once the Miss World pageant began, the Londoners (taking a cue from their U.S. sisters) snuck inside using the same transgender tactic of dressing like middle class, feminine women. Now in the Hall, they let it rip. The host for Miss World was Bob Hope, the famous comic of the "Road" movies fame, and the feminists rushed up to the stage, flinging flour and ink at him and shrieking. Old Bob ran away. The feminists turned to the audience, throwing the plastic mice, squirting tuxes, and bapping gents with grotty tomatoes. One protester, Sally Alexander (now a history professor at the University of London), stubbed out a cigarette on a policeman. There might have also been some biting. The women hollered profanities with glee. Five of them were arrested, while the others escaped. The jailbirds wound up doing star turns at their media-frenzied trials several months later. Ultimately, the charges against them were dropped.

Prof. Yxta Murray writes about Mark Zuckerberg's new kill-it-yourself diet

By Professor Yxta Maya Murray

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently emailed Fortune magazine with the news that this year he is undertaking a personal quest to eat only meat that he kills himself. As of this writing, he's reportedly axed a chicken, a pig, a goat, and -- in a particularly Woody Allenesque gesture -- a lobster, the last of which was "boiled alive."

Zuckerberg packages his slayage as a brand of gastronomical "gratitude" that is linked to whole-foodist-cum-low-carbon-footprinty aspirations. Most of the (acidic, hilarious) commentary has matched this reading of Z's "me kill, me eat" carnilosophy, and has taken him to task for being a bad vegetarian. Laurel Miller of Huffpost Food accuses Z of being a possibly unhinged throat-slasher of baby livestock. Lynn Crosbie of the Globe and Mail accuses him of "gross eco-crimes."

Read the complete piece at Zocalo.