Admiring the Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 movie by the same name was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Last month June and I both re-read the book and watched the movie again—and were impressed again by both. 

Alice Walker is a talented novelist and poet. She is also a lifetime social activist and the one who coined the term “womanist” (in “Coming Apart,” her 1979 short story).

Walker was born in Georgia, the youngest of her sharecropper parents’ eight children. She was an excellent student, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship to prestigious (HBCU) Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of her professors there.

Under the direction of SNCC, Alice and many other Spelman students joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. They were supported by Prof. Zinn—who subsequently was fired in the summer of 1963. Because of that, Alice transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and graduated in 1965.

Through the 1970s Walker was active both as a teacher and an author, and then 40 years ago, in 1982, The Color Purple, her third novel was published. The next year she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple is a feminist work about Celie, an abused and uneducated African American woman’s struggle for empowerment. According to Britannica, among other things the novel was “praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of Black English Vernacular.”

Here is a short conversation between Shug and Celie that shows some of that vernacular—and indicates where the title of the book came from:

Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it (Kindle ed., p. 195).

The same Britannica article goes on to say, “The Color Purple movingly depicts the growing up and self-realization of Celie, who overcomes oppression and abuse to find fulfillment and independence.”  

The novel is a classic, for there are many today who need to overcome oppression and abuse the same as Celie did 100 years ago. More broadly, as a theology professor in Australia writes, The Color Purple is

both a cry of rage and protest against the injustices and inhumanity we humans inflict on one another, and a stubborn affirmation of hope in the midst of suffering, of endurance against all odds, of a kind of triumph in the end as we become more and more who we truly are.*

The Color Purple is also a book about God. The above quote from the book is just one of many referring to God.

The author herself said in a 2006 interview, “Twenty-five-years later, it still puzzles me that The Color Purple is so infrequently discussed as a book about God. About ‘God’ versus ‘the God image.’”**

The blogger cited above explains that Walker clearly holds a panentheist view of God in which “the divine is deeply immanent within everything, a faithful creator and life-giving Spirit. She revolts against the intellectual idolatry that reduces God to the white, to the male, to the human.”

And Walker herself states that the “core teaching of the novel” is delivered by Shug, who says to Celie, “I believe God is everything, . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (Kindle ed., p. 194).

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes. But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them” (Matt. 6:27-28, CEB).

Perhaps when he said this, Jesus was looking out over a field of wild flowers and admiring the color purple.

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* Michael O’Neil in a 2016 blog post.

** From the Introduction of the book in the Kindle version (loc. 80).

Note: For an abundance of information about Alice Walker and her outstanding book, see https://bookanalysis.com/alice-walker/the-color-purple/.

The Good and the Bad in the U.S. Constitution

Saturday, September 17, is Constitution Day, a yearly “federal observance.” And posters in the local library announce: Constitution Week September 17~23. Across the country, many school children will be taught good things about the Constitution. But most won’t hear about its bad aspects.  

“Our original Constitution was both brilliant and highly flawed.” So spoke Harvard law professor Alan Jenkins in a Sept. 15, 2021, interview with Harvard Law Today. He continued,

It beautifully articulated the notion that government’s power flows from the people, and that government serves the people. But it was fundamentally flawed in preserving and propping up slavery, that ultimate form of inequality.

Jenkins also averred that the Constitution was faulty “for excluding women, non-white people, indigenous people, non-property owners, from the definition of ‘the people.’’’ But especially from “a racial justice standpoint it was highly flawed.”

That was the basic self-contradiction of the original Constitution, which to a significant degree was based on the ideas/philosophy of John Locke, as I pointed out in my 8/30 blog post.

Most conservative Americans see and emphasize only the “brilliant” facets of the Constitution. In 1955, the highly patriotic Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) petitioned Congress to set aside September 17~23 annually to be dedicated for the observance of Constitution Week.

That resolution was adopted by the US Congress and signed into law in August 1956 by President Eisenhower. Then, Constitution Day was established in 2004, and this year marks the 235^th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787.

In a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Richard Land, a conservative Southern Baptist who is now the executive editor of The Christian Post, urged American Christians, regardless of their political persuasion, not to allow the Left to define how they see the United States.

“According to Land, the Left-leaning American media invented the hot-button phrase ‘Christian nationalism’ as a pejorative term that serves to undermine the fundamental relationship between Christians and this nation as defined in the U.S. Constitution.”

Yes, patriotic organizations such as the DAR and conservative evangelicals such as Land tend to see only the good aspects of the U.S. Constitution—and there certainly are such aspects that need to be seen and appreciated. But that is only one side of the picture.

Most “Left-leaning” USAmericans also see the “highly flawed” facets of the Constitution. That includes history professor and highly popular blogger Heather Cox Richardson.

“Right-leaning” people doubtlessly see her as Left-leaning, but she is a competent historian who deals with facts not ideological opinions. In my 8/30 blog post, I criticized her for calling the position of Locke and the drafters of the Constitution paradoxical rather than self-contradictory.

But to Richardson’s credit, she also uses the word contradiction in writing about the drafting of the first Constitution. For example, she begins the second chapter of her book How the South Won the Civil War with this assertion:

At the time of the Constitution’s [drafting] in 1787 it was not yet obvious that a contradiction lay at the heart of the nation's founding principles.

Richardson also concurs with Jenkins’s recognition of the “highly flawed” Constitution. She writes, “Without irony, Virginian James Madison crafted the constitution to guarantee that wealthy slaveholders would control the new government” (p. 21).

Although she does not mention maverick historian Howard Zinn, he wrote pointedly about that contradiction in his best-known book, A People’s History of the United States (1980). (Zinn, who died in 2010, was born in August 1922, and last month his centennial birthday was notably celebrated.)**

Zinn’s chapter on the Constitution is based partly on An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, an influential and controversial 1913 book by the noted historian Charles Beard (1874~1948).

According to this website, Beard interpreted the Constitution “as a conservative bulwark against the encroaches of liberal democracy.” That is a “bad” aspect of the original Constitution that is not widely recognized.

But unfortunately, that aspect of the 1787 Constitution may be what the “originalists” on the SCOTUS want to restore now.

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** Zinn’s seminal 1980 book was revised and published for younger readers in 2007 under the title A Young People’s History of the United States. That book cannot be used in many U.S. public schools now, for it is too closely connected to the Right-wing’s opposition to Critical Race Theory and related matters. 
     See here for “Howard Zinn Centennial Week Events” and here for “Howard Zinn at 100: Remembering ‘the People’s Historian,’” an informative article posted by The Nation on August 24.

“The Tragedy at Buffalo”: Reflections on McKinley’s Assassination

William McKinley was the third U.S. President to be assassinated—in just 36 years (plus a few months). He was shot 120 years ago on September 6 and died eight days later. What was behind that tragic event?  

Pres. McKinley shot on 9/6/1901

The Making of Pres. McKinley

William McKinley, Jr., was born in Ohio in January 1843. When he was still 18, he enlisted as a private in the Civil War—and 36 years later became the last President to have fought in that horrendous war.

Mustered out of the army in 1865, McKinley was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives just eleven years later. After six terms in the House, he served as the Governor of Ohio for two two-year terms.

In the presidential election of 1896, Republican McKinley defeated Democrat / Populist William Jennings Bryan and became the 25^th POTUS. Four years later, he was re-elected by defeating Bryan for the second time with 51.6% of the popular vote, up slightly from 1896.

McKinley’s election was due, in large part, to the financial support he received from the wealthy industrialists of the country. Bryan was the “commoner,” who had the support of the working class but with limited resources. The moneyed class won the elections for McKinley.

In his classic bestselling book, A People’s History of the United States (1980; rev. ed., 2003), Howard Zinn wrote that in 1896 “the corporations and the press mobilized” for McKinley “in the first massive use of money in an election campaign” (p. 295).

McKinley’s Presidency

McKinley’s support by the wealthy paid good returns for them. Early in the second year of his presidency, the U.S. went to war with Spain.

Three years before McKinley’s re-election in 1900 with Theodore Roosevelt as the Vice-President, the latter wrote to a friend, “I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.” And, indeed, that very next year (1898) the Spanish-American War began, and Roosevelt was a hero in it.

John Jay, McKinley’s Secretary of State, called it "a splendid little war," partly because it propelled the United States into a world power—with world markets. Indeed, under McKinley’s presidency in 1898, the American Empire emerged.*

Zinn quotes the (in)famous Emma Goldman writing a few years later that “the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of the American capitalists” (p. 321).**

Indeed, the “military-industrial complex” was a reality far before Pres. Eisenhower used that term sixty years ago in January 1961.

Shortly after the brief war with Spain ended, the Philippine-American War started in February 1899 and was still in progress when McKinley was shot and killed.

McKinley’s Assassination

Leon Czolgosz was a Polish-American who, by the time he was 28 years old, believed, probably for good reason, that there was a great injustice in American society, an inequality that allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor.

Early in September 1901, Czolgosz traveled from Michigan to Buffalo, New York, where the President was attending the Pan-American Exposition (a World’s Fair). There he shot McKinley twice at point-blank range.

Czolgosz had clearly been influenced by the fiery, anarchist rhetoric of Goldman (1869~1940). But just as Nat Turner had misused the words of the Bible (see my 8/25 blog post), he misused the words of Goldman, who advocated dramatic social change, but not violence.

Even before McKinley died on Sept. 12, Goldman was arrested and charged with conspiracy. She denied any direct connection with the assassin and was released two weeks later. On Oct. 6 she wrote a powerful essay titled “The Tragedy at Buffalo.”

Goldman stated clearly, “I do not advocate violence,” but wrote in forceful opposition to “economic slavery, social superiority, inequality, exploitation, and war.” And she concluded that her heart went out to Czolgosz “in deep sympathy, and to all the victims of a system of inequality.”

At the end of October, Czolgosz was executed by electric chair—and Goldman continued advocating for the people Czolgosz cared about so deeply and sought to help in an extremely misguided manner.

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* “American Empire, 1898~2018,” my 1/15/18 blog post, elaborates this matter.

** Zinn wrote “Emma,” a play about Goldman that was first performed in 1977. I found Zinn’s play quite informative and of considerable interest.