Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Is Peak Lazy Writing

Posted on by under Fiction

The Obi-Wan Kenobi finale is out, and the show can be awarded a 6/10, perhaps 6.5. This is not a dreadful score, but it isn’t favorable either. I give abysmal films or shows with no redeeming qualities a 1 or 2, though this is extremely rare; bad or mediocre ones earn a 3-5; a 6 is watchable and even enjoyable but not that great, a 7 is a straight-up good production, an 8 is great, and a 9-10 is rare masterpiece or perfection territory. The ranking encompasses everything: was it an interesting, original, sensible story? Do you care about what happens to the characters, whether evil or heroic or neutral? Was the acting, music, pacing, special effects, cinematography, and editing competent? Was the dialogue intelligent or was it painful and cliché? Did they foolishly attempt a CGI human face? And so on.

Understanding anyone’s judgement of a Star Wars film or show requires knowing how it compares to the others, so consider the following rankings, which have changed here and there over the years but typically not by much. I judge A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back to be 10s. Return of the Jedi earns a 9, primarily for the ridiculous “plan” to save Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt that involves everyone getting captured, and for recycling a destroy-the-Death-Star climax. The Mandalorian (seasons 1-2), The Force Awakens, and Solo hover at about 7 for me. Solo is often unpopular, but I think I enjoyed its original, small-scale, train-robbery Western kind of story, which preceded The Mandalorian. The Force Awakens created highly lovable characters, but lost most of its points for simply remaking A New Hope. Rogue One is a 6 (bland characters, save one droid), The Last Jedi (review here) is a 5, Revenge of the Sith a 4.5, and The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and The Rise of Skywalker earn 4s if I’m in a pleasant mood, usually 3.5s. It’s an odd feeling, giving roughly the same rank to the prequels and sequels. They’re both bad for such different reasons. The former had creative, new stories, and there’s a certain innocence about them — but mostly dismal dialogue, acting, and characters (Obi-Wan Kenobi was, in Episodes II and III, a welcome exception). The sequels, at least in the beginning, had highly likable characters, good lines, and solid acting, but were largely dull copy-pastes of the original films. One trilogy had good ideas and bad execution, the other bad ideas and competent execution. One can consult Red Letter Media and its hilarious Mr. Plinkett reviews of the prequels and sequels to fully understand why I find them so awful.

Kenobi was actually hovering at nearly a 7 for me until the end of episode three. Ewan McGregor, as always, is wonderful, little Leia is cute enough, Vader is hell-bent on revenge — here are characters we can care about. The pace was slow and thoughtful, a small-scale kidnapping/rescue story. If you could ignore the fact that Leia doesn’t seem to know Kenobi personally in A New Hope, and that a Vader-Kenobi showdown now somewhat undermines the importance of their fight in that film, things were as watchable and worthwhile as a Mandalorian episode. Some lines and acting weren’t perfect, but a plot was forming nicely. I have become increasingly burnt out of and bored by Star Wars, between the bad productions and it just having nothing new to say (rebels v. empire, Sith v. Jedi, blasters and lightsabers, over and over and over again), but maybe we’d have a 7 on our hands by the end.

Then the stupid awakened.

At the end of part three, Vader lights a big fire in the desert, and Force-pulls Kenobi through it. He then puts out the fire with the Force for some reason. Soon a woman and a droid rescue Kenobi by shooting into the fuel Vader had used, starting a slightly-bigger-fire between protagonist and antagonist. Vader is now helpless to stop the slow-moving droid from picking up Kenobi and lumbering away. He doesn’t walk around the fire (this would have taken five seconds, it’s truly not that big). He doesn’t put out the flames as he did before (I guess 30% more fire is just too much for him). He doesn’t Force-pull Kenobi back to him again. He just stares stupidly as the object of all his rage, who he obsessively wants to torture and kill, gets slowly carried off (we don’t actually see the departure, as that would have highlighted the absurdity; the show cuts).

This is astonishingly bad writing. It’s so bad one frantically tries to justify it. Oh, Vader let him escape, all part of the plan. This of course makes no sense (they’ve been looking for Kenobi for ten years, so him evading a second capture is a massive possibility; it’s established that Vader’s goal is to find him and enact revenge, not enjoy the thrill of the hunt; and it’s never hinted at before or confirmed later that this was intentional). The simpler explanation is probably the correct one: it’s just braindead scene construction. Vader and Kenobi have to be separated, after all. Otherwise Kenobi’s history and the show’s over. There’s a thousand better ways to rescue Kenobi here, but if you’re an idiot you won’t even think of them — of if you don’t care, and don’t respect the audience, you won’t bother. (It’s very much like in The Force Awakens when Rey and Kylo are dueling and the ground beneath them splits apart, as the planet is crumbling, creating a chasm that can conveniently stop the fight — only it’s a million times worse. Now, compare all this to Luke and Vader needing to be separated in Empire. Rather than being caught or killed, Luke lets go of the tower with the only hand he has left and chooses to fall to his death. That’s a good separation. It’s driven by a character with agency and morals. It’s not a convenient Act of God or a suddenly neutered character, someone who doesn’t do what he just did a minute ago for no reason.)

Bad writing is when characters begin following the script, rather than the story being powered by the motivations of the characters. Had the characters’ wants, needs, decisions, actions, and abilities determined the course of events — like in real life — Vader would have put out the flames a second time, he and his twenty stormtroopers would have easily handled one droid and one human rescuer, and Obi-Wan would have been toast. But I guess Disney gave Vader the script. “Oh, I can’t kill him now, there’s three more episodes of this thing, plus A New Hope.” So he stood there staring through the flames like an imbecile.

Anyone who doubts this was bad writing simply needs to continue watching the show. Because the eighth grader crafting the story continues to sacrifice character realism at the altar of the screenplay.

In episode five, Vader uses the Force to stop a transport in mid-air. He slams it on the ground and tears off its doors to get to Kenobi. But surprise, it was a decoy! A second transport right next to this one takes off and blasts away. Vader is dumbfounded. Why does he not use the Force to stop this one? “Well, it was like 40 meters farther away.” “Well, he was surprised, see. And they got out of there quick.” OK, I guess. All this time I thought Vader was supposed to be powerful. It’s crucial to have limits to Force powers, and all abilities, but this is a pretty fine line between doable and impossible. “I can run a mile, but 1.1 will fucking kill me.” It’s strange fanboys would wildly orgasm over Vader’s awesome power to wrench a ship from the air and then excuse his impotence. Either we’re seeing real fire-size and ship-distance challenges Vader can’t meet or the writing here is just sub-par. There are other, more realistic ways to get out of this jam. At least when Kenobi and Leia had to escape the bad guys in the prior episode, snow speeders came along and shot at the baddies (though don’t get me started on how three people fit into a snow speeder cockpit designed for one).

But that’s not even the worst of it. Minutes later two characters violate their motivations. In this episode, it is revealed Third Sister Reva is out to kill Vader, a smart twist and good character development. She attempts to assassinate him, but he runs her through with a lightsaber. Then the Grand Inquisitor, who Reva had run through in an earlier episode, appears. (How did he survive this? You think the show is going to bother to say? Of course it doesn’t. The writers don’t care. Alas, lightsabers suddenly seem far less intimidating.) Vader and the Grand Inquisitor decide to leave her “in the gutter.” They do not finish the kill, they simply walk away. Darth Vader, who snaps necks when you lose ships on radar or accidentally alert the enemy to your presence, doesn’t kill someone who tried to assassinate him! The Grand Inquisitor essentially was assassinated by Reva — wouldn’t he want some revenge for being stabbed through the stomach and out the spine with a lightsaber? “Oh, they’re just leaving her to die” — no. The Grand Inquisitor didn’t die, remember? He and Vader do, it just happened. To be kabobbed in this universe isn’t necessarily fatal (naturally, Reva survives, again without explanation). Is it all just a master plan to inspire Reva to go do or be something? Or is it bad writing, with Reva needing to be shown mercy by Sith types because she’s still in the show?

Happily, the Kenobi finale was strong. It was emotional and sweet, and earns a ranking similar to the first couple episodes. Consternation arose, of course, when Vader buries Kenobi under a mountain of rocks and then walks away! Wouldn’t you want to make sure he’s dead? Can’t you feel his presence when he’s close by and alive? Fortunately, this was not the end of their battle. Kenobi breaks out and attacks Vader. This time their separation makes sense given character traits — Kenobi wounds Vader and, being a good person who never wanted to kill his old apprentice, walks away. Similarly, Reva over on Tatooine tries to kill Luke (though it’s not fully clear why — she’s been left for dead by Vader, then finds out Luke and Obi-Wan have some sort of relationship, so she decides to kill the boy to…hurt Obi-Wan? Please Vader because she hurt Obi-Wan or killed a Force-sensitive child?) Luke escapes death not from some stupid deus ex machina or Reva acting insane. Though Reva appears to be untroubled by torturing Leia earlier on, a real missed opportunity by the filmmakers, we at least understand that as a youngling who was almost slaughtered by a Sith that she might hesitate to do the same to Luke.

In conclusion, series that blast the story in a direction that requires characters, in out-of-character ways, to go along with it will always suffer. As another example, The Walking Dead, in addition to forgetting to have a main character after a while and in general overstaying its welcome, was eventually infected with this. (There’s no real reason for all the main characters to cram into an RV to get Maggie to medical care in season 6, leaving their town defenseless; but the writers wanted them to all be captured by Negan for an exciting who-did-he-kill cliffhanger. There’s no reason Carl doesn’t gun Negan down when he has the chance in season 7, as he planned to do, right after proving his grit by massacring Negan’s guards; but Negan is supposed to be in future episodes.) Obviously, other Star Wars outings have terrible writing (and are worse overall productions), from Anakin and Padmé’s love confession dialogue or sand analysis in Attack of the Clones…to The Rise of Skywalker‘s convenient finding of McGuffins that conveniently reveal crucial information…to the creatively bankrupt plagiarism of the sequels. But I do not believe I have ever seen a show like Kenobi, one that puts heroes in a jam — a dramatic height, a climax — and so lazily and carelessly gets them out of it.

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Did U.S. Policing Evolve from Slave Patrols? Well…Sort Of

Posted on by under Race Relations

“How American Policing Started with Carolina Slave Catchers” and similar headlines need asterisks. There are big elements of truth in them, but also a betrayal of the nuance found in the historical scholarship on which they are based. There is also the problem of lack of context, which perhaps inappropriately electrifies meaning. American policing starting with slave patrols is a powerful idea, but does it become less so when, for example, we study what policing looked like around the globe — and in the American colonies — before slave patrols were first formed in the early 18th century?

Obviously, permanent city forces tasked with enforcing laws and maintaining order have existed around the world since ancient times. There was a police unit in Rome established by the first emperor, China had its own forms of policing long before Western influence, and so on. As human communities grew larger, more complex systems (more personnel, permanent bodies, compensation, training, weaponry) were deemed necessary to prevent crime and capture criminals.

Small bands and villages could use simpler means to address wrongdoing. In traditional societies, which were kin-based, chiefs, councils, or the entire community ran the show, one of unwritten laws and intimate mediation or justice procedures. Larger villages and towns where non-kin lived and worked together typically established groups of men to keep order; for example, “among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647. Although watchmen were paid a fee in both Boston and New York, most officers in colonial America did not receive a salary but were paid by private citizens, as were their English counterparts.” There were also constables and sheriffs in the 1630s. True, American society has virtually always been a slave society, but similar groups were formed elsewhere before the African slave trade began under the Portuguese in the 16th century. There were “patrolmen, sergeants and constables” on six-month contracts in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. There were sheriffs, constables, and coroners (who investigated deaths) in England in medieval times. Before the 1500s, armed men paid (whether by individuals or government) to prevent and respond to trouble in cities had been around in the West for about 4,500 years — as well as in China, African states, and elsewhere (India, Japan, Palestine, Persia, Egypt, the Islamic caliphates, and so on).

This is not to build a straw man. One might retort: “The argument is that modern policing has its roots in slave patrols.” Or “…modern, American policing…” Indeed, that is often the way it is framed, with the “modern” institution having its “origins” in the patrolling groups that began in the first decade of the 1700s.

But the historians cited to support this argument are actually more interested in showing how slave patrols were one (historically overlooked) influence among many influences on the formation of American police departments — and had the greatest impact on those in the South. A more accurate claim would be that “modern Southern police departments have roots in slave patrols.” This can be made more accurate still, but we will return to that shortly.

Crime historian Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University has a popular 2013 writing that contains a paragraph on this topic, a good place to kick things off:

In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in[to] modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing “Jim Crow” segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.

Here the South is differentiated from the rest of the nation — it “followed a different path.” This echoes others, such as the oft-cited Phillip Reichel, criminologist from the University of Northern Colorado. His important 1988 work argued slave patrols were a “transitional,” evolutionary step toward modern policing. For example, “Unlike the watches, constables, and sheriffs who had some nonpolicing duties, the slave patrols operated solely for the enforcement of colonial and State laws.” But that was not to say other factors beyond the South, beyond patrols, also molded the modern institution. It’s simply that “the existence of these patrols shows that important events occurred in the rural South before and concurrently with events in the urban North that are more typically cited in examples of the evolution of policing in the United States.” In his 1992 paper, “The Misplaced Emphasis on Urbanization and Police Development,” Reichel again seeks to show not that slave patrols were the sole root of U.S. policing, but that they need to be included in the discussion:

Histories of the development of American law enforcement have traditionally shown an urban‐North bias. Typically ignored are events in the colonial and ante‐bellum South where law enforcement structures developed prior to and concurrently with those in the North. The presence of rural Southern precursors to formal police organizations suggests urbanization is not a sufficient explanation for why modern police developed. The argument presented here is that police structures developed out of a desire by citizens to protect themselves and their property. Viewing the development of police in this manner avoids reference to a specific variable (e.g., urbanization) which cannot explain developments in all locations. In some places the perceived need to protect persons and property may have arisen as an aspect of urbanization, but in others that same need was in response to conditions not at all related to urbanization. 

In other words, different areas of the nation had different conditions that drove the development of an increasingly complex law enforcement system. A common denominator beyond the obvious protection of the person, Reichel argues, was protection of property, whether slaves in the South or mercantile/industrial interests in the North, unique needs Potter explores as well.

Historian Sally Hadden of Western Michigan University, cited frequently in articles as well, is likewise measured. Her seminal Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas makes clear that Southern police continued tactics of expired slave patrols (such as “the beat,” a patrol area) and their purpose, the control of black bodies. But, given that Hadden is a serious historian and that her work focuses on a few Southern states, one would be hard-pressed to find a statement that positions patrols as the progenitor of contemporary policing in the U.S. (In addition, the Klan receives as much attention, if not more, as a descendant of patrols.) Written in 2001, she is complaining, like other scholars, that “most works in the history of crime have focused their attention on New England, and left the American south virtually untouched.” She even somewhat cautions against the connections many articles make today between patrol violence and 21st century police violence (how one might affect the other, rather than both simply being effects of racism, is for an article of its own):

Many people I have talked with have jumped to the conclusion that patrolling violence of an earlier century explains why some modern-day policemen, today, have violent confrontations with African Americans. But while a legacy of hate-filled relations has made it difficult for many African Americans to trust the police, their maltreatment in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries should not carry all the blame. We may seek the roots of racial fears in an earlier period, but that history does not displace our responsibility to change and improve the era in which we live. After all, the complex police and racial problems that our country continues to experience in the present day are, in many cases, the results of failings and misunderstandings in our own time. To blame the 1991 beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles on slave patrollers dead nearly two hundred years is to miss the point. My purpose in writing this text is a historical one, an inquiry into the earliest period of both Southern law enforcement and Southern race-based violence. Although the conclusions below may provide insight into the historical reasons for the pattern of racially targeted law enforcement that persists to the current day, it remains for us to cope with our inheritance from this earlier world without overlooking our present-day obligation to create a less fearful future.

It may be worthwhile now to nail down exactly what modern policing having roots in slave patrols means. First, when the patrols ended after the Confederate defeat, other policing entities took up or continued the work of white supremacist oppression. Alongside the Ku Klux Klan, law enforcement would conduct the terrors. As a writer for TIME put it, after the Civil War “many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.” An article on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (!) website phrased it: “After the Civil War, Southern police departments often carried over aspects of the patrols. These included systematic surveillance, the enforcement of curfews…” Second, individuals involved in slave patrols were also involved in the other forms of policing: “In the South, the former slave patrols became the core of the new police departments.” Patrollers became policemen, as Hadden shows. Before this, there is no doubt there was crossover between slave patrol membership and the three other forms of policing in colonial America, sheriffs, constables, and watchmen. Third, patrols, as Reichel noted, had no non-policing duties, plus other differences like beats, steps toward contemporary police departments (though they weren’t always bigger; patrols had three to six men, like Boston’s early night watch). Clearly, slave patrols had a huge influence on the modern city police forces of the South that formed in the 1850s, 1860s, and later. (Before this, even the term “police” appears to have been applied to all four types of law enforcement, including patrols, though not universally — in the words of “a former slave: the police ‘were for white folks. Patteroles were for niggers.'” But after the war, Hadden writes in the final paragraph of her book, many blacks saw little difference “between the brutality of slave patrols, white Southern policemen, or the Klan.”)

Notice that the above are largely framed as post-war developments. Before the war, patrols, sheriffs, constables, and watchmen worked together, with plenty of personnel crossover, to mercilessly crush slaves. But it was mostly after the war that the “modern” police departments appeared in the South, with patrols as foundations. Here comes a potential complication. The free North was the first to form modern departments, and did so before the war: “It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857” (New Orleans and Baltimore were in slave states, Newark in a semi-slave state). This development was due to growth (these were among the largest U.S. cities), disorder and riots, industrialization and business interests and labor conflict, and indeed “troublesome” immigrants and minorities, among other factors.

That point is raised by conservatives to suggest that if Northern cities first established the police departments we know today, how can one say slave patrols had an influence? A tempting counter might be: these states hadn’t been free for long. Slavery in New York didn’t end until 1827. While that is true, the North did not have patrols. “None of the sources I used indicated that Northern states used slave patrols,” Reichel told me in an email, after I searched in vain for evidence they did. Northern sheriffs, constables, and watchmen enforced the racial hierarchy, of course, but slave patrols were a Southern phenomenon. One can rightly argue that patrol practices in the South influenced police forces in the North, but that’s not quite the strong “root” we see when studying Southern developments.

This is why boldly emphasizing that modern departments in Southern states originated with patrols is somewhat tricky. It’s true enough. But who would doubt that Southern cities would have had police departments anyway? This goes back to where we began: policing is thousands of years old, and as cities grow and technology and societies change, more sophisticated policing systems arise. The North developed them here first, without slave patrols as foundations. Even if the slave South had never birthed patrols, its system of sheriffs, constables, and watchmen would surely not have lasted forever — eventually larger police forces would have appeared as they did in the North, as they did in Rome, as they did wherever communities exploded around the globe throughout human history. New Orleans went from 27,000 residents in 1820 to 116,000 in 1850! Then 216,000 by 1880. System changes were inevitable.

Consider that during the 18th and early 19th centuries, more focused, larger, tax-funded policing was developing outside the United States, in nations without slave patrols, nations both among and outside the Euro-American slave societies. In 1666, France began building the first modern Western police institution, with a Lieutenant General of Police paid from the treasury and overseeing 20 districts in Paris — by “1788 Paris had one police officer for every 193 inhabitants.” The French system inspired Prussia (Germany) and other governments. There was Australia (1790), Scotland (1800), Portuguese Brazil (1809), Ireland (1822), and especially England (1829), whose London Metropolitan Police Department was the major model for the United States (as well as Canada’s 1834 squad in Toronto). Outside the West, there were (and always had been, as we saw) evolving police forces: “By the eighteenth century both Imperial China and Mughal India, for example, had developed policing structures and systems that were in many ways similar to those in Europe,” before European armies smothered most of the globe. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Japan, one of the few nations to stave off European imperialism and involuntary influence, was essentially a police state. A similar escapee was Korea, with its podocheong force beginning in the 15th century. As much as some fellow radicals would like the West to take full credit for the police, this ignores the historical contributions (or, if one despises that phrasing, developments) of Eastern civilizations and others elsewhere. Like the North, the South was bound to follow the rest of the world.

It also feels like phrasing that credits patrols as the origin of Southern departments ignores the other three policing types that existed concurrently (and in the North were enough to form a foundation for the first modern institutions, later copied in the South). Sheriffs, constables, and watchmen were roots as well, even if one sees patrols as the dominant one. (Wondering if the latter had replaced the three former, which would have strengthened the case of the patrols as the singular foundation of Southern law enforcement, I asked Sally Hadden. She cautioned against any “sweeping statement.” She continued: “There were sheriffs, definitely, in every [Southern] county. In cities, there were sometimes constables and watchmen, but watchmen were usually replaced by patrols — but not always.”) Though all were instruments of white supremacy, they were not all the same, and only one is now in the headlines. In their existence and distinctiveness, they all must receive at least some credit as the roots of Southern institutions — as our historians know, most happenings have many causes, not one.

“Many modern Southern police departments largely have roots in slave patrols but would have arisen regardless” is probably the most accurate conclusion. Harder to fit in a headline or on a protest sign, but the nuanced truth often is.

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The Nativity Stories in Luke and Matthew Aren’t Contradictory — But the Differences Are Bizarre

Posted on by under Religion

In The Bible is Rife with Contradictions and Changes, we saw myriad examples of different biblical accounts of the same event that cannot all be true — they contradict each other. But we also saw how other discrepancies aren’t contradictions if you use your imagination. The following example was too long to examine in that already-massive writing, so we will do so now.

It’s interesting that while the authors of both Matthew and Luke have Jesus born in Bethlehem and then settle down in Nazareth, the two stories are dramatically different, in that neither mentions the major events of the other. For example, the gift-bearing Magi arrive, King Herod kills children, and Jesus’ family flees to Egypt in Matthew, but Luke doesn’t bother mentioning any of it. Luke has the ludicrous census (everyone in the Roman Empire returning to the city of their ancestors, creating mass chaos, when the point of a census is to see where people live currently), the full inn, the shepherds, and the manger, but Matthew doesn’t.

These stories can be successfully jammed together. But it takes work. In Matthew 2:8-15, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are in Bethlehem but escape to Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter. Before fleeing, the family seems settled in the town: they are in a “house” (2:11) beneath the fabled star, and Herod “gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi” visitors concerning when the star appeared (2:16, 2:7). This is a bit confusing, as all boys from born-today to nearly three years old is a big range for someone who knows an “exact time” (2:7). But it suggests that Jesus may have been born a year or two ago, the star was over his home since his birth, and the Magi had a long journey to find him. Many Christian sites will tell you Jesus was about two when the wise men arrived. In any event, when Herod gives this order, the family travels to Egypt and remains there until he dies, then they go to Nazareth (2:23).

In Luke 2:16-39, after Jesus is born in Bethlehem the family goes to Jerusalem “when the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses” (2:22). This references the rites outlined in Leviticus 12 (before going to Jerusalem, Jesus is circumcised after eight days in Luke 2:21, in accordance with Leviticus 12:3). At the temple they sacrifice two birds (Luke 2:24), following Leviticus 12:1-8 — when a woman has a son she does this after thirty-three days to be made “clean.” Then, “When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth” (Luke 2:39). Here they simply go to Nazareth when Jesus is about a month old. No mention of a flight to Egypt, no fear for their lives — everything seems rather normal. “When the time came for the purification rites” certainly suggests they did not somehow occur early or late.

So the mystery is: when did the family move to Nazareth?

Both stories get the family to the town, which they must do because while a prophecy said the messiah would be born in Bethlehem, Jesus was a Nazarene. But the paths there are unique, and you have to either build a mega-narrative to make it work — a larger story that is not in the bible, one you must invent to make divergent stories fit together — or reinterpret the bible in a way different than the aforementioned sites.

In this case, Option 1 is to say that when Luke 2:39 says they headed for Nazareth, this is where the entire story in Mathew is left out. They actually go back to Bethlehem, have the grand adventure to Egypt, and then go to Nazareth much later. This is a serious twist of the author’s writing; you have to declare the gospel doesn’t mean what it says, that narrative time words like “when” are meaningless (in the aforementioned article I wrote of us having to imagine “the bible breaks out of chronological patterns at our convenience”).

Option 2 is that they go to Nazareth after the rites as stated. Then at some point they go back to Bethlehem, have the Matthew adventure, and end up back in Nazareth. Maybe they were visiting relatives. Maybe they moved back to Bethlehem — after Herod dies it seems as if the family’s first thought is to go back there. Matthew 2:22-23: “But when [Joseph] heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.” So perhaps it’s best to suppose they went to Nazareth after the temple, moved back to Bethlehem, hid in Egypt, and went again to Nazareth. Luke of course doesn’t mention any of this either; the family heads to Nazareth after the temple rites and the narrative jumps to when Jesus is twelve (2:39-42).

Option 3 is that Jesus’ birth, the Magi visit, Herod’s killing spree, the family’s flight, Herod’s death, and the family’s return all occur in the space of a month. This of course disregards and reinterprets any hints that Jesus was about two years old. But it allows the family to have Matthew’s adventure and make it back to Jerusalem for the scheduled rites (which Matthew doesn’t mention), then go to Nazareth. One also must conclude that 1) the Magi didn’t have to travel very far, if the star appeared when Jesus was born, or 2) that the star appeared to guide them long before Jesus was born (interpret Matthew 2:1-2 how you will). It’s still odd that the only thing Luke records between birth and the temple is a circumcision, but Option 3, as rushed as it is, may be the best bet. That’s up to each reader to decide, for it’s all a matter of imagination.

Luke’s silence is worth pausing to consider. The Bible is Rife with Contradictions and Changes outlined the ramifications of one gospel not including a major event of another:

Believers typically insist that when a gospel doesn’t mention a miracle, speech, or story it’s because it’s covered in another. (When the gospels tell the same stories it’s “evidence” of validity, when they don’t it’s no big deal.) This line only works from the perspective of a later gospel: Luke was written after Matthew, so it’s fine if Luke doesn’t mention the flight to Egypt to save baby Jesus from Herod. Matthew already covered that. But from the viewpoint of an earlier text this begins to break down. It becomes: “No need to mention this miracle, someone else will do that eventually.” So whoever wrote Mark [the first gospel] ignored one of the biggest miracles in the life of Jesus, proof of his divine origins [the virgin birth story]? Or did the author, supposedly a disciple, not know about it? Or did gospel writers conspire and coordinate: “You cover this, I’ll cover that later.” Is it just one big miracle, with God ensuring that what was unknown or ignored (for whatever reason, maybe the questionable “writing to different audiences” theory) by one author would eventually make it into a gospel? That will satisfy most believers, but an enormous possibility hasn’t been mentioned. Perhaps the story of Jesus was simply being embellished — expanding over time, like so many other tales and legends (see Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist).

In truth, it is debatable whether Matthew came before Luke. Both were written around AD 80-90, so scholars disagree over which came first. If Matthew came first, Luke could perhaps be excused for leaving out the hunt for Jesus and journey to Egypt, as surprising as that might be. If Luke came first, it’s likely the author of Matthew concocted a new tale, making Jesus’ birth story far more dramatic and, happily, fulfilling a prophecy (Matthew 2:15: “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son'”). If they were written about the same time and independently, with the creators not having read each other’s work, they were likewise two very different stories.

Regardless of order and why the versions are different, one must decide how to best make the two tales fit — writers not meaning what they write, the holy family moving back and forth a bunch, or Jesus not being two when the Magi arrived with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

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Like a Square Circle, Is God-Given Inherent Value a Contradiction?

Posted on by under Religion

Can human beings have inherent value without the existence of God? The religious often say no. God, in creating you, gives you value. Without him, you have no intrinsic worth. (Despite some inevitable objectors, this writing will use “inherent” and “intrinsic” value interchangeably, as that is fairly common with this topic. Both suggest some kind of immutable importance of a thing “in its own right,” “for its own sake,” “in and of itself,” completely independent of a valuer.) Without a creator, all that’s left is you assigning worth to yourself or others doing so; these sentiments are conditional, they can be revoked (you may commit suicide, seeing yourself of no further worth, for example); they may be instrumental, there being some use for me assigning you value, such as my own happiness; therefore, such value cannot be intrinsic — it is extrinsic. We only have inherent importance — unchangeable, for its own sake — if lovingly created by God in his own image.

The problem is perhaps already gnawing at your faculties. God giving a person inherent value appears contradictory. While one can argue that an imagined higher power has such divine love for an individual that his or her worth would never be revoked, and that God does not create us for any use for himself (somewhat debatable), the very idea that inherent value can be bestowed by another being doesn’t make sense. Inherent means it’s not bestowed. Worth caused by God is extrinsic by definition. God is a valuer, and intrinsic value must exist independently of valuers.

As a member of the Ethical Society of St. Louis put it:

+All human life has intrinsic value

-So we all [have] value even if God does not exist, right?

+No, God’s Love is what bestows value onto His creations. W/o God, everything is meaningless.

-So human life has *extrinsic* value then, right?

+No. All human life has intrinsic value.

That’s well phrased. If we think about what inherent value means (something worth something in and of itself), to have it humans would need to have it even if they were the only things to ever have existed.

If all this seems outrageous, it may be because God-given value is often thought of differently than self- or human-given value; it is seen as some magical force or aura or entity, the way believers view the soul or consciousness. It’s a feature of the body — if “removed [a person] would cease to be human life,” as a Christian blogger once wrote! When one considers one’s own value or that of a friend, family member, lover, home, money, or parrot, it’s typically not a fantastical property but rather a simple mark of importance, more in line with the actual definition of value. This human being has importance, she’s worth something. Yes, that’s the discussion on value: God giving you importance, others giving you importance, giving yourself importance. It’s not a physical or spiritual characteristic. A prerequisite to meaningful debate is agreeing on what you’re talking about, having some consistency and coherence. There’s no point in arguing “No person can have an inherent mystical trait without God!” That’s as obvious as it is circular, akin to saying you can’t have heaven without God. You’re not saying anything at all. If we instead use “importance,” there’s no circular reasoning and the meaning can simply be applied across the board. “No person can have inherent importance without God” is a statement that can be analyzed by all parties operating with the same language.

No discourse is possible without shared acceptance of meaning. One Christian writer showcased this, remarking:

Philosopher C. I. Lewis defines intrinsic value as “that which is good in itself or good for its own sake.” This category of value certainly elevates the worth of creation beyond its usefulness to humans, but it creates significant problems at the same time.

To have intrinsic value, an object would need to have value if nothing else existed. For example, if a tree has intrinsic value, then it would be valuable if it were floating in space before the creation of the world and—if this were possible—without the presence of God. Lewis, an atheist, argues that nothing has intrinsic value, because there must always be someone to ascribe value to an object. Christians, recognizing the eternal existence of the Triune God in perpetual communion[,] will recognize that God fills the category of intrinsic value quite well.

What happened here is baffling. The excerpt essentially ends with “And that ‘someone’ is God! God can ascribe us value! Intrinsic value does exist!” right after showing an understanding (at least, an understanding of the opposing argument) that for a tree or human being to possess inherent value it must do so if it were the only thing in existence, if neither God nor anything else existed! Intrinsic value, to be real, must exist even if God does not, the atheist posits, holding up a dictionary. “Intrinsic value exists because God does, he imbues it,” the believer says, either ignoring the meaning of intrinsic and the implied contradiction (as William Lane Craig once did), or not noticing or understanding them. Without reaching shared definitions, we just talk past each other.

In this case, it is hard to say whether the problem is lack of understanding or the construction of straw men. This is true on two levels. First, the quote doesn’t actually represent what Lewis wrote on in the 1940s. He in fact believed human experiences had intrinsic value, that objects could have inherent value, sought to differentiate and define these terms in unique ways, and wasn’t making an argument about deities (see here and here if interested). However, in this quote Lewis is made to represent a typical atheist. What we’re seeing is how the believer sees an argument (not Lewis’) coming from the other side. This is helpful enough. Let’s therefore proceed as if the Lewis character (we’ll call him Louis to give more respect to the actual philosopher) is a typical atheist offering a typical atheist argument: nothing has intrinsic value. Now that we are pretending the Christian writer is addressing something someone (Louis) actually posited, probably something the writer has heard atheists say, let’s examine how the atheist position is misunderstood or twisted in the content itself.

The believer sees accurately, in Sentences 1/2, that the atheist thinks intrinsic value, to be true, must be true without the existence of a deity. So far so good. Then in Sentence 3 everything goes completely off the rails. Yes, Louis the Typical Atheist believes intrinsic value is impossible…because by definition it’s an importance that must exist independently of all valuers, including God. God’s exclusion was made clear in Sentences 1/2. It’s as if the Christian writer notices no connection between the ideas in Sentences 1/2 and Sentence 3. The first and second sentences are immediately forgotten, and therefore the atheist position is missed or misconstrued. It falsely becomes an argument that there simply isn’t “someone” around to “ascribe” intrinsic value! As if all Louis was saying was “God doesn’t exist, so there’s no one to ascribe inherent worth.” How easy to refute, all one has to say is “Actually, God does exist, so there is someone around!” (Sentence 4). That is not the atheist argument — it is that the phrase “intrinsic value” doesn’t make any coherent sense: it’s an importance that could only exist independently of all valuers, including God, and therefore cannot exist. Can a tree be important if it was the only thing that existed, with no one to consider it important? If your answer is no, you agree with skeptics that intrinsic value is impossible and a useless phrase. Let’s think more on this.

The reader is likely coming to see that importance vested by God is not inherent or intrinsic. Not unless one wants to throw out the meaning of words. A thing’s intrinsic value or importance cannot come from outside, by definition. It cannot be given or created or valued by another thing, otherwise it’s extrinsic. So what does this mean for the discussion? Well, as stated, it means we’re speaking nonsense. If God can’t by definition grant an individual intrinsic value, nor other outsiders like friends and family, nor even yourself (remember, you are a valuer, and your inherent value must exist independently of your judgement), then intrinsic value cannot exist. It’s like talking about a square circle. Inherent importance isn’t coherent in the same way inherent desirability isn’t coherent, as Matt Dillahunty once said. You need an agent to desire or value; these are not natural realities like color or gravity, they are mere concepts that cannot exist on their own.

To be fair, the religious are not alone in making this mistake. Not all atheists deny inherent value; they instead base it in human existence, uniqueness, rationality, etc. Most secular and religious belief systems base intrinsic value on something. Yet the point stands. Importance cannot be a natural characteristic, it must be connoted by an agent, a thinker. The two sides are on equal footing here. If the religious wish to continue to use — misuse — inherent value as something God imbues, then they should admit anyone can imbue inherent value. Anyone can decree a human being has natural, irrevocable importance in and of itself for whatever reason. But it would be less contradictory language, holding true to meaning, to say God assigns simple value, by creating and loving us, in the same way humans assign value, by creating and loving ourselves, because of our uniqueness, and so forth.

“But if there’s no inherent value then there’s no reason to be moral! We’ll all kill each other!” We need not waste much ink on this. If we don’t need imaginary objective moral standards to have rational, effective ethics, we certainly don’t need nonsensical inherent value. If gods aren’t necessary to explain the existence of morality; and if we’re bright enough to know we should believe something is true because there’s evidence for it, not because there would be bad consequences if we did not believe (the argumentum ad consequentiam fallacy); and if relativistic morality and objective morality in practice have shown themselves to be comparably awful and comparably good; then there is little reason to worry. Rational, functioning morality does not need “inherent” values created and imbued by supernatural beings. It just needs values, and humans can generate plenty of those on their own.

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Purpose, Intersectionality, and History

Posted on by under History

This paper posits that primary sources meant for public consumption best allow the historian to understand how intersections between race and gender were used, consciously or not, to advocate for social attitudes and public policy in the United States and the English colonies before it. This is not to say utilization can never be gleaned from sources meant to remain largely unseen, nor that public ones will always prove helpful; the nature of sources simply creates a general rule. Public sources like narratives and films typically offer arguments.[1] Diaries and letters to friends tend to lack them. A public creation had a unique purpose and audience, unlikely to exist in the first place without an intention to persuade, and with that intention came more attention to intersectionality, whether in a positive (liberatory) or negative (oppressive) manner.

An intersection between race and gender traditionally refers to an overlap in challenges: a woman of color, for instance, will face oppressive norms targeting both women and people of color, whereas a white woman will only face one of these. Here the meaning will include this but is expanded slightly to reflect how the term has grown beyond academic circles. In cultural and justice movement parlance, it has become near-synonymous with solidarity, in recognition of overlapping oppressions (“True feminism is intersectional,” “If we fight sexism we must fight racism too, as these work together against women of color,” and so on). Therefore “intersectionality” has a negative and positive connotation: multiple identities plagued by multiple societal assaults, but also the coming together of those who wish to address this, who declare the struggle of others to be their own. We will therefore consider intersectionality as oppressive and liberatory developments, intimately intertwined, relating to women of color.

Salt of the Earth, the 1954 film in which the wives of striking Mexican American workers ensure a victory over a zinc mining company by taking over the picket line, is intersectional at its core.[2] Meant for a public audience, it uses overlapping categorical challenges to argue for gender and racial (as well as class) liberation. The film was created by blacklisted Hollywood professionals alongside the strikers and picketers on which the story is based (those of the 1950-1951 labor struggle at Empire Zinc in Hanover, New Mexico) to push back against American dogma of the era: normalized sexism, racism, exploitation of workers, and the equation of any efforts to address such problems with communism.[3] Many scenes highlight the brutality or absurdity of these injustices, with workers dying in unsafe conditions, police beating Ramon Quintero for talking back “to a white man,” and women being laughed at when they declare they will cover the picket line, only to amaze when they ferociously battle police.[4]

Intersectionality is sometimes shown not told, with the protagonist Esperanza Quintero facing the full brunt of both womanhood and miserable class conditions in the company-owned town (exploitation of workers includes that of their families). She does not receive racist abuse herself, but, as a Mexican American woman whose husband does, the implication is clear enough. She shares the burdens of racism with men, and those of exploitation — with women’s oppression a unique, additional yoke. In the most explicit expositional instance of intersectionality, Esperanza castigates Ramon for wanting to keep her in her place, arguing that is precisely like the “Anglos” wanting to put “dirty Mexicans” in theirs.[5] Sexism is as despicable as racism, the audience is told, and therefore if you fight the latter you must also fight the former. The creators of Salt of the Earth use intersectionality to argue for equality for women by strategically tapping into preexisting anti-racist sentiment: the men of the movie understand that bigotry against Mexican Americans is wrong from the start, and this is gradually extended to women. The audience — Americans in general, unions, the labor movement — must do the same.

A similar public source to consider is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. Like Salt of the Earth, Beloved is historical fiction. Characters and events are invented, but it is based on a historical happening: in 1850s Ohio, a formerly enslaved woman named Margaret Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the rest to prevent their enslavement.[6] One could perhaps argue Salt of the Earth, though fiction, is a primary source for the 1950-1951 Hanover strike, given its Hanover co-creators; it is clearly a primary source for 1954 and its hegemonic American values and activist counterculture — historians can examine a source as an event and what the source says about an earlier event.[7] Beloved cannot be considered a primary source of the Garner case, being written about 130 years later, but is a primary source of the late 1980s. Therefore, any overall argument or comments on intersectionality reflect and reveal the thinking of Morrison’s time.

In her later foreword, Morrison writes of another inspiration for her novel, her feeling of intense freedom after leaving her job to pursue her writing passions.[8] She explains:

I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what “free” could possibly mean to women. In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools…and choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not. Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country—a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being responsible for them—being, in other words, their parent—was as out of the question as freedom.[9]

This illuminates both Morrison’s purpose and how intersectionality forms its foundation. “Free” meant something different to women in 1987, she suggests, than to men. Men may have understood women’s true freedom as equal rights and access, but did they understand it also to mean, as women did, freedom from judgment, freedom not only to make choices but to live by them without shame? Morrison then turns to intersectionality: black women were forced to live by a different, harsher set of rules. This was a comment on slavery, but it is implied on the same page that the multiple challenges of multiple identities marked the 1980s as well: a black woman’s story, Garner’s case, must “relate…to contemporary issues about freedom, responsibility, and women’s ‘place.’”[10] In Beloved, Sethe (representing Garner) consistently saw the world differently than her lover Paul D, from what was on her back to whether killing Beloved was justified, love, resistance.[11] To a formerly enslaved black woman and mother, the act set Beloved free; to a formerly enslaved man, it was a horrific crime.[12] Sethe saw choice as freedom, and if Paul D saw the act as a choice that could not be made, if he offered only stigma, then freedom could not exist either. Recognizing the unique challenges and perspectives of black women and mothers, Morrison urges readers of the 1980s to do the same, to graft a conception of true freedom onto personal attitudes and public policy.

Moving beyond historical fiction, let us examine a nonfiction text from the era of the Salem witch trials to observe how Native American women were even more vulnerable to accusation than white women. Whereas Beloved and Salt of the Earth make conscious moves against intersectional oppression, the following work, wittingly or not, solidified it. Boston clergyman Cotton Mather’s A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning (1693) begins by recounting how Mercy Short, an allegedly possessed servant girl, was once captured by “cruel and Bloody Indians.”[13] This seemingly out of place opening establishes a tacit connection between indigenous people and the witchcraft plaguing Salem. This link is made more explicit later in the work, when Mather writes that someone executed at Salem testified “Indian sagamores” had been present at witch meetings to organize “the methods of ruining New England,” and that Mercy Short, in a possessed state, revealed the same, adding Native Americans at such meetings held a book of “Idolatrous Devotions.”[14] Mather, and others, believed indigenous peoples were involved in the Devil’s work. Further, several other afflicted women and girls had survived Native American attacks, further connecting the terrors.[15]

This placed women like Tituba, a Native American slave, in peril. Women were the primary victims of the witch hunts.[16] Tituba’s race was an added vulnerability (as was, admittedly, a pre-hysteria association, deserved or not, of Tituba with magic).[17] She was accused and pressured into naming other women as witches, then imprisoned (she later recanted).[18] A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning was intended to describe Short’s tribulation, as well as offer some remedies,[19] but also to explain its cause. Native Americans, it told its Puritan readers, were heavily involved in the Devil’s work, likely helping create other cross-categorical consequences for native women who came after Tituba. The text both described and maintained a troubling intersection in the New England colonies.

A captivity narrative from the previous decade, Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, likewise encouraged intersectional oppression. This source is a bit different than A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning because it is a first-hand account of one’s own experience; Mather’s work is largely a second-hand account of Short’s experience (compare “…shee still imagined herself in a desolate cellar” to the first-person language of Rowlandson[20]). Rowlandson was an Englishwoman from Massachusetts held captive for three months by the Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wompanoag during King Philip’s War (1675-1676).[21] Her 1682 account of this event both characterized Native Americans as animals and carefully defined a woman’s proper place — encouraging racism against some, patriarchy against others, and the full weight of both for Native American women. To Rowlandson, native peoples were “dogs,” “beasts,” “merciless and cruel,” creatures of great “savageness and brutishness.”[22] They were “Heathens” of “foul looks,” whose land was unadulterated “wilderness.”[23] Native society was animalistic, a contrast to white Puritan civilization.[24]

Rowlandson reinforced ideas of true womanhood by downplaying the power of Weetamoo, the female Pocassett Wompanoag chief, whose community leadership, possession of vast land and servants, and engagement in diplomacy and war violated Rowlandson’s understanding of a woman’s proper role in society.[25] Weetamoo’s authority was well-known by the English.[26] Yet Rowlandson put her in a box, suggesting her authority was an act, never acknowledging her as a chief (unlike Native American men), and emphasizing her daily tasks to implicitly question her status.[27] Rowaldson ignored the fact that Weetamoo’s “work” was a key part of tribal diplomacy, attempted to portray her own servitude as unto a male chief rather than Weetamoo (giving possessions first to him), and later labeled Weetamoo an arrogant, “proud gossip” — meaning, historian Lisa Brooks notes, “in English colonial idiom, a woman who does not adhere to her position as a wife.”[28] The signals to her English readers were clear: indigenous people were savages and a woman’s place was in the domestic, not the public, sphere. If Weetamoo’s power was common knowledge, the audience would be led to an inevitable conclusion: a Native American woman was inferior twofold, an animal divorced from true womanhood.

As we have seen, public documents make a case for or against norms of domination that impact women of color in unique, conjoining ways. But sources meant to remain private are often less useful for historians seeking to understand intersectionality — as mentioned in the introduction, with less intention to persuade comes less bold or rarer pronouncements, whether oppressive or liberatory. Consider the diary of Martha Ballard, written 1785-1812. Ballard, a midwife who delivered over eight hundred infants in Hallowell, Maine, left a daily record of her work, home, and social life.[29] The diary does have some liberatory implications for women, subverting ideas of men being the exclusive important actors in the medical and economic spheres.[30] But its purpose was solely for Ballard — keeping track of payments, weather patterns, and so on.[31] There was little need to comment on a woman’s place, and even less was said about race. Though there do exist some laments over the burdens of her work, mentions of delivering black babies, and notice of a black female doctor, intersectionality is beyond Ballard’s gaze, or at least beyond the purpose of her text.[32]

Similarly, private letters often lack argument. True, an audience of one is more likely to involve persuasion than an audience of none, but still less likely than a mass audience. And without much of an audience, ideas need not be fully fleshed out nor, at times, addressed at all. Intersectional knowledge can be assumed, ignored as inappropriate given the context, and so on. For instance, take a letter abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimké wrote to Sarah Douglass of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society on February 22, 1837.[33] Grimké expressed sympathy for Douglass, a black activist, on account of race: “I feel deeply for thee in thy sufferings on account of the cruel and unchristian prejudice…”[34] But while patriarchal norms and restrictions lay near the surface, with Grimké describing the explicitly “female prayer meetings” and gatherings of “the ladies” where her early work was often contained, she made no comment on Douglass’ dual challenge of black womanhood.[35] The letter was a report of Grimké’s meetings, with no intention to persuade. Perhaps she felt it off-topic to broach womanhood and intersectionality. Perhaps she believed it too obvious to mention — or that it would undercut or distract from her extension of sympathy toward Douglass and the unique challenges of racism (“Yes, you alone face racial prejudice, but do we not both face gender oppression?”). On the one hand, the letter could seem surprising: how could Grimké, who along with her sister Angelina were pushing for both women’s equality and abolition for blacks at this time, not have discussed womanhood, race, and their interplays with a black female organizer like Douglass?[36] On the other, this is not surprising at all: this was a private letter with a limited purpose. It likely would have looked quite different had it been a public letter meant for a mass audience.

In sum, this paper offered a general view of how the historian can find and explore intersectionality, whether women of color facing overlapping challenges or the emancipatory mindsets and methods needed to address them. Purpose and audience categorized the most and least useful sources for such an endeavor. Public-intended sources like films, novels, secondary narratives, first-person narratives, and more (autobiographies, memoirs, public photographs and art, articles, public letters) show how intersectionality was utilized, advancing regressive or progressive attitudes and causes. Types of sources meant to remain private like diaries, personal letters, and so on (private photographs and art, some legal and government documents) often have no argument and are less helpful. From here, a future writing could explore the exceptions that of course exist. More ambitiously, another might attempt to examine the effectiveness of each type of source in producing oppressive or liberatory change: does the visual-auditory stimulation of film or the inner thoughts in memoirs evoke emotions and reactions that best facilitate attitudes and action? Is seeing the intimate perspectives of multiple characters in a novel of historical fiction most powerful, or that of one thinker in an autobiography, who was at least a real person? Or is a straightforward narrative, the writer detached, lurking in the background as far away as possible, just as effective as more personal sources in pushing readers to hold back or stand with women of color? The historian would require extensive knowledge of the historical reactions to the (many) sources considered (D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation famously sparked riots — can such incidents be quantified? Was this more likely to occur due to films than photographs?) and perhaps a co-author from the field of psychology to test (admittedly present-day) human reactions to various types of sources scientifically to bolster the case.

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[1] Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 10th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020), 14.

[2] Salt of the Earth, directed by Herbert Biberman (1954; Independent Productions Corporation).

[3] Carl R. Weinberg, “‘Salt of the Earth’: Labor, Film, and the Cold War,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 24, no. 4 (October 2010): 41-45.

  Benjamin Balthaser, “Cold War Re-Visions: Representation and Resistance in the Unseen Salt of the Earth,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 2008): 347-371.

[4] Salt of the Earth, Biberman.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), xvii.

[7] Kathleen Kennedy (lecture, Missouri State University, April 26, 2022).

[8] Morrison, Beloved, xvi.

[9] Ibid, xvi-xvii.

[10] Ibid., xvii.

[11] Ibid., 20, 25; 181, 193-195. To Sethe, her back was adorned with “her chokecherry tree”; Paul D noted “a revolting clump of scars.” This should be interpreted as Sethe distancing herself from the trauma of the whip, reframing and disempowering horrific mutilation through positive language. Paul D simply saw the terrors of slavery engraved on the body. Here Morrison subtly considers a former slave’s psychological self-preservation. When Sethe admitted to killing Beloved, she was unapologetic to Paul D — “I stopped him [the slavemaster]… I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” — but he was horrified, first denying the truth, then feeling a “roaring” in his head, then telling Sethe she loved her children too much. Then, like her sons and the townspeople at large, Paul D rejected Sethe, leaving her.

[12] Ibid., 193-195.

[13] Cotton Mather, A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning, in George Lincoln Burr, Narratives of the New England Witch Trials (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2012), 259.

[14] Ibid, 281-282.

[15] Richard Godbeer, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018), 83.

[16] Michael J. Salevouris and Conal Furay, The Methods and Skills of History (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 211.

[17] Godbeer, Salem, 83.

[18] Ibid., 83-84.

[19] Burr, Narratives, 255-258.

[20] Ibid., 262.

[21] Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018).

[22] Ibid., 76-77, 113-114.

[23] Ibid., 100, 76.

[24] This was the typical imperialist view. See Kirsten Fischer, “The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 3-11.

[25] Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), chapter one.

[26] Ibid., 264.

[27] Ibid.

   Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 81, 103.

[28] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 264, 270.

[29] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

[30] Ibid., 28-30.

[31] Ibid., 168, 262-263.

[32] Ibid., 225-226, 97, 53.

[33] Sarah Grimké, “Letter to Sarah Douglass,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 94-95.

[34] Ibid., 95.

[35] Ibid., 94.

[36] Ibid., 84-148.