The Impeachers by Brenda Wineapple

     In 1868, "out of the midst of political gloom, impeachment, that dead corpse, rose up and walked forth again!" Mark Twain wrote. Republicans in the House impeached President Andrew Johnson by a vote of 126-47. They were desperate, as Brenda Wineapple chronicles in her gripping new book, "The Im­peachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation." Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who didn't free his slaves until 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation, had been Abraham Lincoln's improbable Vice­ President, and had assumed the office of the Presidency after his assassination, in 1865. Lincoln and congressional Republicans had one plan for Reconstruction: it involved welcoming the freedmen into the political community of the nation. Johnson, who believed that, "in the progress of nations, negroes have shown less capacity for gover­ment than any other race of people," betrayed that vision. "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot," Frederick Douglass declared. But granting the franchise to black men was the last thing Johnson intended to allow. While Congress was out of session, he set in motion a Reconstruction plan that was completely at variance with what Congress had proposed: he intended to return power to the very people who had waged war against the Union, and he readmitted the former Confederate states to the Union. "No power but Congress had any right to say whether ever or when they should be admitted to the Union as States and entitled to the privileges of the Constitution," the Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens said during Johnson's impeachment proceedings. (Stevens, ailing, had to be carried into the Capitol on a chair.) "And yet Andrew Johnson, with un­blushing hardihood, undertook to rule them by his own power alone." John­son vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill and nearly every other congressional attempt to reassert authority over the law of the United States. But the Republicans' strategy, to pass a law they expected Johnson to break, so that they could impeach him, backfired. 
     The Senate acquitted Johnson, falling short by a single vote of the two­-thirds majority necessary to convict. Stevens died a couple of months later, "the bravest old ironclad in the Capitol," Twain wrote. The Republicans had tried to save the Republic by burying the Confederacy for good. They failed. 
     Every impeachment reinvents what impeachment is for, and what it means, a theory of government itself Every impeachment also offers a chance to establish a new political settlement in an unruly nation. The impeachment of [Justice] Samuel Chase steered the United States toward judicial independence, and an accommodation with a party system that had not been anticipated by the Framers. Chase's acquittal stabilized the Republic and restored the balance of power between the executive and the judicial branches. The failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson steered the United States toward a regime of racial segregation: the era of Jim Crow, which would not be undone until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 were passed, a century later, in the Administration of another Johnson. Johnson's acquittal undid the Union's victory in the Civil War, allowed the Confederacy to win the peace, and nearly destroyed the Republic. 
Johnson's acquittal also elevated the Presidency by making impeachment seem doomed. Jefferson once lamented that impeachment had become a "mere scarecrow." That's how it worked for much of the twentieth century: propped up in a field, straw poking out from under its hat. A Republican congressman from Michigan called for the impeachment of F.D.R., after the President tried to pack the Court. Nothing but another scarecrow. 
The impeachment of Richard Nixon, in 1974, which, although it never went to trial, succeeded in the sense that it drove Nixon from office, represented a use entirely consistent with the instrument's medieval origins: it attempted to puncture the swollen power of the Presidency and to reassert the supremacy of the legislature. Nixon's Presidency began to unravel only after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971 - which indicted not Nixon but Lyndon Johnson, for deceiving the public about Vietnam­ and the public anger that made impeachment possible had to do not only with Nixon's lies and abuses of power but also with Johnson's. But a new settlement, curtailing the powers of the President, never came. Instead, the nation became divided, and those divisions widened. 
     The wider those divisions, the duller the blade of impeachment. Only very rarely in American history has one party held more than two-thirds of the seats in the Senate (it hasn't happened since 1967), and the more partisan American politics the less likely it is that sixty-seven senators can be rounded up to convict anyone, of anything. And yet the wider those divisions the more willing Con­gress has been to call for impeachment. Since Ronald Reagan's Inauguration in 1981, members of the House have in­troduced resolutions for impeachment during every Presidency. And the peo­ple, too, have clamored. "Impeach Bush," the yard signs read. "Impeach Obama." 
     Not every impeachment brings about a political settlement, good or bad. The failed impeachment of Bill Clinton, in 1999, for lying about his sexual relation­ship with Monica Lewinsky, settled less than nothing, except that it weakened Americans' faith in impeachment as anything other than a crudely wrought partisan hatchet, a prisoner's shiv. 
     Clinton's impeachment had one more consequence: it got Donald Trump, self­-professed playboy, onto national television, as an authority on the sex lives of ego-mad men. "Paula Jones is a loser," Trump said on CNBC. "It's a terrible embarrassment." Also, "I think his lawyers ... did a terrible job,"Trump said. "I'm not even sure that he shouldn't have just gone in and taken the Fifth Amendment." Because why, after all, should any man have to answer for anything? 
     "Heaven forbid we should see another impeachment!" an exhausted Republican said at the end of the trial of Samuel Chase. The impeachment of an American President is certain to lead to no end of political mischief and almost certain to fail. Still, worse could happen. Heaven forbid this Republic should become one man's kingdom.
     - New Yorker magazine, October 28, 2019, p31. 

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation - REVIEW

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson

"Appropriation is everywhere and is also inevitable. If appropriation is everywhere and everyone appropriates all the time, why does any of this matter? The answer, in a word: power."

In her debut essay collection, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, Lauren Michele Jackson, a professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University, examines the problematic social trend of "black aesthetics without black people." Her essays analyze the desire for black culture by people who are not black and takes to task America's tendency to poach blackness for its profit and benefit. From art to fashion, language to activism, black culture influences worldwide trends. And, according to Jackson, everyone wants to be "cool" without fearing for their lives, to be "black" with the wealth and privilege of whiteness.

Jackson asserts that when the powerful appropriate from the oppressed, society's imbalances are worsened, and its inequalities extended. White people in America, Jackson writes, hoard power like Hungry Hungry Hippos. She cites statistics on the ever-growing wealth gap between white and black people in the United States-according to the Institute for Policy Studies, if current trends continue, the average black family won't reach the amount of wealth white families own today for another 228 years. The seriousness of this reality comes into focus when we see who can thrive off of intellectual property and who is prevented from doing so by "this nation's hysterical, driving compulsion to own and regulate all things black."

Jackson divides her book into areas of popular culture to explore the concept of "blackness in decay without its people." Topics include:

• Sound and Body: Jackson uses the evolution of Christina Aguilera's music career as the backdrop to examine the typical trajectory of a young white female popstar-emancipating themselves from an image of innocence by using black aesthetics to appear older and mature. "The entire Stripped era put black culture in motion in a departure from Christina's earlier aesthetics, even as a child performer raised on jazz and soul records." Throughout her career, Aguilera goes from one interpretation of black culture to another until, with her most recent album, she finally achieves a tenor of homage to the black music that formed her, Jackson concludes.

• Art and Language: Jackson questions the motives of Dana Schutz, whose painting Open Casket was a recreation of a 1955 photograph of Emmett Till's body in his casket. The painting was created for the Whitney Museum of Art's 2017 Biennial, which Jackson explains is remembered primarily for its blatant dismissal of violence and black pain. "Mamie Till-Mobley, thrust into activism, took control of her son's image in death, plain evidence of what America does to black children," Jackson states. "Today, the chasm between seeing a person in pain and in death and the actions it would take to reduce the pain and death is so much wider than the Atlantic."

• Technology: "Black people are the best part of going online," Jackson asserts. "Black culture is the fiber in the memes that are sometimes the only reasonable excuse for logging on while the world crumbles." She tells of Vine and the funny storytelling of its former black users. Before its demise, Vine's most popular meme came from Kayla Newman, a black woman who admires her brows in the camera and says they're "on fleek." Jackson shares that Newman's attempt to raise money to fund a line of hair and beauty products led to derision and claims that she was entitled for wanting to profit off her creation-despite the term's co-opted use in Hefty ads and fast fashion crop tops.

• Economy and Politics: Detailing cultural appropriation's inherent political nature, Jackson describes a period in the 1970s, when the white working class experienced a financial depression they called the "blue-collar blues," which was attributed to a black upward mobility that was perceived to outpace white prosperity. Then, as now, Jackson writes, they needed use of black aesthetics to describe the circumstance. In the new millennium, attempts to delegitimize #BlacklivesMatter spur absurd terms like All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. Another example Jackson cites is the Women's March on Washington, a name borrowed from a black-led political march. Anger and rage, she writes, are all the rage. Thanks to white feminists' appropriative actions, the politics of activism and self-care are given a new and profitable look. "After Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland, everyone can make a hashtag and be mad and make it home safely. As long as well-heeled white people are angry, others can be angry too."

Jackson concludes that although thoughtless appropriation is impossibly embedded in our culture, it can become appreciation if the world reorders society to be a place where black people have options and where they matter to society just as much as their contributions. "Whether black people will be acknowledged and allowed to thrive more than spiritually from their innovations remains to be seen," she states. "If there is a call embedded in this book, it is a call to more alertness, more intensity, more care, and more fluency in the racial dramas performed as part and parcel of business as usual."

About the Author Lauren Michele Jackson teaches in the departments of English and African American studies at Northwestern University.

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation
by Lauren Michele Jackson
$25.95 Hardcover • 978-080701180-5 • Audio book: 978-080708132-7
Contact: Perpetua Charles, Associate Publicist, pcharles@beacon.org / 617-948-6102

A literary scholar examines the many ways in which African American influences are incorporated, without acknowledgment or thanks, into the white cultural mainstream. Cultural appropriation, writes Jackson (English and African American Studies/Northwestern Univ.), "gets a bad rap." Rap, for instance, borrows from the styles of earlier generations-soul, disco, funk, even gospel-but includes the likes of Billy Joel and Paul Simon in its DNA. Appropriation, she writes, 11 is everywhere, and it is inevitable," though it is also a matter of power as much as artistic license: The culturally dominant group gets away with borrowing fashions, musical styles, and language, developing "black aesthetics without black people." In a lucid explication of the work of appropriation in music, she examines borrowings not just by white artists such as Britney Spears, but also members of minority populations such as Jennifer Lopez, who, by Jackson's account, lifted liberally from a less-known artist named Ashanti. It's Lopez's good luck that the borrowing, including the passing insertion of the N-word, took place in a time when "the internet wasn't then what the internet is now, and time forgives all slurs." Pop star Pink took a different course, gradually shedding any blackness in her sound, even as Miley Cyrus dropped her white­pop teen persona to embrace the hip-hop world and Khloe Kardashian did her hair up in cornrows and called herself a "Bantu babe." The author ranges across a broad field of reference, writing of the appropriation of the Southern-ism "chile" (child, that is) by means of the TV show Real Housewives of Atlanta and the culinary borrowings of Paula Deen, "white Mammy, plumping America one fried delicacy at a time," who got in trouble not for her lifting recipes but instead for using the N-word. Jackson is evenhanded throughout, though there's a welcome fire to her discussion, as when she writes, "America is addicted to hurting black people. America is addicted to watching itself hurt black people.”
A revelatory, well-argued work of cultural criticism.
- Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2019 issue

Northwestern University professor Jackson's insightful debut essay collection takes on cultural appropriation-particularly of black innovation by white celebrities, artists, and entrepreneurs-through the lens of power dynamics, identifying it as a process by which "society's imbalances are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged." In the realm of pop culture, she analyzes the pursuit of "urban" sexual wildness by Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus, the aesthetic but not economic investment of the Kardashians in black fashion, and Paula Deen's fetishistic presentation of Southern food alongside explicit racism. Her exploration of the art world juxtaposes the public reaction to Rachel Dolezal, made famous by her "impulse to inhabit blackness," with accusations against institutions such as the Whitney Biennial, which she asserts ignores black artists but treats depictions of antiblack violence as edgy and relevant. She identifies toxic white resentment of black success in the recent viral videos of white people calling the police on black people (often children) for using public pools, having lemonade stands, or barbecuing in parks. Jackson is uncompromising in her bold language, palpable in her outrage; she keeps her razor-sharp analysis in an accessible but academic register. She both calls out the damage done by appropriative and oppressive behavior and calls in white readers to take part in valuing black contributions in a way that helps black lives.
- Publishers Weekly August 19th issue

"Like 'intersectionality' and "diversity'' and "neoliberalism" and perhaps even "capitalism," the word "appropriation" has taken on so many interpretations and interpolations as to court ontological disaster: what does it even mean? Lauren Michele Jackson wrestles with the idea, the concept, the history, the bodies, and the selves that are implicated in cultural appropriation. Jackson does not absolve anyone, but she does point toward some of the most complex corners of culture. In those corners she asks us to consider not freedom and choice but power. That emphasis on _who can commodify appropriation is different from pedestrian debates about who can do appropriation. White Negroes is a mature meditation for debates that have, at times, wallowed in their own intellectual infancy. The collection is witty, wry, and welcome. In the vein of lmani Perry and Zoe Samudzi, this book is an excellent addition to critical thinking about culture and contemporary racial orders."
- Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick and Lower Ed

"What I love most about Lauren Jackson's incisive and richly detailed work in White Negroes is how it does not imagine any cultural phenomenon as something that does not have a history attached to it. And through the work of charting that history, a new cultural understanding arises. This is a vital text­one that offers new ways of seeing, hearing, and consuming."
- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

"We've needed this book for years~ and yet somehow it's right on time. Miraculously, Lauren Michele Jackson is able to write about cultural appropriation in a way that doesn't make you want to drink a glass of sand. She brings incredible nuance and a sharp critical voice to a discussion that has sorely lacked both-yet somehow emerges with a text that is as accessible as it is theoretically relevant. Jackson avoids platitudes and easy answers, has a keen eye for history and popular culture, and, moreover, she is funny."
- Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard

"Blacking up-the American caucasoidal desire to inhabit, stage, and master an imaginary Black identity-has been a national obsession and a national enterprise since the antebellum days of traveling tent show minstrelsy. With language laced with critical clarity, tempered outrage, radical snark, and researched detail, Lauren Michele Jackson's White Negroes interrogates and exposes our present-day society of appropriated racial spectacle-highlighting a plethora of the ways contemporary white minstrelsy reproduces the erasures and violence of its Jim Crow-era predecessor, then circulates its bad­to-rad copies for profit and mockery through viral technology. Jackson eruditely connects the dots between such disparate phenomena of the modern racial age as Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Kim Kardashian, Rachel Dolezal, the fashion and cosmetic industries, the Whitney Biennial, and the appropriation of 'Bye Felisha.' In so doing, Jackson makes us wiser and even more disturbed about how much stolen Black imaging and ideations matter to the cultural, political, and economic maintenance of the nation's anti-Black status quo."
- Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and editor of Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture