Friday Links for August 14, 2020
Links looking at racism from the points of view of Wendell Berry, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor.
Race & Anti-fragility: Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound at Fifty
Joshua P. Hochschild at Commonweal Magazine reviews Wendell Berry writing on white privilege, fifty years later. Recommended by Katy Carl: "Long but worth it."
“If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself.... I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured.”—Wendell Berry
The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor? It Never Should Have Happened
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell writes at Commonweal Magazine about the removal of Flannery O'Connor's name from a building at Loyola University Maryland.
“The deed is done. A week after the decision by Loyola University Maryland to remove Flannery O’Connor’s name from one of its buildings, the cherry-pickers arrived on the school’s bucolic campus in northeast Baltimore and, letter by letter, the name of one America’s most iconic Catholic writers disappeared from the dormitory that had been known for more than a decade as Flannery O’Connor Hall."
Who Was Flannery O’Connor and Why Is She Being Canceled?
Lorraine Murray writes at National Catholic Register:
“By the time of her death in Georgia in 1964, O’Connor had come to express strong support for the civil rights movement and applauded the gains already made in racial relations. Today she’s being accused of racism."
What to Do About William Faulkner
Drew Gilpin Faust's book about William Faulker is reviewed at The Atlantic by Michael Gorra.
“A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it."
Recommended by Katy Carl, "Interesting resonances with the debate over O'Connor. We need to come to a full understanding of what these writers saw, how and why they saw it, and why perceptions that seem clear to us now were by no means so easily available to them then."
